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Pianos and Pianists - Consultant Editor Ates Orga

The First American Pianist

 

 

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'The King of Pianists'

In Paris, besides Saint-Saëns, then all of seven, Moreau befriended Bizet, Meyerbeer and Offenbach (who arranged his beguiling, best-selling La bananier, chanson nègre for cello), and drew the attention of Chopin and Liszt. The Sephardic Alkan, too, perhaps? On April 2nd 1845 Stamaty presented him privately at the Salle Pleyel playing operatic fantasies by Liszt and Thalberg together with Chopin's E minor Concerto. Fryderyk C, legend has it, at once took the boy in his arms (either that or went backstage to take his hand), predicting him to become 'the king of pianists' - the sort of Romantic blessing from genius essential to make anyone someone, even if it had to be invented (Gottschalk's future publisher, the critic Léon Escudier [Mes souvenirs, 1863], could only corroborate the embrace part). Also in the audience was the superior Kalkbrenner (in Chopin's opinion 'as much hated here as his talent is respected') - the following morning putting the success of the occasion, so the story goes, entirely down to his Hand-Guide. 'I don't like the music you played - Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg. They're not classical. You and Stamaty should have chosen my music. It's classical, and, besides, everybody likes it'(Vernon Loggins, Where the World Ends, 1958).

During the 1846-47 season, concerts followed with Berlioz at the Théâtre italien. Then came a formal solo début on April 17th 1849, again in Pleyel's rooms, this time with his mother and her six other children present (she having left his father in 1847). The slight, dreamy, melancholic 'pianiste-compositeur louisianais' had arrived. His piano playing glittered with charisma. His foreign, far-away/another-time allure left the bejewelled ladies of the metropolis faint with desire. His piano pieces were all the rage - 'wild, languishing, indescribable, [bearing] no resemblance to any other European music' (La France musicale) - the delirious, ritualistic, virtuoso-stretching Bamboula, Danse des nègres , Op 2 (1844-45), proving the ultimate calling-card: a D flat spectacular of deep-thoated, time-keeping bass, hypnotic rhythms, percussive note repetitions, thunder-burst fireworks, scintillating swoonings, velocity lacework, sighing rests, and jangling fff climax. It's a spectacular statement still. To a public used to nothing more exotic than places east of Vienna, prepared for Slavs rather than slaves, it must have seemed like the naked danger of a caged animal suddenly let loose. Even the ageing Zimmermann, forgetting the boy he'd turned down a few years previously, succumbed to its alien spell, in 1849 selecting it as the piano test-piece of the Conservatoire with its young composer invited to join the jury. Sweet satisfaction.

 

'Louisiana Trilogy' or 'Scenes from My Childhood'

Dedicated to the Queen of Spain, Bamboula (based on a Creole tune, 'When that 'tater's cooked don't you eat it up!') and La savane, Ballade creole, Op 3 (1845-46, using another plantation song remembered from childhood, 'Pov piti Lolotte') were first played in Paris in November 1848. With the 'shower of pearls' of the instantly popular Le Bananier, Op 5 (1845-46, derived from a Creole song colloquially known as 'En avan' Grenadie'), they comprise what Gilbert Chase has called Gottschalk's 'Louisiana Trilogy' (America's Music, 1966). Add the malinconico Louisiana/Caribbean inflected serenade Le mancenillier Op 11 (1848-49), Richard Jackson proposes, and you have an autobiographical quartet, 'Scenes from My Childhood.' Rhythmic flight, knife-edge muscularity, unleashed festivity; ancestral yearning. The steps and strains, the body language and spirit-voices of the Confederate South, as generically unmistakeable as the Bohemian polka, Hapsburg waltz, Polish mazurka or Ottoman march, as removed from the high Western art of its day - Chopin's Fourth Ballade, the Alkan studies, Liszt's B minor Sonata - as can possibly be imagined. Hothouse souvenirs of an entertainment and imagery, a light and scent, not to be heard again till Joplin ragtime, Debussy music-hall, the Iberian moodscapes of Albéniz.

'Mr Gottschalk was born in America, whence he has brought a host of curious chants from the Creoles and Negroes; he has made from them the themes of his most delicious compositions. Everybody in Europe now knows Bamboula, La bananier, Le mancenillier, La Savane, and twenty [?] other ingenious fantasias in which the nonchalant graces of tropical melody assuage so agreeably our restless and insatiable passion for novelty'

Berlioz, Feuilleton du Journal des Débats, April 13th 1851

 

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Copyright © 14 January 2000, Ates Orga, Suffolk, UK

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