Louis Moreau Gottschalk encyclopedia topics

Biography

Gottschalk was born to a Jewish businessman from London and a white Haitian Creole in New Orleans, where he was exposed to a wide variety of musical traditions. He had six brothers and sisters. His family lived for a time in a tiny cottage at Royal and Esplanade in the Vieux Carré. Louis later moved in with relatives at 518 Conti Street; his Grandmother Buslé and his nurse Sally had both been born in Saint-Domingue (later known as Haiti). Gottschalk played the piano from an early age and was soon recognized as a wunderkind by the New Orleans bourgeois establishment. In 1840, he gave his informal public debut at the new St. Charles Hotel.

Only two years later at the age of 13, Gottschalk left the United States and sailed to Europe, as he and his father realized a classical training was required to fulfill his musical ambitions. The Paris Conservatoire, however, initially rejected his application on the grounds of his nationality. His examiner commented that "America is a country of steam engines". Gottschalk gradually gained access to the musical establishment through family friends.

After Gottschalk returned to the United States in 1853, he traveled extensively; a lengthy trip to Cuba in 1854 marking the beginning of a series of trips to Central and South America. By the 1860s, Gottschalk had established himself as the foremost pianist in the New World. Although born and reared in New Orleans, he was a supporter of the Union cause during the American Civil War. He returned to his native city only occasionally for concerts, but Gottschalk always introduced himself as a New Orleans native. In 1865, he was forced to leave the United States because of a scandalous affair with a student at the Oakland Female Seminary.

Gottschalk chose to travel to South America, where he continued to give frequent concerts. During one of these concerts, in Rio de Janeiro on November 24, 1869, he collapsed from having contracted malaria. Just before his collapse, he had finished playing his romantic piece Morte!! (interpreted as "she is dead"), although the actual collapse occurred just as he started to play his celebrated piece Tremolo.

Gottschalk never recovered from the collapse. Three weeks later, on December 18, 1869, at the age of 40, he died at his hotel in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, probably from an overdose of quinine. In 1870 his remains were returned to the United States and were interred at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

His burial spot was originally marked by a magnificent monument, which has eroded over the years. The Green-Wood is seeking donations to restore the monument in his honor, the cost of which they estimate at $75,000 (http://www.green-wood.com/pdf/gottschalkp6to7.pdf).

His grand-nephew Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk was a notable composer of silent film and musical theatre scores.

Works

Gottschalk's music was very popular during his lifetime, and his earliest compositions created a sensation in Europe. Early pieces like "Le Bananier" and "Bamboula" were based on Gottschalk's memories of the music he heard during his youth in Louisiana. They appealed to critics' and audiences interest in the exotic at the time. Throughout his life, Gottschalk used a variety of non-traditional, ethnically derived material for many of his compositions. Notable examples included the "Souvenir de Porto Rico" and "The Banjo, Grotesque Fantasie". These ethnic and national-character pieces were of high rhythmic originality, as they were based on Afro-Cuban music which was mostly unexplored by composers of the time. These pieces paved the way for ragtime and subsequently jazz; they are regarded as his finest and most important work.

Gottschalk was also very successful as a composer of more traditional salon music. Sentimental pieces like "The Dying Poet" were favorites of countless, mostly female, amateur pianists. His most famous work in this vein is "The Last Hope, Religious Meditation", which enjoyed a spectacular success during Gottschalk's life, and for several decades afterward. Past critics regarded Gottschalk's salon compositions as dated, musically shallow and insignificant in comparison with his more distinctive American ethnic music.

Gottschalk is being rediscovered as modern art music has become consistently more complex and disengaged from the listener. In this context, some of Gottschalk's work, such as the 13-minute opera Escenas campestres, retains a wonderfully innocent sweetness and charm.

Recordings

Various pianists later recorded his piano music. The first important recordings of his orchestral music, including the symphony A Night in the Tropics, were made for Vanguard Records by Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra. Vox Records issued a multi-disc collection of his music, which was later reissued on CD.