[ Back to Programmes for Music Festivals ] [ My Home Page ]
An evening with America's first national composer
Philip Martin Piano Jeremy Nicholas Writer and Narrator
|
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was the first native American composer (he was born in New Orleans in 1829) to achieve international success as a composer and as a virtuoso pianist. The darling of the Paris salons in the 1840s, hailed as a national hero throughout his incessant and interminable perambulations the lengthand breadth of the Americas, Gottschalk's name is all but unknown in this country.
During his lifetime, his piano music was phenominally popular - and it's easy to see why. He was writing ragtime half a century before Scott Joplin, he thrilled audiences with his scintillating versions of national anthems and operatic themes and, most extraordinary of all to an audience used to Bach, Beethoven and Schumann, he introuced for the first time the exotic, sensual rhythms of Latin America.
His success with the ladies did nothing to harm his reputation and when he died at the early age of forty, literally thousands followed his cortege through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Throughout his travels, Gottschalk kept a diary. Notes of the Pianist is one of the most remarkable musician's journals of the last century and the programme draws extensively from this and other contemporary sources. But it is through his extraordinary music tha Gottschalk's name survives 120 years after his death. If you haven't heard it before, then you have a real treat and, perhaps, a surprise in store.