The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

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СКАЧАТЬ at a dangerous speed, skimming past a factory chimney and just missing a steam locomotive pulling out of a railway station. Any right-minded person living in the nineteenth century would never have dreamed of repeating such a futuristic piece of daredevilry. Gottschalk again clambered into the balloon the next day, taking a harmonium with him where he composed a short piece high in the sky that he called l’Extase.

      In that era music was a serious business, not at all to be taken lightly. Gottschalk was the first to dare to be lighthearted.

      No sooner had he come of age than he attracted public attention with four lively pieces of music called Le Bananier, Bamboula, Le Mancenillier, and La Savane. La Bananier was subtitled chanson nègre, and the entire Parisian cultural elite turned out to hear that “black song” performed. Listening to Gottschalk himself playing La Bananier in the salon of newspaper magnate Emile Garardin were no less than Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas. Sixty years before the advent of jazz, the poets and novelists were given a foretaste and were absolutely thrilled. They were amazed at so much rhythm, such exuberance, and their response was one of elation. From that point onward Gottschalk was known as Gottschalk de Louisiana and his reputation was established. He immediately embarked on a tour to cash in on his fame.

      If you listen to his compositions in chronological order, you can tag along on all the journeys Gottschalk undertook. Wherever he went, he was inspired by the local musicians. His first trip was to Spain. He stayed there for two years, learned to speak fluent Spanish, and composed Minuit à Sevilla and Chanson de Gitano, pieces reminiscent of the early works of De Falla or Granados, and which could have easily been included in Bizet’s Carmen—except it would be another fifty years before De Falla and Granados started composing and twenty-five years before Carmen premiered in Paris. The amazing thing about these pieces is that Gottschalk combined Iberian motifs with the style of Chopin, especially his mazurkas. Wherever he went, Gottschalk absorbed musical impressions without forgetting his master.

      Gottschalk had an exceptional gift for making contacts. In every country he composed a large-scale showpiece, which he performed with the help of local musicians. He began in Spain, where he composed Siege of Saragossa for ten pianos. He played the most demanding part himself; the other nine were played by local pianists. He bonded with the musicians during rehearsals, often resulting in the start of a friendship; after the performance he was a welcome guest in salons and artist associations. All other traveling virtuosos remained outsiders; Gottschalk crawled like lice on a dog.

      Naturally, from time to time this caused professional envy. In Spain the court pianist slammed the door of a coach so hard it broke the virtuoso’s right pinky finger. Gottschalk made light of the incident, claiming that a medical student had shook his hand too firmly. That student was purportedly jealous of Gottschalk having made overtures to a nightclub singer from Madrid by the name of Carmen. The first version of the incident is probably the truth; Gottschalk put his own spin on the story in order not to spoil his good relations with the Spanish court.

      In Havana he again performed his Siege of Saragossa with nine Cuban pianists. That performance in the Gran Teatro de Tacón brought him into contact with the grand master of the Cuban contradanza, the completely self-effacing composer Manuel Saumell (1817–1870). The Cuban writer Natalio Galán compared the meeting to that of “Buxtehude with Bach.” I considered that utter nonsense when I read it in Starr’s biography; it was not until a few months later that I heard pianist Georges Rabol’s recordings of four Saumell pieces. The four songs La Tedezca, La niña bonita, Recuerdos tristes, and La Matalide lasted less than five minutes between them. What Saumell does in those works, which he wrote around 1850, bordered on the incredible. All of a sudden I realized where Gottschalk had gotten his rhythms from; it was as if I were listening to a work by Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Artie Matthews, or some other ragtime composer, or a contradanse by a Curaçaoan composer from the early twentieth century, or—even more modern—to passages from Gershwin’s Spanish Prelude. Saumell was the first to slip Afro-Cuban rhythms underneath melody lines in the style of Schubert and Chopin, and the talented Gottschalk realized immediately how effective such a combination could be. After meeting Saumell he threw himself into Cuban contradanzas and his own rhythms took on the syncopated intensity that later came to be described as “typical Gottschalk.” Gottschalk stole, and in turn was plundered by others himself. For his Carmen, Bizet used the habanera rhythm from Minuit à Seville—he had a considerable collection of Gottschalk’s sheet music—and the Antillean composers went to town with his Cuban dances.

      In the northeast of the United States, where the old misunderstanding was still very much alive and kicking, the critics had an aversion to Gottschalk. Being light-footed and lighthearted was equated with being lazy and banal. The fiercest resistance came from Boston, where all classical music was measured by German musical standards. Gottschalk was not in the same league as Beethoven; besides, he had been educated in France and preferred to perform with the likes of Italian opera singers and divas. It took Gottschalk many years to conquer the “civilized” United States of America, and in the end he prevailed, not because of his music, but because of his political stance.

      Without the slightest bit of hesitation he supported the Union during the American Civil War. His Southern roots did not keep him from considering slavery to be a backward-looking, degrading practice, since the movement to secede from the Union had been predicated upon maintaining slavery. The South, he wrote in one of his notes, “is intent on destroying one of the finest political moments of modern times—namely the American Union, in the name of slavery.” To give his intentions musical expression, he composed a piece called The Union, which yielded him an invitation to play for President Lincoln and his wife. He told reporters that he had freed three slaves in New Orleans. It was a publicity stunt; he had never owned slaves.

      The standpoint he took had more to do with his antipathy for his father, the trader who scoured markets for bargain deals. In Paris Gottschalk would not have failed to notice that Victor Schoelcher was a regular guest at the salons where Chopin performed. Schoelcher, the most vociferous advocate for the abolition of slavery (and the French Assistant Secretary who signed the 1848 decree for French abolition of slavery), was a personal friend of Chopin—and of Liszt, as well as the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel. For Chopin the fate of black slaves was the same as the serfs in Russian-occupied Poland. He had a soft spot in his heart for Schoelcher, certainly since this champion of human rights came from the upper middle class—his father owned a porcelain factory in the Alsace—and he was a man of impeccable manners. Whenever Pleyel travelled to Guyana, Cuba, and the French Antilles, he attended to Schoelcher’s business by chronicling the horrors of slavery he encountered in a series of reports. Those who Gottschalk admired the most, Chopin first and foremost, but also Camille Pleyel, at whose salon he made his debut, were appalled at the practices his father had been guilty of all his life. And so Gottschalk did not waver a single moment fifteen years later when he came down on the side of the abolitionists versus the anti-abolitionists; he believed he still had to do something to make amends to Chopin, Liszt, and Pleyel.

      The Civil War had a detrimental effect on the quality of his work. He wrote such tearjerkers as The Last Hope and The Dying Poet to commemorate the fallen; he increasingly became the entertainer with politically correct sentiments and the wrong kind of music. During the first months of 1862 he gave one hundred and nine concerts in one hundred and twenty days. The twenty thousand kilometers he travelled in trains amid drunken soldiers did nothing to make him any happier, although he cheerfully informed his European readers that “Yankees are certainly the world’s only real travellers.” He described Sundays in Boston as “ennui, ennui, ennui,” and the northern Protestantism all around him as “concentrated boredom.” He yearned for the South, for the warmth and hospitality and the delirious singing in most of the churches.

      Back in Cuba, life again smiled upon him. He entitled a danza he had just written Di que sí, and a day later his friend Manuel Saumell wrote one in СКАЧАТЬ