Who was this Louis Moreau Gottschalk?

Those readers who know me personally know that I have lately been teaching music courses at a lovely retirement village. If you know that, you also know that I have found the experience fulfilling and enjoyable beyond my expectations. The students/participants are bright and knowledgeable, well-read and well-traveled, and sharing my passion of music with them is simply a joy.

We are currently midway through a six-week course on American Music, beginning with Colonial America and ending in the 1920s with precursors of jazz and nascent American art music. In preparing each two-hour lecture, I have come across surprises and treasures I didn't know existed, and sometimes I even surprise those savvy participants with some aspect of American music with which they had not been familiar.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was a rock star in the mid-1860s.

Louis Moreau Gottchalk was a delightful surprise for all of us. I had heard of him, and I remember certain pianists in graduate school being so enamored with his music that they became Gottschalk specialists. I had never read about him, and not encountered his piano music because it was way past what I could expect to master for my own repertoire. This man was ahead of his time as they say, using the syncopated rhythms of Creole New Orleans in his piano compositions, and putting together a unique cosmopolitan sensibility from his travels in Europe and South America, as well as his native United States.

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans to a Haitian mother and German father. Music is a fundamental part of that city now, and was then, too. Gottschalk soaked it up and showed his aptitude for music early in his childhood. His parents signed him up for piano lessons at age five with the organist at St. Louis Cathedral, François Letellier, and by age seven he was substituting at Mass on the organ.

The organ pipes in St Louis Cathedral

As a survivor of eight years of childhood organ lessons, I can vouch for the difficulty of this instrument. Every finger and foot is required to act independently, while also adjusting switches and bars to tweak the organ's sounds. Both hands and the left foot are usually engaged in playing melodies and chords independent of each other. I wasn't able to come near mastering this in eight years, but little Louis Moreau could perform well enough after two years of lessons to play in church in front of people. I spent some time in New Orleans a couple of years ago, and St. Louis Cathedral was one of my favorite places there.

St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, New Orleans

When he was thirteen, his parents sent him to Paris to study music. He gave a recital at the Salle Pleyel (one of Chopin's hangouts) just before his 16th birthday which was a huge hit. He began composing for the piano and incorporating influences from the Creole music he knew from New Orleans. When you listen to Bamboula below, please remember that ragtime jazz as we know them did not exist yet. Some of the roots of jazz were around (the Creole influence, for instance), but they had not evolved into any kind of pure concert music. Parisians were fascinated by the sounds Gottschalk got out of the piano and his music became wildly popular. He gave recitals all over Europe, and North and South America, and soaking up musical influences at each location.

Scholars generally divide Gottschalk's music into six compositional periods, and these are based on where he was living at the time:

1844-1851: Paris (Bamboula is from this period)

1851-1852: Switzerland and Spain

1853-1856: United States (check out Le banjo from this period)

1857-1861: the Antilles (considered by some to be his most prolific period; listen to Souvenir de Porto Rico)

1862-1865: United States

1865-1869: South America

He was not strictly a piano composer. Gottschalk composed operas which are mostly lost to us today, and a collection of orchestral music. Towards the end of his life in South America, he enjoyed organizing huge concerts with hundreds of musicians. This exciting orchestral piece is Gottschalk's Grande Tarantelle.

Gottschalk suffered from malaria when he lived in Rio de Janeiro and eventually moved to Tijuca, a suburb, where he died on December 18, 1869 at 40 years old. My premiere source* tells me that it is believed he died not from the malaria, but from an overdose of the quinine used to treat it. His remains were moved from Brazil to Brooklyn, New York, where he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

If you've never heard the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk before that this post will spark your curiosity. If you would like to read more, get your hands on Gottschalk's own memoir, Notes of a Pianist. I haven't read it YET, but it comes highly recommended!

*Irving Lowens and S. Frederick Starr. "Gottschalk, Louis Moreau." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11530>.