Musical unknown America : Gottschalk (1829-1869)

I. The Life

II  The music

Gottschalk was born in 1829 (May 8) in New Orleans and died in 1869 (December 18) in Tijuca near Rio de Janeiro. When he died “he was the most famous musician in the Western Hemisphere” (Kirsch, 2006). He was called the Chopin of the Creoles and enjoyed the reputation of today’s rock stars. He was a great composer but also a virtuoso pianist. He played in very various places: “in the smallest towns of the American West, on isolated Caribbean plantations, in war-torn Latin American capitals”. He played before Isabella II of Spain, at the beginning of his brilliant career, for President Lincoln during the Civil War, and for the Emperor of Brazil too. Gottschalk died when he was 40 years old. 50 years later fashion had changed and his music had been nearly forgotten, apart from some well-known sentimental works such as The Last Hope, Religious Meditation (1854) and The Dying Poet, Meditation (1863-1864).

However Gottschalk deserves now a revival: that is to say a better place in the history of music and in the American musical tradition.

A/ Gottschalk and his familial background: New Orleans

Like his music, Gottschalk’s origins are various. He is an example of the different cultures which made America: his father, Edward Gottschalk, was a very rich English London-born Jewish merchant and slave trader of German origin and a gentleman of great culture, able to speak up to nine languages, and his mother Aimée claimed that she had French aristocratic origin (but that is in fact a complete fabrication). Gottschalk’s grandmother was born in the opulent colony of Saint-Domingue and the allegedly noble family owned a plantation before they fled the rebellion of Toussaint-Louverture (1743-1803) when the British troops had abandoned the island and then the family had escaped to Louisiana, a French possession.

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in 1829 in a house that still exists today. At this time, 50 percent of the city was made up by Creoles. Gottschalk was raised by his White Creole mother and a Black Creole nurse. Hence, from his birth, he was exposed to French and African Caribbean melodies which justify a deep impression on him. According to Vernon Loggins’ sometimes imaginative biography (1958), Gottschalk could listen to the sounds of the streets from his house. New Orleans was a very vivid town in which music filled the streets, as is still the case today. One very popular spot for song and dance was Congo Square; well-known to have been the location of Sunday afternoon public dances in the early nineteenth century. Gottschalk was supposed to hear drums and to see hundreds of dancers here. This fantastic spectacle would give birth to one of most famous Gottschalk’s works, Bamboula, negro dance (1844-1845), which was dedicated to “Her Majesty Isabella II, the Queen of the Spains”.

The young Gottschalk began to play the piano at the age of 3 years old and quickly revealed to be a piano prodigy. He easily picked up tunes of many popular French operas premiering in New Orleans and created variations on the well-known arias and themes, a kind of exercise that will become one of his specialities. In 1840, Gottschalk made his unformal debut as a pianist and was identified on the program of a concert in an hotel of the wealthy New Orleans as “Young X, a Creole”. But it was an instant success and two years later, he had learned all the elements that local musicians can teach to him. That is why he decided to go to Europe, more precisely in Paris.

B/ Gottschalk, an American in Paris

George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote his symphonic composition An American in Paris in 1928. Going to Paris, the center of the musical world, was no small adventure in the mid-19th century. Gottschalk was only 12 years old in 1841 when his parents decided to send him more than 3000 miles away to Paris where he could complete his musical education and met Berlioz, Chopin and other famous composers.

In fact Gottschalk was refused admission to the Conservatoire where strangers were not easily admitted at that time. Here is the opinion of the director of the Conservatoire Pierre Zimmermann (1785-1853): “Americans are only seriously interested in steam engines”. Moreover he told Gottschalk to go home and learn to become a mechanic. Gottschalk decided to take private lessons to become a professional. However Gottschalk was not isolated : he had zealous and enthusiastic admirers such as Berlioz, Chopin and a few other ones. Some positive opinions on Gottschalk for instance:

Frederic CHOPIN (1810-1849): “Give me your hand, my child. I predict that you will become the king of pianists”.

