He achieved considerable acclaim with a number of his operettas — in particular Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl), which remains popular to this day.

Because Jessel was a Jew by birth (he converted to Christianity at the age of 23), with the rise of Nazism in the late 1920s, his composing virtually came to an end, and his musical works, which had been very popular, were suppressed and nearly forgotten.

Leon converted to Christianity in 1894 — the same year he premiered his first operetta Die Brautwerbung (The Courtship) — in order to marry Clara Louise Grunewald, and they were wed in 1896.

[1] Jessel's biggest success was the operetta Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest Girl), which premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin in August 1917.

Jessel's last major work was his 1933 operetta Junger Wein (Young Wine), and his biographer Albrecht Dümling believes that he was a victim of targeted boycott measures as early as 1927.

In 1941, a house search turned up a 1939 letter to his librettist William Sterk in Vienna, in which Jessel had written: "I cannot work in a time when hatred of Jews threatens my people with destruction, where I do not know when that gruesome fate will likewise be knocking at my door."

He was tortured by the Gestapo in a basement of the Police Bureau at Alexanderplatz and subsequently died on 4 January 1942 in the Berlin Jewish Hospital.

For instance, a Betty Boop film of the same name was created with the music in 1933, and The Rockettes have been performing their own choreographed version of the piece since then in the annual Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

In Great Britain the piece was used for many years in BBC radio's Children's Hour to introduce the series Toytown, based on stories by S. G. Hulme Beaman.