Louis Moreau Gottschalk (jan 1, 1829 – jan 1, 1869)

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The American composer Gottschalk had a virtuoso piano career in part modeled on Chopin. He found that he was best able to win recognition from European audiences by playing up exotic American elements, and early on he composed works inspired by his New Orleans childhood, including Bamboula, Op. 2. For American audiences, by contrast, Gottschalk wrote sentimental parlor music that represented European sophistication.

According to Gottshalk, when he was 15 he played Chopin Concerto 1 and Chopin was in the audience, thereafter telling him that he would be the future "King of Pianists". Yet like Chopin, Gottschalk found he could not break through to real recognition from teh European public except as an exotic--which is what turned him, against the current of his upbringing, into an American (or, more precisely, a Louisiana Creole) composer.

Thanks to the boom in American railroad construction during this period, Gottschalk covered more miles in less time than any other virtuoso of the day. He perforemd not only in big cities but in small mill and minig towns from coast to coast, brining European fine-art music to audiences that had never heard it before.

Gottschalk's popularity led him to write pieces with titles like The Last Hope, The Maiden's Blush, and The Dying Poet. These works, intended for home consumption, shared a commercial sentimentality found in the enormously popular songs of his compatriot Stephen Collins Foster, the composer of "Camptown Races", Öh! sUSANna""Swanee River"and others. Yet Gottschalk's aim was not in the least nationalistic. Quite the contrary: to aristocratic European audienes, Gottschalk had represented untamed America, so to the "vulgar"American public, both those who came to hear him play and those who purchased the sheet music afterward to play at home, he represented European class and sophistication.

He was forced to leave the US in 1865 to avoid prosecution on a false charge of sexual misconduct. The scandal that led to his exile reflected the social stigma and suspicion that often attached to charismatic artists in American society, which placed a premium on conformity. European attitudes were considerably more tolerant. Both Liszt and Chopin lived openly with women to whom they were not married (and who were married or had been married to others) and suffered little social stigma in consequence.

As an emissary from America to Europe, then from Europe to America, and finally between teh Americas; as a mediator between "low culture and "high"society, and then between "high"culture and "low" society; as a shuttler between culture and commerce; and as a perpetual wanderer whose selfhood was always defined by some sort of otherness, Louis Moreau Gottschalk led an existence on the borders. In many ways, America did too.

The United Statesm the exemplary late-eighteenth-century creation of Enlightened universalist politics, posed a perpetual threat to teh European status quo. What it threatened was the security of traditional hierarchy. The American experience, which had begun with a revolution against the British Empire, was viewed in nineteenth-century Europe as an experiment in the leveling of different classes. A backlash against Americanism was already well advanced by teh time the young Gottschalk sailed for Europe in 1841. The head of the piano department at the Paris COnservatoire would not even allow him to audition, despite the fact that he spoke perfect French and had been trained by Frenchmen, because Ämerica produces steam egnines, not musicians."

The democratic, nonhierarchical spirit of nineteenth-century America, was of course partial; the existence of slavery lasted until 1865, to pick only the most obvious conradiction. Yet new middle-class American audiences fostered a kind of golden age for the popular consumption of art. Gottschalk's successful career as an American public entertainer in midcentury reflects a time before the great divide between ärt"music and "popular"music that became so pronounced in teh twentieth century. Shakespeare plays and Rossini operas, albeit often presented in mangled forms, were considered genuinely popular entertainment enjoyed by huge numbers of Americans of all classes from across the country.

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