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Overview
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a virtuoso pianist renowned for his exceptional talent and innovative compositions, takes readers on a fascinating journey through his life, from his early years in New Orleans to his international tours and triumphs. "Notes of a Pianist" is a collection of diary entries, letters, and reflections that chronicle Gottschalk's experiences, thoughts, and observations as he navigates the highs and lows of a career in music.
The book delves into Gottschalk's creative process, offering insights into his inspirations, influences, and the challenges he faced as a pioneering artist. He shares his encounters with other musical legends, the cultural and political landscapes of the places he visited, and the personal joys and sorrows that shaped his music.
Gottschalk's writing is infused with wit, passion, and a keen sense of observation, making "Notes of a Pianist" not only a valuable historical document but also a compelling and entertaining read. His vivid descriptions of performances, audiences, and the artistic milieu of the 19th century bring to life the world of classical music in a way that is both informative and engaging.
This memoir is an essential read for music lovers, historians, and anyone interested in the life of a remarkable artist. Gottschalk's reflections provide a unique perspective on the development of American classical music and the global influence of his work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781991312822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Porirua Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 474 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Notes of a Pianist
By Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12716-6
Foreword
Gottschalk and His Notes of a Pianist by S. Frederick StarrLouis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-869) was America's first internationally recognized composer, its first virtuoso pianist, first musical nationalist, and first Pan-American artist in any field. At once a Jacksonian democrat and a snob, he was hailed in his native New Orleans as "the Chopin of the Creoles," yet he supported the Union during the Civil War. His sentimental compositions moved generations of Americans to tears, even as his lively syncopated pieces anticipated ragtime and jazz by fifty years. Fluent in four languages, he was a matinee idol on a global scale yet found time also to be a dedicated educational reformer and, as this volume amply demonstrates, a spirited writer.
Gottschalk died in Rio de Janeiro at age forty. Eleven years later Notes of a Pianist was published in Philadelphia. The manuscript had been saved from oblivion by his sister, Clara Gottschalk, who may also have been responsible for the destruction of the notebooks in which the composer had recorded his impressions. Whether she bowdlerized them in the process of translation and editing is as intriguing a question as it is unanswerable. What is certain is that the translation fromGottschalk's original French by Clara's future husband, Dr. Robert E. Peterson, is graceless and wooden, lacking most of the irony and sentiment that gives the original its piquant flavor.
Notes of a Pianist spans the years 1857, when Moreau (as he was called) was twenty-eight, to December 1868, when he was thirty-nine and had only a year more to live. It covers Gottschalk's musical peregrinations across the United States, Canada, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and all of coastal South America except Venezuela and Colombia. The only region he did not visit was the American South, whose cities were less frequented by touring artists before the Civil War and were then off limits during the years of combat. The Notes are a tale of picaresque adventure, combined with social and political commentary and droll asides on anything that touched Gottschalk's fancy, including his impressions of the cuisine of Cleveland, the mores of California mining camps, and spitting everywhere in the United States.
Several writers, including Robert Offergeld, one of Gottschalk's many would-be biographers, and Jeanne Behrend in the otherwise excellent introduction that follows, mistakenly refer to the Notes as a diary. In only one sense is this true. As a touring artist, Gottschalk was condemned to spend endless solitary hours in smoky train cars and shabby hotels. Setting down impressions in his small notebooks was for the gregarious Moreau a form of escape from squalor, boredom, and loneliness. In the same mood he penned hundreds of letters (as yet unpublished) to his five younger sisters, who were in his charge after the death of his English-born father in 1853 and, five years later, of his mother. But only rarely are the Notes or letters truly confessional, even when we know Gottschalk was going through wrenching personal crises. In letters he reported on raucous times with his friend, the famed Italian tenor Pasquale Brignoli, and wrenching conflicts with the Bohemian artiste Ada Clare, but neither is mentioned in the Notes. By contrast, they are filled with details and explanations that would have been out of place in a diary but quite relevant if he was writing for a public audience, as was in fact the case.
