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I discovered Gottschalk at an opportune moment. American historian S. Frederick Starr’s substantial biography Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk was published in 1995, followed in 1996 by the just as detailed Louis Moreau Gottschalk et son temps by the Canadian sociologist Réginald Hamel. They were certainly not the first biographies—when he was alive Gottschalk had already been adulated twice in book form, and before he sank into oblivion he would be the subject of no less than four hagiographies—but these were the first academic works on his life. The books complement each other wonderfully: Starr places Gottschalk in the American search for cultural identity, while Hamel approaches him from a Creole perspective. In that same decade, French pianist Georges Rabol, the son of a black musician from Martinique, recorded two CDs with works by Gottschalk, and the Irishman Philip Martin went a step further by recording all the piano works by Gottschalk still in existence on a total of seven CDs between 1990 and 2004.

I was able to read about and listen to Gottschalk, and to be honest, I was in for a bit of a surprise. Not that he was the misunderstood genius; I had to agree with Wim Statius Muller that sometimes Gottschalk set low standards for himself and was incapable of throwing total or partial failures into the wastepaper basket. Nevertheless, he had just as often infused his music with a contagious feeling of euphoria, and I became fond of Gottschalk, of the man himself, the traveler, the phenomenon.

First and foremost, Gottschalk was a nomad. He stayed in each country he visited for several months and sometimes even years, with the sole purpose of acquiring new experiences. He enjoyed the company of poets, writers, and journalists just as much as composers and musicians; he accepted the invitations of five presidents, from high-minded democrats such as Abraham Lincoln to bloodthirsty dictators such as Vernacio Flores in Montevideo, wandering through their palaces like dazed madmen. Gottschalk wanted to see everything with his own eyes and hear everything with his own ears in order to be able to process it into music or writing. He sent reportage-like written impressions to the French magazine La France musicale from every country he visited for a long period of time. The magazine sold these pieces on to newspapers in Milan, Mainz, Madrid, and St. Petersburg, and gradually Gottschalk gained the reputation in Europe of being a nomadic virtuoso. All his articles were posthumously collected under title Notes d’un pianiste, and in 1964 when they were republished by the New York publisher Knopf, it enabled a reviewer to sneer: “If Gottschalk did not deserve fame for his music, then at least he did for these travel stories.”

The nineteenth century prescribed that composers lead deeply tragic lives. Hector Berlioz tried to make an exception to the rule; like Gottschalk he was intensely curious and put his impressions down in writing. However, when it came to his music he was generally underestimated. Gottschalk was spared that sad fate; he was worshipped his entire life. Given his cheerful disposition, he adhered to one of the lines of the Cuban poet Manuel Ramírez: “vivir es gozar, amar es vivir” (to live is to enjoy, to love is to live). As far as that was concerned he had a great deal in common with Rossini, who indeed embraced him as a kindred spirit.

Sometimes he was short of cash, sometimes his intestines bothered him due to the umpteenth change of climate and diet, and sometimes he was almost hooked by a woman, such as the American journalist and writer Ada Clare, who claimed that Gottschalk was the father of her son. Whether or not she was right, was never determined; in any case she wrote a scandalous roman à clef about him in the same vein as George Sand about Chopin or Marie d’Agoult about Liszt, and Gottschalk considered it wiser to take his leave. From that moment on he chose only to make eyes at young girls, pretty enough to court but of an age too tender to deflower. He inhaled the odor of the mademoiselles, and when they turned his head, he quickly lit a Cuban cigar.

Gottschalk sought adoration, not sex, which made him practically the only nineteenth-century artist not to have contracted a venereal disease. Nevertheless, in California he became embroiled in a sex scandal. He and a friend picked up two fourteen-year-old girls from a boarding school in the middle of the night, and due to a slip-up failed to bring them back before the morning roll call. Gottschalk was threatened with being indicted for obscene conduct with underage minors. He escaped going to trial by sailing to Peru under an assumed name.

