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).