Sent to Paris just before his twelfth birthday, Moreau's nonmusical education was almost entirely literary in character. He had a deep knowledge of French letters and was to draw on works of French poetry for the names of countless compositions. Thus, it was as natural for Gottschalk to write as it was for him to compose music or play the piano. In addition to his letters to his sisters he kept up a steady correspondence with friends and professional colleagues on three continents and penned voluminous letters (in Spanish) in behalf of political and educational reform in South America, issues to which he was ardently dedicated.
Gottschalk was a charter member of America's first group of self-styled Bohemians, which met at Pfaff? Saloon on lower Fifth Avenue in New York during the years 1857 to 1863. The group included many of the best artistic and literary talents of the day. Walt Whitman knew and respected Gottschalk, but kept somewhat aloof; however others, including editor Henry Clapp, Jr., illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr., painter Frederic Church, and journalist William Dean Howells, drew him into their convivial mischief. Gottschalk's contribution to this raucous group was to arrange for himself to write reviews of his own concerts and submit them to his archenemy in Boston, John Sullivan Dwight, for publication in the highbrow Dwight's Journal of Music. That he actually succeeded in this ruse on at least two occasions is testimony to Gottschalk's professional competence as a writer, as well as to his boundless self-confidence.
During his Parisian years young Moreau made contact with Hector Berlioz and Liszt, both of whom wrote frequently for the monthly French musical press. Gottschalk doubtless also read Berlioz's engaging book of travels, Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (2 vols., Paris, 1844). He would have understood that such works were not only effective tools for self-promotion but that they could also supplement a meager income from performance and composition. Both were urgent issues for a young concert artist seeking to make his way in America, to which he returned in 1853, and for a young man saddled with the maintenance in Paris of his spendthrift mother and five siblings.
Thus, what became the Notes began as a series of contracted articles for La France musicale and later for L'art musical. This explains not only such long asides on French culture as Gottschalk's account of his visit to the émigré Anna de Lagrange in the wilderness of upstate New York (p. 202) but also his rather snide references to Anglo-Saxons, who "as a race lack the pensive element so indispensable in the arts"(p. 76). Both were intended to remind Parisians of his bona fides as a French insider. These articles were in turn translated and reprinted as far afield as Milan, Mainz, St. Petersburg, New York, and Boston.
Treating them as a commercial venture, Gottschalk mined his articles for as much publicity and money as he could derive from them, never hesitating to use the same material twice, modifying it as necessary for different audiences. Adaptations for the French public stressed his musical successes in America, as if preparing the way for an eventual return to Paris. American versions underscored his credentials as a native son and patriot. Sometimes Gottschalk did not even bother to adapt his texts. Thus, a number of sections of what became the Notes appeared first in a French language paper issued in New York, the Courrier des Etats-Unis, and then in translation immediately thereafter in the Leader, Once a Month, Home Journal, and the Saturday Press.
The many reports and journal entries that eventually became the Notes can be neatly divided into three distinct groups and phases, each of them involving a somewhat different intended audience. The first, spanning the years 1857 to 1862, covered Gottschalk's travels in the Caribbean, his two stays in New York, and the early phase of his Civil War-era tours. During this period the author had no intention of publishing a book and was content to produce a stream of articles, mainly for the French musical press but also, when convenient, for New York monthlies.
These early passages are by far the most self-promoting sections of the Notes, and with good reason. Gottschalk achieved signal successes during this period, especially in New York and Havana, yet his career was by no means secure. He had no steady agent, his publishers were eager but inept, and he was trying desperately to send off a hefty check each month to his family in Paris.
After his return to the United States in 1862 and his decision to swear allegiance to the Union, Gottschalk's career took off. His sheet music sold briskly, and he toured constantly as the headline act of a small "opera" company that included several of the best Italian singers of the day, all of them artists revered by the renowned Verdi. His music was known and beloved by audiences in the smallest towns of the interior, most of which could now be reached by train. As a handsome and suave New Orleanian who spoke English with a French accent, Moreau was a matinee idol, beloved by the female part of his audience. As a Southern Unionist who shamelessly wove "Hail Columbia" into his performances, he was warmly embraced by Northern patriots and the families of soldiers who were dying by the thousands.