Hector BERLIOZ (1803-1869):
“Gottschalk is one of the very small number of people who possess all the different elements of a consummate pianist”
“The infantine simplicity of his smiling caprices, the charming ease with which he renders simple things seems to belong to a second individuality, distinct from that which characterizes his thundering energies”.
“He knows just how fancy can be indulged in expression. He knows the limits beyond which any freedom taken with the rhythm produces only confusion and disorder, and upon these limits he never encroaches. There is an exquisite grace in his manner.”

The young Gottschalk made his real concert debut in Paris in 1849 and then he gained fame throughout Western Europe (more especially in Spain and in Switzerland) with his virtuosic playing and Creole-inspired compositions.

C/ Gottschalk is back to the United States

With such a cultural formation in European music, Gottschalk decided to return to his native country in 1853 presumably in order to capitalize on his European reputation. “A mere pianist”, The New York Times reported in 1853. Gottschalk’s playing “dazzles, astonishes”. When Gottschalk played, it sounded as if more than one person were at the keyboard. But in reality things proved to be more difficult than expected…

The guardians of musical taste in America, often German immigrants defending a kind of German model in music, had a bad opinion of Gottschalk’s music. John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), an editor and musical critic, was one of these guardians: for him, music was symbolized by the symphonies of titans such as Beethoven, Haydn or Mozart – some composers who were very rarely played by Gottschalk who was well-known for playing his own composition instead. Gottschalk was not very interested in that kind of music of the classical era and writes: “[their piano music] falls below mediocrity - the least pianist of any intelligence, in our days, writes infinitely better than Beethoven ever did" (cf. William L. Hawes, The Musician, October, 1908). Gottschalk pleased the crowd with fantasias on themes from Donizetti and Verdi, sometimes played by dozens of pianos in "monster" concerts – an idea Gottschalk got in Europe where he saw Berlioz’ big orchestra. This did not mean that Gottschalk did not like Beethoven’s music for instance. He could play the sonatas of the Master and he admired him for his brilliant symphonic works. But in purely pianistic terms, Mozart’s or Beethoven’s sonatas belonged to the past. The piano technique, with Chopin and Liszt, had significantly evolved since the Classical Era.

So there was always the suspicion that he was not a truly classical musician. But on the other hand, Gottschalk’s music was considered to be “too learned”, that is to say to sophisticated for the American crowd. This opposition between a biased vision of what serious classical music should be and a more popular musical form has created a fissure that still exists today. For instance, jazz has grown up inside it. Looking back to musical history, the strength of Gottschalk was to try to bridge the gap between the elites and the people. He often used popular tunes in some of his most substantial works (for instance: Souvenir de Porto Rico, Marche des Gibaros, 1857, The Union, Concert Paraphrase, 1862, Home, Sweet Home, 1862). On the other hand he composed a few works to meet the needs of a audience who did not have always unfailingly good taste (for example: Chant du Martyr , 1853-1858, Le Réveil de l'aigle, grande polka guerrière, after 1852), while he was also very critical of that kind of popularity-seeking composers.

D/ Gottschalk’s tour in the Americas

Gottschalk never returned to his hometown New Orleans for more than a couple weeks at a time following his departure in 1841, nor did he ever settle in the United States. He never married, preferring instead to travel the United States and Europe and to trace his Creole history back to the Caribbean region as well as Cuba and South America. He died in 1869 most probably because of his extensive touring.

Thanks to Gottschalk’s charming and fascinating diaries called Notes of a pianist which he kept in French and that was edited by Gottschalk’s sister in 1881, we have an idea of the life of this musical superstar between 1857 and 1868:

Gottschalk’s life looked like a strange, nonstop, long trip, with train accidents, delays and so on... Gottschalk wrote in his diary: “My home is somewhere between the baggage car and the last car of the train. […] The conductors salute me as one of the employees.” Gottschalk traveled from Cuba to Montreal, from New York to Lima, averaging one recital a day. Gottschalk wrote at the end of 1862: "I have given eighty-five concerts in four months and a half. I have traveled fifteen thousand miles by train. A few more weeks in this way and I would have become an idiot! Eighteen hours a day on the railroad! Arrive at seven o'clock in the evening, eat with all speed, appear at eight o'clock before the public. The last note finished, rush quickly for my luggage, and en route until next day, always the same thing! I have become stupid with it. I have the appearance of an automaton under the influence of a voltaic pile. […] The sight of a piano sets my hair on end like the victim in the presence of the wheel on which he is about to be tortured.” When he arrived in San Francisco in May 1865, Gottschalk calculated that he had travelled 95,000 miles on the railway and given 1100 concerts.

