Can can music origin

 

What is the connection between Orpheus in Hades (the ending of the overture) and women dancing high steps.

The connection is that the famous high-kicking dance music people associate with chorus girls and the can-can actually comes from the finale of the overture to Orpheus in the Underworld (often loosely called “Orpheus in Hades”).

The composer Jacques Offenbach wrote a fast, wild dance section called the “Galop infernal” (“Infernal Galop”). That music became enormously popular in Paris dance halls in the 19th century, where dancers performed energetic kicks, splits, and high steps to it. Over time the music and the dance fused in the public imagination, so now many people hear that tune and immediately picture women in ruffled skirts kicking their legs in unison.

Strictly speaking, the dance itself is the can-can, and the music most famously associated with it is Offenbach’s “Infernal Galop.” The overture often ends with it because audiences loved it so much.

So the chain is:

• operetta about Orpheus descending to the underworld

• finale contains the “Infernal Galop”

• Paris dance halls adopt it for the can-can

• the tune becomes permanently linked with high-kicking dancers

It is one of those strange cultural migrations where a satirical operetta based on Greek myth ends up becoming shorthand for cabaret dancers.

In short it was not written for that but just got adopted.

Exactly. Jacques Offenbach was not composing “can-can music” in the modern sense. He wrote the “Infernal Galop” as part of a comic operetta scene in Orpheus in the Underworld. The dance halls then seized on it because it was fast, brash, rhythmic, and slightly outrageous — perfect for the can-can style already developing in Paris.

So the music did not originate as accompaniment for synchronized chorus-line kicking. Cultural adoption came afterward. Much later, popular entertainment compressed all that history into “that funny French high-kick tune.”