In this phase of his career, Gottschalk felt fully confident in himself both as an artist and a writer, and allowed himself free rein. His travels took him to the battlefronts in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and also to obscure frontier regions then little known to the residents of East Coast cities. Also, he met many of the great figures of the day, including President Lincoln, who attended several of his concerts. Gottschalk therefore transformed himself into a travel writer.
With few exceptions, the best travel books on America had been written by foreigners. Back in the eighteenth century the Frenchman Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in his Letters of an American Farmer (1782), had asked (and answered) the epochal question, "What then is the American ... this new man?" Gottschalk set out to do the same. As a patriot he railed against the silly and primitive stereotypes of American life that abounded in Europe, offering his own judgments instead.
It was in this period that Gottschalk probably came to see his jottings not just as a series of articles but as a book. An important stimulus to this decision was his reading of Anthony Trollope's great travel book, North America, issued in two volumes in 1862. Trollope (1815-882) was at the height of his fame as a novelist after the publication of his Barchester Towers in 1857. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, an American friend, Kate Field from Boston, invited Trollope to tour the country and set down his impressions in a book. Trollope came by this subject naturally, his mother, Frances Trollope (1780-1863), having written in 1839 an acclaimed but sharply critical travel book entitled Domestic Manners of the Americans. Gottschalk knew and admired the Fields for their well-known publishing house, and must have been stung by Mrs. Field's approach to Trollope. In his own notes from this period he singled out Trollope's "stupid remarks" (in this case on Baltimore's supposed "Englishness"), even as he acknowledged that at times the Englishman "perfectly seized" his subject. Henceforth Gottschalk seemed determined to produce his own "American" response to Trollope and other European travel writers.
This second period ended abruptly when Gottschalk hastily departed San Francisco for Panama and then South America in September 1865. Up to that moment he had intended to return to New York and eventually to France. But a former manager, Emanuele Muzio, and the head of a rival piano firm to the Chickering firm that Gottschalk endorsed, teamed up to lure him into a misadventure and then used the resulting rumors to raise a fury of anger against him in the California press. Gottschalk had indeed shown poor judgment in traveling to Oakland from San Francisco for a rendezvous with two proper young women from a private academy there, but otherwise did nothing untoward. But the hostile articles and a (false) rumor that a lynch-mob was being raised against him caused the thin-skinned Gottschalk to flee the country in self-imposed disgrace. In reality, the entire episode evaporated as quickly as it had arisen. But Gottschalk did not learn this for several years. In the meanwhile, the incident had shattered his self-confidence, and also his dream of publishing a best-selling travel book.
Over the ensuing years of travel and performance across South America Gottschalk continued to record his impressions in his notebooks. His first-hand accounts of a revolution in Peru and bloody wars in Paraguay, along with his increasingly dyspeptic ruminations on politics and culture in the independent Spanish states, make these some of the most interesting chapters in the entire volume. They are also the most personal, as he allowed his personal gloom to find expression in his choice of subjects and his manner of treating them.
By 1868, though, he had hit upon a new mission for himself and his travel notes. Appalled by the state of culture and education in America's southern hemisphere, Gottschalk reinvented himself as an educational reformer. Through this new role he would regain his high standing among cultural leaders in the United States (which in fact he had never lost) and prepare the way for his triumphant return. He was well on his way to succeeding at this when he suddenly died of peritonitis on December 17, 1869.
As a consequence of his early death, Moreau Gottschalk's travel book remained unfinished, a collection of published articles in French and English, along with hundreds of pages of notes and random jottings in French spanning a decade. From the literary polish of the articles and feuilletons that Gottschalk allowed to appear in print, we can be sure he would have strongly objected to the publication of his incomplete and rough manuscript. We can be equally sure that, had he lived, Gottschalk would have taken as much time as was necessary to shape his manuscript into a well-structured whole, developing some of the more telegraphic passages into lively prose and creating smooth transitions between them. This was precisely what he did with the manuscript scores of his several operas, which he carried with him for years and worked on during free moments in Nevada mining camps or on shipboard in South America. Like his Notes of a Pianist, the operas all remained incomplete at the time of his death. Unlike the Notes, however, they survive only in a few incomplete fragments.
