Jalousie, "Tango tsigane" ("Jealousy," or originally, Tango jalousie), is by far the most famous piece of music ever to come out of Denmark. It was written by Jacob Gade who was a violinist, composer, and leader of a 24-piece orchestra that played at the Palads Teatret (Palace Theater), an ornate silent movie theater located in Copenhagen.

Jalousie was written as part of Gade's accompaniment to an American film, Donald Crisp's Don Q, Son of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks, and first heard in public during the Danish premiere of that film on September 14, 1925. Within the same calendar year the Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen first published Jalousie in the fourth volume of Film piano thek, a cumulative publication of Gade's movie melodies that eventually ran to 26 volumes. Very shortly afterward Jalousie appeared in print as a work separate from the film collection, scored for three violins, clarinet, two trumpets, trombone, cello, and contrabass.

The popularity of Jalousie spread like wildfire in Europe, and its profile was given a boost by a best-selling recording of the piece on the German Odeon label by a salon orchestra led by Marek Weber. However the tune remained little-known in the United States until Arthur Fiedler, leader of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summertime Popular Concerts series, discovered a copy of the sheet music to Jalousie in the bargain bin at a local music store. An orchestration was hastily drawn up, and on July 1, 1935, Fiedler first recorded Jalousie with the orchestra that RCA Victor would provisionally name the Boston Pops for the benefit of recording. Fiedler's record of Jalousie, among the first he made with the Boston Pops, sold more than a million copies, and as late as the year 2001 battered 78 rpm discs of this record may still be easily found in American junk shops and antique malls. Fiedler re-recorded Jalousie many times, and in the U.S. the melody became closely associated with the Boston Pops, though it has been recorded countless times by others since 1935.

Needless to say, the residuals from Jalousie made Jacob Gade a very wealthy man. He had already retired from live music with the dawn of sound in Denmark in 1931. The additional great popularity of Jalousie in the United States made his retirement a great deal more comfortable. Maintaining Jacob Gade's claim to the work, however, has proven more difficult. Some feel that the tune has to be older and of Argentinean origin. Others mistakenly attribute Jalousie to nineteenth-century composer Niels Gade, who died 30 years before Jalousie was written and never himself composed a note of tango.

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