The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

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      8

       Oh My Sweet Darling, Spare Me

      Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) spent the first years of his life in New Orleans, within hearing distance of Congo Square, where black musicians were given the exceptional privilege during the years of slavery of performing every Sunday afternoon in a frenzied atmosphere.

      His mother, Aimeé Brusle, was a Cajun from Louisiana, his father a German Jew who had immigrated at a young age to America from London, where his parents had sought their fortune.

      Aimée spoke French at home and could not read English. Her ancestors had exchanged Louisiana in the middle of the eighteenth century for Saint-Domingue, and forty-five years later, after the declaration of the black republic, came back to the United States by way of Jamaica. At first they had not disapproved of the slave revolt; Gottschalk was named after his uncle Moreau Bruslé, who for a short time had been the revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s secretary.

      So on his mother’s side he clearly had ties to Haiti, which he even referred to as “a mysterious affinity.” His father imported goods from Bremen and Hamburg but earned considerably more in the slave trade. In New Orleans Edward Gottschalk supported two families from the proceeds, the official one with Aimée, and the illegitimate one with Judith Françoise Rubio, a so-called free woman of color, whose forebears, like Aimée’s, had come from Saint-Domingue. He had seven children with the first and four with the latter. He recognized all eleven of them, which caused him to be in constant need of money.

      Louis Moreau was not very fond of his father. He refused to learn German and on his later travels he avoided going to Germany and England. He did, however, absolutely adore his Creole mother, which he expressed in countless compositions and which he would always convey in the way he spoke English: a little like Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie films.

      Edward Gottschalk pushed his son into music, with the singular aim of making money. Edward could not read a single note of music but had read in the newspaper that child prodigies were making fortunes. He invested in his son like real estate, and when the young man became famous, he came to collect the money he felt he was entitled to as some kind of landlord would.

      Louis Moreau took piano lessons, violin lessons, and composition from the age of seven; when he was twelve he was sent to further his musical studies at the Paris Conservatory, where Blasini had also studied. That did not happen, however: as an American he did not stand a ghost of a chance to be admitted, and he lacked the extraordinary letter that had led to Blasini’s admission; all he could do was take private lessons from Camille Stamaty, a student of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Besides Gottschalk, Stamaty was molding another talent, Camille Saint-Saëns, in a ruthless but efficient way: Saint-Saëns was soon regarded a child prodigy. A month before his sixteenth birthday Louis Moreau made his debut in the Salle Pleyel, on April 2, 1845.

      Among his audience was Sigismund Thalberg, “the man with the iron wrists.” The Viennese pianist was a great rival in Paris at the time with Liszt and Chopin and won the battle of the virtuosos according to the taste of his contemporaries, which left Chopin indifferent and Liszt furious. Thalberg discovered in the young Gottschalk a new challenger.

      In the first row sat Chopin himself. The constantly shivering Pole had come to listen to the performance of his piano composition in E-minor. Afterward he rushed to the soloist’s dressing room. According to Gottschalk’s first biographer he said in a languid voice: “Bien, mon enfant, bien, très bien, donnez-moi encore la main.”

      No, claimed Gottschalk’s French music publisher later, Chopin had said: “Embrassez-moi, encore, encore!” Not true, said Gottschalk’s sister Clara afterwards; Chopin had laid his hand on the boy’s head to give him his paternal blessing: “Je prédis que vous serez le roi des pianists.”

      Gottschalk would indeed become the king of the pianists, in New Orleans, New York, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. He gave thousands of performances to audiences who were sometimes so ecstatic they carried him on their shoulders to his hotel where they cheered him deep into the night. He often had to bid a final farewell to his admirers from the balcony of his hotel with a majestic bow.

      As a composer he introduced countless Creole rhythms, in the exact same spirit as Chopin and Liszt, who had brought Polish and Hungarian dances to the world’s attention. Gottschalk became familiar with Creole music through his mother, his childhood nanny Sally, who had been born in Saint-Domingue, and by his grandmother, who had spent the first thirty years of her life there as well. He had heard La Belle Lolotte sung at home, and used the theme to it for his La Savane; at home he had also heard En avan’Grenadie and used the melody for La Bananier; at home he had seen Sally dance to the beat of Quan’patate la cuite, the melody of which he used in his most famous composition Bamboula.

      He wrote his Pasquinade in 1860, the first piece that prefigured ragtime eight years before Scott Joplin was born and thirty-nine years before the Maple Leaf Rag appeared in print. He was a forerunner to Joplin, Gershwin, Ives, Carter, and Ellington, drove American music toward swing, and would nevertheless end up being forgotten in his land of birth.

      South of New Orleans his legacy is much deeper. You can hear his influence in practically every Caribbean composition that followed. He set to work on the mazurka, and transformed the polka and the contradanse until they were more reminiscent of waving palm trees than rustling birches.

      Gottschalk’s early mazurkas were strongly influenced by Chopin, but he quickly gave them a Creole twist, and in his later works combined the piano techniques of Chopin and Thalberg with Caribbean motifs. In formal terms his etude Madeleine, which he composed in Rio de Janeiro, fits seamlessly with Chopin’s etudes, but sounds like a Latin American bolero.

      In the end, Gottschalk shared with his musical model the fact that he died just before the age of forty. During a concert in Rio de Janeiro when he was performing his composition Morte he fell forward on the grand piano. His death throes lasted another three weeks, and because of the hassles with payments of outstanding debts, nine months went by before he could be buried in New York. On his tombstone would be engraved the words L.M. GOTTSCHALK—MORTE, thus feeding the myth that Gottschalk had forced his own death, in a similar way to Mozart, who died after having committed the first sections of his Requiem to paper. The e in Morte indicated that Gottschalk had written the piece for a woman; morte refers to the poem by Victor Hugo that begins with: Elle est morte.

      Upwards of three hundred Gottschalk compositions have survived. They are almost all miniatures. In this he was also a forerunner to the Caribbean composers that followed, who СКАЧАТЬ