Even though Gottschalk left us only a mass of sketches from which the present volume was assembled, it is possible to speak of a number of his main preoccupations and conclusions about the New World at mid-century. Regarding the United States, he was an ardent but by no means uncritical patriot. His loyalty to the Union was genuine, and he had no doubts as to America's continental destiny. At the same time, he had only a superficial acquaintance with the American Constitution and showed little interest in America's institutions of government. Instead, his patriotism focused on the vitality of the American economy and on Americans themselves as practical problem-solvers and entrepreneurs.
These same qualities, in Gottschalk's eyes, gave America's popular culture a rough-hewn and elemental quality, dominated by an overriding concern for money and, at its worst, coarse and vulgar. Yet they also accounted for the vigor of America's emerging cultural life, the ferocious ambitions of its impresarios, the generosity of its patrons, and the eagerness of Americans on the rough frontier to furnish their new towns with opera houses, libraries, and lyceums from whose podiums touring lecturers spread enlightenment to all and sundry.
In his Notes, Gottschalk also reveals himself as a thoroughgoing democrat, a cultural Jacksonian who treats the pretensions of the New England elite-epitomized in his mind by Bostonians's-as insufferably pompous. By the mid-1860s he had made contact with other New Englanders, however, especially the literary and educational elite of Boston, whom he came to revere and who in turn accepted him as one of their own.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Notes of a Pianist by Louis Moreau Gottschalk Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
Having grown up in opera-mad New Orleans in a household in which Creole tunes were probably common currency, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, after finishing school in Paris, gave free rein to his captivating and spontaneous fantasy and melodic charm. As Frederick Starr convincingly shows, his music was brilliant and original. And it leaves, when sympathetically presented, an indelible impression of his genius.
— Lawrence Gushee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of "Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band"
In his autobiographical Notes of a Pianist, nineteenth-century New Orleans piano virtuoso and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk shares with us his impressions as he travels through North and South America. His concert schedule and the number of cities he visits in a year during the age of locomotive and steamship would be daunting to even the most travel-hardened jet-age road warrior. Whether at a railroad siding worrying about the fate of his precious Chickering concert grand pianos before the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, fleeing San Francisco for South America because of a concocted scandal, or tending the wounded during the revolution in Lima, Peru, Gottschalk puts the reader in the middle of the action. His writing style is like his music—bold, colorful, romantic, virtuosic, and dramatic.
— Lambert Orkis, Grammy Award-winning pianist
"In his autobiographical Notes of a Pianist, nineteenth-century New Orleans piano virtuoso and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk shares with us his impressions as he travels through North and South America. His concert schedule and the number of cities he visits in a year during the age of locomotive and steamship would be daunting to even the most travel-hardened jet-age road warrior. Whether at a railroad siding worrying about the fate of his precious Chickering concert grand pianos before the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, fleeing San Francisco for South America because of a concocted scandal, or tending the wounded during the revolution in Lima, Peru, Gottschalk puts the reader in the middle of the action. His writing style is like his music—bold, colorful, romantic, virtuosic, and dramatic."—Lambert Orkis, Grammy Award-winning pianist"Having grown up in opera-mad New Orleans in a household in which Creole tunes were probably common currency, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, after finishing school in Paris, gave free rein to his captivating and spontaneous fantasy and melodic charm. As Frederick Starr convincingly shows, his music was brilliant and original. And it leaves, when sympathetically presented, an indelible impression of his genius."—Lawrence Gushee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band"Over and above all [the] purely sensuous aspects of [Gottschalk's] pianism . . . Was the presence of a genuinely musical soul. This was what most commanded the admiration of his friend and mentor Hector Berlioz: his musicianship, his taste, and his fine sense of proportion."—From the editor's Prelude