Gottschalk’s diary is also very interesting for those who want to discover the unknown musical life of mid-19th-century Americans. Often Gottschalk is astonished by his listeners' ignorance. In a small town called Zanesville (Ohio), a woman in the audience laughs at the movement of his feet - she had never seen a piano with pedals, and thought he was doing a little dance with his feet. In another city, a farmer who had never seen a piano thought it was a big accordion. With his one-dollar-ticket-price concerts, Gottschalk has had a huge influence on the musical life of people of all parts and of all social classes of the United States.

II  The music

Gottschalk’s music is an exciting, melodious, rythmic, romantic, highly-accessible output. It is difficult to understand why it is not better known, and why you hear it so rarely performed in concerts or on the radio, all the more so as it incorporates elements of European music, sometimes Chopinesque, sometimes Lisztian, and elements of the folk and popular music of the Americas and uses Latin American and Afro-American melodies and rhythms in an idiomatic way that preceded by half a century their similar use in ragtime and early jazz.

A few examples:

Miserere (Trovatore), Concert Paraphrase (1856)

The Miserere was originally a two-piano transcription of the part of an opera by Verdi called “Il trovatore”. It was performed by Thalberg (1812-1871, an Austrian virtuoso pianist) and Gottschalk at the Niblo’s Garden concerts in New York. Richard Hoffman, a friend of Gottschalk and pianist said: “a remarkable double trill which Thalberg played on the middle of the piano, while Gottschalk was flying all over the keyboard in the ‘Anvil Chorus,’ produced the most prodigious volume of tone I ever heard from the piano. […] Gottschalk was possessed of a ringing, scintillating touch, which, joined to a poetic charm of expression, seemed to sway the emotions of his audience with almost hypnotic power.”

Second Banjo (1852-1853)

The Second Banjo had an enormous success in New Orleans in 1854. It is an ostinato-rich piece with virtuosic ornaments which evokes the sound of a banjo but also imitates the gestures of a banjo player. There is of course a link with the musical ambiance of the New Orleans of Gottschalk’s childhood. Last but not least, it anticipates Debussy’s ragtime period and Debussy must have heard this piece when he wrote his Minstrels and his Golliwog’s Cakewalk.

The Union, Concert Paraphrase (1862)

The Union is a spectacular Lisztian fantasy on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail, Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle” that Gottschalk played at the White House in 1864.

The Dying Poet, Meditation (1863-1864)

This piece was aimed at being executed with ease by amateur pianists. The Dying Poet eventually became a standby of silent-movie pianists.

Aeolian Murmurs (1860)

A Lisztian poem, the interpretation of which is so musically and technically demanding that Gottschalk wrote a note in the edition of the score for the amateur pianists who would venture to try to play this beautiful nocturne.

Conclusion

Gottschalk still belongs to unknown America but things are probably going to change. Gottschalk was a pioneer at his time. He appeared before audiences that knew nothing about classical music and could be seen as a first and clever multiculturalist. He is definitively a figure of significance and this rare individuality deserves our attention.

J.-B. D.

Bibliography

Gottschalk’s tour in the United States, The Nation, January 5, 1882

Gottschalk's views regarding Beethoven's sonatas, William L. Hawes, The Musician, October, 1908

Our First Musical Ambassador, Ernest L. Bolling, 1932

A real pioneer, Time, June 14, 1968

Chopin called him the king of pianists, Peter Andrews, American Heritage, dec 1982, vol 34 n°1

Louis Moreau Gottschalk: the First Gershwin, Fred Flaxman, 1997, www.compactdiscoveries.com

Review of: Notes of a Pianist , Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun, June 7, 2006

Our Gottschalk, Terry Teachout, 2006