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       The Virtuoso Nomad

      I discovered Gottschalk at an opportune moment. American historian S. Frederick Starr’s substantial biography Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk was published in 1995, followed in 1996 by the just as detailed Louis Moreau Gottschalk et son temps by the Canadian sociologist Réginald Hamel. They were certainly not the first biographies—when he was alive Gottschalk had already been adulated twice in book form, and before he sank into oblivion he would be the subject of no less than four hagiographies—but these were the first academic works on his life. The books complement each other wonderfully: Starr places Gottschalk in the American search for cultural identity, while Hamel approaches him from a Creole perspective. In that same decade, French pianist Georges Rabol, the son of a black musician from Martinique, recorded two CDs with works by Gottschalk, and the Irishman Philip Martin went a step further by recording all the piano works by Gottschalk still in existence on a total of seven CDs between 1990 and 2004.

      I was able to read about and listen to Gottschalk, and to be honest, I was in for a bit of a surprise. Not that he was the misunderstood genius; I had to agree with Wim Statius Muller that sometimes Gottschalk set low standards for himself and was incapable of throwing total or partial failures into the wastepaper basket. Nevertheless, he had just as often infused his music with a contagious feeling of euphoria, and I became fond of Gottschalk, of the man himself, the traveler, the phenomenon.

      First and foremost, Gottschalk was a nomad. He stayed in each country he visited for several months and sometimes even years, with the sole purpose of acquiring new experiences. He enjoyed the company of poets, writers, and journalists just as much as composers and musicians; he accepted the invitations of five presidents, from high-minded democrats such as Abraham Lincoln to bloodthirsty dictators such as Vernacio Flores in Montevideo, wandering through their palaces like dazed madmen. Gottschalk wanted to see everything with his own eyes and hear everything with his own ears in order to be able to process it into music or writing. He sent reportage-like written impressions to the French magazine La France musicale from every country he visited for a long period of time. The magazine sold these pieces on to newspapers in Milan, Mainz, Madrid, and St. Petersburg, and gradually Gottschalk gained the reputation in Europe of being a nomadic virtuoso. All his articles were posthumously collected under title Notes d’un pianiste, and in 1964 when they were republished by the New York publisher Knopf, it enabled a reviewer to sneer: “If Gottschalk did not deserve fame for his music, then at least he did for these travel stories.”

      The nineteenth century prescribed that composers lead deeply tragic lives. Hector Berlioz tried to make an exception to the rule; like Gottschalk he was intensely curious and put his impressions down in writing. However, when it came to his music he was generally underestimated. Gottschalk was spared that sad fate; he was worshipped his entire life. Given his cheerful disposition, he adhered to one of the lines of the Cuban poet Manuel Ramírez: “vivir es gozar, amar es vivir” (to live is to enjoy, to love is to live). As far as that was concerned he had a great deal in common with Rossini, who indeed embraced him as a kindred spirit.

      Sometimes he was short of cash, sometimes his intestines bothered him due to the umpteenth change of climate and diet, and sometimes he was almost hooked by a woman, such as the American journalist and writer Ada Clare, who claimed that Gottschalk was the father of her son. Whether or not she was right, was never determined; in any case she wrote a scandalous roman à clef about him in the same vein as George Sand about Chopin or Marie d’Agoult about Liszt, and Gottschalk considered it wiser to take his leave. From that moment on he chose only to make eyes at young girls, pretty enough to court but of an age too tender to deflower. He inhaled the odor of the mademoiselles, and when they turned his head, he quickly lit a Cuban cigar.

      Gottschalk sought adoration, not sex, which made him practically the only nineteenth-century artist not to have contracted a venereal disease. Nevertheless, in California he became embroiled in a sex scandal. He and a friend picked up two fourteen-year-old girls from a boarding school in the middle of the night, and due to a slip-up failed to bring them back before the morning roll call. Gottschalk was threatened with being indicted for obscene conduct with underage minors. He escaped going to trial by sailing to Peru under an assumed name.

      Every once in a while he suffered from the consequences of his popularity, though most of the time he bore his fate of being an idol in a lighthearted manner. His fame allowed him to indulge in any crazy whim he desired. In New Orleans he became acquainted with a balloonist. He immediately wanted to take to the sky with the aeronaut СКАЧАТЬ