Every once in a while he suffered from the consequences of his popularity, though most of the time he bore his fate of being an idol in a lighthearted manner. His fame allowed him to indulge in any crazy whim he desired. In New Orleans he became acquainted with a balloonist. He immediately wanted to take to the sky with the aeronaut and for six minutes they hovered above the city. The balloon suddenly started descending at a dangerous speed, skimming past a factory chimney and just missing a steam locomotive pulling out of a railway station. Any right-minded person living in the nineteenth century would never have dreamed of repeating such a futuristic piece of daredevilry. Gottschalk again clambered into the balloon the next day, taking a harmonium with him where he composed a short piece high in the sky that he called l’Extase.

In that era music was a serious business, not at all to be taken lightly. Gottschalk was the first to dare to be lighthearted.

No sooner had he come of age than he attracted public attention with four lively pieces of music called Le Bananier, Bamboula, Le Mancenillier, and La Savane. La Bananier was subtitled chanson nègre, and the entire Parisian cultural elite turned out to hear that “black song” performed. Listening to Gottschalk himself playing La Bananier in the salon of newspaper magnate Emile Garardin were no less than Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas. Sixty years before the advent of jazz, the poets and novelists were given a foretaste and were absolutely thrilled. They were amazed at so much rhythm, such exuberance, and their response was one of elation. From that point onward Gottschalk was known as Gottschalk de Louisiana and his reputation was established. He immediately embarked on a tour to cash in on his fame.

If you listen to his compositions in chronological order, you can tag along on all the journeys Gottschalk undertook. Wherever he went, he was inspired by the local musicians. His first trip was to Spain. He stayed there for two years, learned to speak fluent Spanish, and composed Minuit à Sevilla and Chanson de Gitano, pieces reminiscent of the early works of De Falla or Granados, and which could have easily been included in Bizet’s Carmen—except it would be another fifty years before De Falla and Granados started composing and twenty-five years before Carmen premiered in Paris. The amazing thing about these pieces is that Gottschalk combined Iberian motifs with the style of Chopin, especially his mazurkas. Wherever he went, Gottschalk absorbed musical impressions without forgetting his master.

Gottschalk had an exceptional gift for making contacts. In every country he composed a large-scale showpiece, which he performed with the help of local musicians. He began in Spain, where he composed Siege of Saragossa for ten pianos. He played the most demanding part himself; the other nine were played by local pianists. He bonded with the musicians during rehearsals, often resulting in the start of a friendship; after the performance he was a welcome guest in salons and artist associations. All other traveling virtuosos remained outsiders; Gottschalk crawled like lice on a dog.

Naturally, from time to time this caused professional envy. In Spain the court pianist slammed the door of a coach so hard it broke the virtuoso’s right pinky finger. Gottschalk made light of the incident, claiming that a medical student had shook his hand too firmly. That student was purportedly jealous of Gottschalk having made overtures to a nightclub singer from Madrid by the name of Carmen. The first version of the incident is probably the truth; Gottschalk put his own spin on the story in order not to spoil his good relations with the Spanish court.

In Havana he again performed his Siege of Saragossa with nine Cuban pianists. That performance in the Gran Teatro de Tacón brought him into contact with the grand master of the Cuban contradanza, the completely self-effacing composer Manuel Saumell (1817–1870). The Cuban writer Natalio Galán compared the meeting to that of “Buxtehude with Bach.” I considered that utter nonsense when I read it in Starr’s biography; it was not until a few months later that I heard pianist Georges Rabol’s recordings of four Saumell pieces. The four songs La Tedezca, La niña bonita, Recuerdos tristes, and La Matalide lasted less than five minutes between them. What Saumell does in those works, which he wrote around 1850, bordered on the incredible. All of a sudden I realized where Gottschalk had gotten his rhythms from; it was as if I were listening to a work by Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Artie Matthews, or some other ragtime composer, or a contradanse by a Curaçaoan composer from the early twentieth century, or—even more modern—to passages from Gershwin’s Spanish Prelude. Saumell was the first to slip Afro-Cuban rhythms underneath melody lines in the style of Schubert and Chopin, and the talented Gottschalk realized immediately how effective such a combination could be. After meeting Saumell he threw himself into Cuban contradanzas and his own rhythms took on the syncopated intensity that later came to be described as “typical Gottschalk.” Gottschalk stole, and in turn was plundered by others himself. For his Carmen, Bizet used the habanera rhythm from Minuit à Seville—he had a considerable collection of Gottschalk’s sheet music—and the Antillean composers went to town with his Cuban dances.

