Louis Moreau Gottschalk

One of the great pianists of the mid-nineteenth century and major early American composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lived a peripatetic life, leaving and returning and finally leaving for good the United States. He was born in New Orleans to Edward Gottschalk and Marie Françoise Aimée Gottschalk. His father was a Jewish businessman originally from London, his mother was French Creole. Of his six brothers and sisters, five were by his father’s mistress.

Gottschalk was a piano prodigy and made his formal debut in 1840 at the St. Charles Hotel. Two years later, his father took him to Europe to complete his training, however the thirteen-year-old Gottschalk was rejected from the Paris Convervatoire because he was American, a country apparently too barbaric to produce great musicians. He nevertheless managed to secure private instruction, and his early compositions, like Bamboula (Danse Des Nègres) and La Savane embraced that very Americanness, playing up exotic New World fantasies. His concerts were huge successes, with Chopin and Liszt both avowed fans.

In 1853 he returned to the United States, travelling and concertizing across the country and through Cuba and Puerto Rico, where he absorbed new musical influences that would appear in subsequent compositions. Though Gottschalk continued to tour constantly, he made his home in New York, where found himself at the center of American cultural life. There he had a relationship with actress, writer and “Queen of Bohemia” Ada Clrare, with whom he had a child out of wedlock. By the end of the decade, he had established himself as the best-known American pianist. Although Gottschalk always played up his Creole roots, he sided with the Union in the Civil War.

In 1865 he was at the center of a scandal, allegedly having had an affair with a young student at the Oakland Female Seminary. He fled the country and never returned. He traveled to South America on a concert tour, and contracted yellow fever in Brazil, collapsing in the middle of a concert. His remains were returned to the United States and buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, his grave marked with a marble monument, atop which sat the Angel of Music.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk

c. 1840