Amilcare Ponchielli - Dance of the Hours

The clocks were set back this morning (you are done with that, right?) for Daylight Savings Time.  Classical Music anticipated this with a piece that you almost certainly know, from a composer you very likely don't.

Amilcare Ponchielli was an Italian composer from the 19th Century.  Never enormously successful, he made a living writing mostly operas.  His most successful was La Gioconda which contains this.  Walt Disney picked up Dance of the Hours from that opera and used it in the 1940s film Fantasia.



You've almost certainly heard this, and very likely the companion piece by Allan Sherman's take.