Louis Moreau Gottschalk

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Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (born May 8, 1829 in New Orleans , Louisiana , † December 18, 1869 in Tijuca , today Alto da Boa Vista in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil ) was an American pianist and composer of French origin.

family

Louis Moreau Gottschalk's father - born in London - was a Sephardic Jew . In the early 1820s he migrated to New Orleans and became a successful businessman there. The maternal grandparents lived in Santo Domingo , where the grandfather served as governor. Family members moved to New Orleans during the slave riots around 1800. Because the maternal ancestors came from France, French was spoken in the family .

Life

Louis Moreau Gottschalk - first child of a total of seven children - grew up in the district of Old New Orleans, where he got to know the music of the Creoles and the African American . From 1842 he studied composition with Jacques Fromental Halévy and Hector Berlioz and piano with Camille Stamaty in Paris . He was friends with Georges Bizet and Camille Saint-Saëns . As a US citizen, he was not accepted into the Paris Conservatory. Seven years after his rejection, however, the same conservatory accepted the former applicant as a member of the jury for the entrance exams. In 1845 Chopin was present at Gottschalk's concert in the Salle Pleyel .

In Spain he was awarded several times by the king and queen. Among other things, he wrote the piece The Siege of Saragossa for ten pianos in Spain .

In 1853 Gottschalk left Europe and returned to the USA. It was there that his career began as a celebrated concert pianist who could travel on his own special train. He also had longer stays in the Caribbean from 1856 to 1862 . He toured the whole of the USA in concert, played in civil war- fought cities, in front of an audience of gold diggers, carried two grand pianos with him on his travels, a piano tuner, his impresario , when he was delayed he sent telegrams to his audience and staged the march out of Tannhauser with fourteen pianos .

In 1865 Gottschalk had to flee to Latin America because of an affair , where he lived until his death. Here he composed z. B. The symphony No. 1 La nuit des tropiques , gave concerts and organized music festivals.

On November 24, 1869, Louis Moreau Gottschalk collapsed due to an attack of malaria from which he did not recover. Three weeks later, on December 18, 1869, Gottschalk died at the age of forty in a hotel in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro - presumably of a quinine overdose .

In 1870 his remains were returned to the United States and interred in Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. His tomb was originally crowned by a marble monument, a statue entitled Angel of Music , which was badly damaged by vandalism in 1959 and is now to be renovated.

reception

Gottschalk's work also includes a number of popular piano pieces, some of which can be assigned to upscale salon music , for example The Dying Poet ("The dying poet") and The Last Hope ("The last hope"). More important, however, are his national piano pieces, which were shaped by the Spanish, Latin American and Creole musical traditions, for example the piano pieces The Banjo and La Bamboula (1848). His virtuoso arrangement of the music of the Brazilian national anthem Hino Nacional Brasileiro is also well known . With his technically difficult compositions, Louis Moreau Gottschalk celebrated triumphs in Paris as a virtuoso who achieved international recognition. In the USA he influenced, among other things, the work of Charles Ives .

In his work, Gottschalk documents early forms of Afro-American dance music from which jazz would later develop. As a pianist, he was one of the first internationally successful pianists to use techniques from later ragtime ( syncopation , walking bass , stride ).

Discography

The Texan pianist Ivan Davis presented a recording of Gottschalk's piano works in 1972 under the title Der Bananenbaum (Decca). In 1987 Raymund Havenith recorded a selection of 8 piano pieces under the title Early American Piano Music (Musicaphon).

The Irish pianist Philip Martin has recorded Gottschalk's existing two-hand piano works for the British record label Hyperion since 1990 (eight albums have so far been released). Georges Rabol has also recorded these piano works . Among the most recent recordings, a selection of six piano pieces that the pianist Jimin Oh-Havenith recorded ( revolution at the piano , musicaphone) should be highlighted .

publication

  • Louis Moreau Gottschalk: Notes of a Pianist , ed. By Jeanne Behrend, reprint: Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2006, ISBN 0-691-12716-6 .

literature

  • John G. Doyle: Louis Moreau Gottschalk 1829–1869. A bibliographical study and catalog of works. The College Music Society, Detroit 1983.
  • Dieter Hildebrandt : Pianoforte or the novel of the piano in the 19th century. Hanser, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-446-14181-2 (Chapter: The War in the Hall ).
  • Wolfgang Lempfrid: The adventurous life of the pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. In: Pianoforte. Journal for pianos and grand pianos Vol. 2 (1992), Issue 1, pp. 28-37.
  • S. Frederick Starr : Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. University of Illinois Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-507237-5
  • Philipp Teriete: Louis Moreau Gottschalk - An American Pianist Composer: Improvisation in the 19th Century. New York City 2015 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Louis Moreau Gottschalk  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Brockhaus Music: Lemma Gottschalk. Mannheim / Leipzig 2006.
  2. ↑ Frederick Starr: Louis Moreau Gottschalk , University of Illinois Press, 1995, pp. 19-21
  3. ↑ The curriculum vitae of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Markus Hillenbrand, accessed on July 17, 2011 .
  4. ^ A b Dieter Hildebrandt: Pianoforte or The War in the Hall. The piano in the 19th century. Hanser, Munich 1985, Chapter XII.
  5. ↑ a b Roger Willemsen : Classical meets jazz. In: NDR Kultur , episode 98/16. July 2011.
  6. ↑ a b Irving Lowens, S. Frederick Starr:  Gottschalk, Louis Moreau. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
  7. ↑ Based on a text by Jeremy Nicholas for the booklet of the recording Gottschalk Piano Music by Philip Martin on the Hyperion label: "He died of emphysema, the result of a burst abscess in his stomach."
  8. ↑ Louis Moreau Gottschalk in the Find a Grave database . Accessed November 23, 2016.
  9. ↑ James Barron: A Brooklyn Mystery Solved: Vandals Did It, in 1959. In: The New York Times . May 3, 2010 .;
personal data
SURNAME Gottschalk, Louis Moreau
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pianist and composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1829
PLACE OF BIRTH New Orleans , Louisiana , USA
DATE OF DEATH December 18, 1869
Place of death Rio de Janeiro , Brazil