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.