In the northeast of the United States, where the old misunderstanding was still very much alive and kicking, the critics had an aversion to Gottschalk. Being light-footed and lighthearted was equated with being lazy and banal. The fiercest resistance came from Boston, where all classical music was measured by German musical standards. Gottschalk was not in the same league as Beethoven; besides, he had been educated in France and preferred to perform with the likes of Italian opera singers and divas. It took Gottschalk many years to conquer the “civilized” United States of America, and in the end he prevailed, not because of his music, but because of his political stance.

Without the slightest bit of hesitation he supported the Union during the American Civil War. His Southern roots did not keep him from considering slavery to be a backward-looking, degrading practice, since the movement to secede from the Union had been predicated upon maintaining slavery. The South, he wrote in one of his notes, “is intent on destroying one of the finest political moments of modern times—namely the American Union, in the name of slavery.” To give his intentions musical expression, he composed a piece called The Union, which yielded him an invitation to play for President Lincoln and his wife. He told reporters that he had freed three slaves in New Orleans. It was a publicity stunt; he had never owned slaves.

The standpoint he took had more to do with his antipathy for his father, the trader who scoured markets for bargain deals. In Paris Gottschalk would not have failed to notice that Victor Schoelcher was a regular guest at the salons where Chopin performed. Schoelcher, the most vociferous advocate for the abolition of slavery (and the French Assistant Secretary who signed the 1848 decree for French abolition of slavery), was a personal friend of Chopin—and of Liszt, as well as the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel. For Chopin the fate of black slaves was the same as the serfs in Russian-occupied Poland. He had a soft spot in his heart for Schoelcher, certainly since this champion of human rights came from the upper middle class—his father owned a porcelain factory in the Alsace—and he was a man of impeccable manners. Whenever Pleyel travelled to Guyana, Cuba, and the French Antilles, he attended to Schoelcher’s business by chronicling the horrors of slavery he encountered in a series of reports. Those who Gottschalk admired the most, Chopin first and foremost, but also Camille Pleyel, at whose salon he made his debut, were appalled at the practices his father had been guilty of all his life. And so Gottschalk did not waver a single moment fifteen years later when he came down on the side of the abolitionists versus the anti-abolitionists; he believed he still had to do something to make amends to Chopin, Liszt, and Pleyel.

The Civil War had a detrimental effect on the quality of his work. He wrote such tearjerkers as The Last Hope and The Dying Poet to commemorate the fallen; he increasingly became the entertainer with politically correct sentiments and the wrong kind of music. During the first months of 1862 he gave one hundred and nine concerts in one hundred and twenty days. The twenty thousand kilometers he travelled in trains amid drunken soldiers did nothing to make him any happier, although he cheerfully informed his European readers that “Yankees are certainly the world’s only real travellers.” He described Sundays in Boston as “ennui, ennui, ennui,” and the northern Protestantism all around him as “concentrated boredom.” He yearned for the South, for the warmth and hospitality and the delirious singing in most of the churches.

Back in Cuba, life again smiled upon him. He entitled a danza he had just written Di que sí, and a day later his friend Manuel Saumell wrote one in reply calling it Di que no. In the pious Northeast he had felt 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.

Had he lived longer he would have become a universal composer. His untimely death limited his influence on Caribbean music, but indeed gave it form and direction. Joseph Sickman Corsen understood this all too well. When the first theatre was opened on Curaçao in 1872, he played Gottschalk’s Souvenir de Porto-Rico. The applause was just as thunderous as it had been in Havana, when after a performance Gottschalk was showered under a mass of women’s hats, and three hundred and fifty bouquets.