The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

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СКАЧАТЬ it necessary to compose a religious, meditative piece; in Havana they were always in for a good lark. The city had the cluttered charm of New Orleans and the prominence of Paris. Thanks to the sugar industry Havana was one of the world’s most prosperous cities. Gottschalk felt at home there; he began his day with a cup of pitch black coffee at the Café Louvre, then wandered into a working-class neighborhood to immerse himself in the Creole rhythms and listen to percussion groups playing tumba francesa. Back in his hotel room he composed such little gems such as Ojos Criollos, in which you can hear his footsteps as well as the joyful flute and drumming that had caught his ear.

      It now seems completely natural: the classically trained Gottschalk’s ears catch the Afro-Caribbean rhythms, which he then assimilates into his music. Daring? We can scarcely believe it. All you have to do is read interviews with Duke Ellington to get an idea of the prejudices that were involved. Long after the heyday of the Cotton Club, in 1940 the Duke was asked straight out why he allowed himself to be inspired by “jungle drumming and howling.” For the straight-laced, jazz appealed to the basest instincts in the underbelly; by then Gottschalk’s composition Creole Eyes was already eighty years old.

      After a tour that took him to all the cities and towns of Cuba, Gottschalk travelled to Puerto Rico, where he became acquainted with the local bomba and danza. On Christmas Eve he witnessed the annual procession of the jíbaros, the peasant farmers from Puerto Rico. The next day he composed Souvenir de Porto-Rico, one of the loveliest Caribbean compositions of the nineteenth century, full of tresillo and cinquillo rhythms that rise to a crescendo before suddenly descending into a final lyrical adagio.

      Gottschalk enjoyed rural life in Puerto Rico. He spent several months in plantation houses, did not pass up a single party, and tickled the ivories of every piano in any village fortunate enough to have one. Right before one of his performances in a country inn, one of the guests suddenly died. Because Gottschalk would be leaving the next day, the innkeeper insisted on letting the concert take place, even though it meant playing in the hall where the deceased lay in state. A stage was built that arched over the coffin on which a grand piano was placed. That evening, Gottschalk played variations on local songs and dances. The audience egged him on. He banged harder and harder on the keys; he pushed his feet deeper and deeper into the pedals. Then the piano crashed through the floor. The audience rushed over to him screaming: “He’s dead.” A second later Gottschalk scrambled to his feet above the coffin to a deafening volley of laughter.

      The next islands Gottschalk visited were Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad. After a stay in Guyana and Suriname, he wanted to travel onward to Venezuela, but there was a civil war in progress, so he went to Martinique and Guadeloupe. On the latter island he retreated into the mountains for several months, settling near the smoking volcano La Soufrière, with a mentally retarded servant who read Voltaire and Rousseau and was a virtuoso on the violin. In the dispatches he sent to European newspapers, he made Guadeloupe out to be some practically uninhabited island and himself as some Robinson Crusoe and the mulatto servant Firmin Moras into his man Friday. Moras, who could hardly speak, would stay by his side until the day Gottschalk died.

      Living like a hermit, Gottschalk intended on getting down to some serious work on a grand scale. It turns out he did indeed compose a symphony, though no more than a few sketches have survived. Due to his travelling existence he lost quite a few pieces of luggage and compositions, and after his death in Rio de Janeiro an unscrupulous impresario made off with several of his scores. Some works resurfaced on the black market; quite a few were lost forever.

      Back in Cuba, he organized a monster concert in which four hundred and fifty musicians took part, both professionals and amateurs. His orchestra included Afro-Cuban rhythm instruments, from the lowliest shakers to gigantic drums. At the last minute he added forty pianists to the four hundred and fifty performers. The concert was a real happening; everyone and anyone in Havana who could play a few notes participated. The reviewers wrote that music could not sound any grander or more powerful. Gottschalk merely took it as a challenge: for the monster concert he organized years later in Rio de Janeiro, he invited no less than six hundred and fifty musicians. He enlisted the services of brass bands of the Brazilian army and navy, two German orchestras, seventy music teachers, and the orchestra of a local revue theatre. He put eleven copyists to work around the clock for a week to write out the scores for all the musicians.

      During his travels, Gottschalk passed on the knowledge he had acquired in Europe. He gave lessons in New York to the Venezuelan Teresa Carreño (1853–1917), who would become one of the most prominent concert pianists at the turn of the century. In 1886 she performed in Curaçao and, as always, began her recital with her own composition entitled Gottschalk March. The young Arthur Rubenstein saw her play in Berlin thirteen years later, a Valkyrie-like appearance “with the power and turbulence of two men.” In Cuba Gottschalk took the young Ignacio Cervantes (1849–1905) under his wing, in Chile Federico Guzmán (1837–1885), and in Brazil Brasilio Itibere de Cunha (1846–1913). Cervantes would turn into Cuba’s greatest nineteenth-century composer, Guzmán the greatest Chilean composer, and Itibere de Cunha would be the man who paved the way for Villa-Lobos. Gottschalk took up a collection from his audiences in order for Guzmán to further his studies in Paris. And to each pupil he gave his dearest, most precious memory: the delicate, reserved, and sensitive performance of Chopin in a Parisian salon. He was not to be compared with Liszt, whom he had also heard in Paris and whom he reproached as having “an insatiable thirst for fame”—a little like the sort of criticism one high flyer gives another.

      In Lima, he reverted to organizing simpler concerts for ten pianos. In Peru he was inspired by the local zamacuecas and listened intently to the tristos or Indian flute.

      He travelled seven hundred kilometers into the interior of the country on the back of a donkey. These sojourns were not without danger: Gottschalk never forgot to take his pistol with him nor his walking stick, which sheathed a hidden sword. He regularly was forced to pull his gun, and with his walking stick he successfully warded off an assailant, though not in some obscure backlands but in Buenos Aires; and the man who attacked him was a drunken Frenchman. South America gave him plenty to write about—from the darkened recesses of his lodgings he spied on the rebels on horseback in Lima, and he survived a cholera epidemic in Buenos Aires that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims—but in musical terms he had reached the end of his tether. His interest in native melodies and rhythms faded. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, and Guadeloupe had made an impression on him, since the local music constantly reminded him of his grandmother, mother, and his nanny’s roots in Saint-Domingue. In Argentina he used local rhythms that foreshadowed the tango in his compositions Dernier amour and Souvenir de Buenos Aires, though in Brazil he was not at all taken with the local rhythms. In Chile he listened intently to the mecapaqueña; in Uruguay, where quite a few German colonists had settled, he studied the scores of Wagner.

      “New, admirable, picturesque, outrageously distinguished,” were the terms he used to describe Wagner’s music in his Notes, and this made him think it was time to return to Europe and head for Germany. It was the land of his father, after all, “and France in recent years had no more to offer than Offenbach and champagne”; and he had reached the age at which he had been able to put the frustrations of childhood behind him. In preparation for his impending trip to Germany he wrote a couple of Lieder. A case of food poisoning put an abrupt end to his plans; the poisoning led to an inflammation of the appendix, and since it went untreated, to a case of peritonitis. The Brazilian emperor Dom Carlos II had him rushed to the mountains, but the fresh air did little more than ease his suffering.

      Gottschalk directed his last words to the administering physician. “I have travelled much and have often been dangerously ill but never have I found a friend as devoted as you. A father or brother could not have done more. Your efforts are truly superhuman.” He made the sign of the cross, kissed the doctor’s hand, and drew his last breath.

      A gentleman to the last.

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