1829–1869 · United States · Romantic
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) was an American pianist and composer from New Orleans who wrote romantic piano pieces. He spent most of his career outside the United States, and by the 1860s he was regarded as the most famous pianist of the New World. His early pieces Bamboula and La Savane are counted among the earliest Louisiana Creole music to enter the classical tradition.
New Orleans was where Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born, on 8 May 1829. His father, a Jewish businessman, came from London, and his mother was a Creole. Besides Louis, the family had other children. For a time they lived in the French Quarter, and then the boy went to live with relatives, at 518 Conti Street.
He took to the piano from early childhood and while still a child became known among the New Orleans bourgeoisie. In 1840, at the St. Charles Hotel, he gave a first public performance of an informal kind.
In 1842, aged 13, Gottschalk left the United States for Europe. He and his father understood that classical training was needed to fulfil his musical ambitions.
His father's connections opened the way into the musical world. In Paris he took private lessons from Charles Hallé, Camille Stamaty and Pierre Maleden. He gave his debut concert there in 1845, and around the turn of the 1840s and 1850s he was already on tour in France, Spain and Switzerland.
Early works such as Bamboula and La Savane made his name as an authentically American composer rather than a copyist of the European notated tradition. They carried the legacy of music made by enslaved African people into a romantic setting, and in this respect they also anticipated jazz. They remain the earliest examples of Louisiana Creole music in classical culture.
His first compositions created a stir in Europe. Following a concert at the Salle Pleyel, Chopin voiced his confidence in the young man's future as a pianist. Liszt and Charles-Valentin Alkan also recognised Gottschalk's exceptional talent.
After coming back to the US in 1853 Gottschalk travelled a great deal. His stay in Cuba in 1854 launched a run of journeys through Central and South America. After his debut in Havana he also visited Puerto Rico, and was so taken with the island's music that, probably in 1857, he wrote a piece called Souvenir de Porto Rico, Op. 31 (subtitled Marche des gibaros). The title refers to Puerto Rican peasants, and the theme is a march tune that may rest on a folk song of the island.
By the 1860s Gottschalk ranked as the most famous pianist of the New World. New Orleans was where he was born and brought up, yet during the American Civil War he sided with the Union. He visited his home city only now and then, but wherever he went he presented himself as a New Orleanian.
Gottschalk had few students: he seldom took pupils and distrusted child prodigies. He made an exception for the very young Venezuelan Teresa Carreño and was resolved that she would do well. His busy schedule allowed only a few lessons, but she remembered him fondly and played his music until the end of her life. A year after they met she played for Abraham Lincoln, and later she grew into a well-known concert pianist. Among his other pupils was Anna Ware Poole, an American composer and pianist.
From late 1855 into early 1856 Gottschalk became acquainted with several prominent figures of New York's art world: the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School, the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, and the composer and musician George William Warren. Like Gottschalk, Church had travelled widely in Latin America, and he painted a series of big canvases on South American themes. Gottschalk dedicated a Mazurka poétique to him, and the painter gave him a small landscape. He may have worked with Warren on The Andes, Marche di Bravoura (1863), a piece inspired by Church's painting The Heart of the Andes (1859).
In May 1865 a San Francisco newspaper reported that Gottschalk had covered 95,000 miles on the railway and played a thousand concerts. Later in the year he had to leave the country over an episode involving a seminary student in Oakland, California, and he did not come back.
He chose South America, where he went on giving frequent concerts. In 1869, during a concert in Rio de Janeiro at the Teatro Lyrico Fluminense, Gottschalk collapsed. Moments earlier he had played the last notes of his romantic piece Morte! (Portuguese for Death), and the collapse itself came as he began Tremolo. He never recovered.
Gottschalk died on 18 December 1869, aged 40, in his hotel in the Tijuca district of Rio de Janeiro, less than a month after that. The exact cause of death remains unknown to this day. His remains were taken back to America in 1870 and buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York. The grave was first marked by a marble monument crowned with a statue of the Angel of Music, which vandals destroyed in 1959. In October 2012 a new Angel of Music statue was unveiled at the grave.
Nicolás Ruiz Espadero wrote of Gottschalk as a pianist who combined classical tradition with progress. He introduced novelties without hesitation and was bolder in this than most great masters of his instrument: his inventiveness suggested new ways of attacking notes, heightening effects and using the pedals. Espadero called Gottschalk a reformer of piano touch.
In his playing Espadero noted poetic feeling, lofty grace, sensuality and tenderness combined with strength and passion. In his view, in a certain sense Gottschalk was undoubtedly closer to Chopin than any other performer. By his account Gottschalk tended towards the pleasant valleys but, like all poets, sometimes soared to the heights on a sudden impulse.
Gottschalk's music enjoyed great popularity in his lifetime. Early pieces such as Le Mancenillier, Le Bananier, La Savane and Bamboula drew on what the composer remembered of the music he heard as a young man in Louisiana, and they are widely seen as the earliest Creole music in the classical tradition. The Bamboula theme also appears in his first symphony, A Night in the Tropics. Ernesto Lecuona's popular twentieth-century piece Malagueña takes its basis from a tune in Gottschalk's Souvenirs d'Andalousie (Memories of Andalusia).
Other works include Souvenir de Porto Rico, Op. 31, and Grande Tarantelle, Op. 67 (also called Célèbre Tarentelle), which Gottschalk composed between 1858 and 1864. His music was also heard on the ballet stage: in 1860 August Bournonville used it in the ballet Far from Denmark, and in 1964 George Balanchine created Tarantella to the music of the Grande Tarantelle, orchestrated by Hershy Kay for piano and orchestra, a virtuoso duet made for Patricia McBride and Edward Villella.
A good many of Gottschalk's works were destroyed after he died, or have been lost. In 1964 Jeanne Behrend, a composer, pianist and musicologist, put together an edition of selected piano scores along with his autobiography, Notes of a Pianist. A collection of his piano music that came out in 1973 was edited by the musicologist Richard Jackson, who at the same time organised an exhibition about Gottschalk at the New York Public Library. Our site has The Dying Swan, Op. 100, at the Intermediate+ level.