CHAPTER 5 | LOUIS MOREAU GOTTSCHALK: A NEW ORLEANS ORIGINAL 129
“cast in an original mold,” he argued, he could hardly “abdicate his individual-
ity,” even if he tried.
As Gottschalk saw it, critics who championed the classics placed living com-
posers, especially Americans, at a disadvantage. He knew, for example, that the
very idea of classic works depended on who was defi ning them and how. In any
discussion of the subject, Gottschalk wrote, he would insist on “reserving the
right to ask you what you understand by the classics,” for the label could be used
as a “convenient club with which you knock on the head all those who annoy
you.” Aware also that a preoccupation with the classics threatened musical
diversity, he asked, “Because the apple is a fruit less delicate than the pineapple,
[would you] wish that there should be no apples?”GOTTSCHALK’S LATER CAREER
During the sixteen years between his return from Europe and his death in 1869,
Gottschalk never left the Western Hemisphere again, although he spent less than
half of that time in North America. After touring the United States and Canada until
1857, he passed the next several years in the Caribbean, with long stays in Puerto
Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and especially Cuba, where he played many concerts,
staged festivals, and even for a time managed the opera in Havana. Early in 1862 he
returned to the United States and began a strenuous tour. At one point Gottschalk
calculated that he had given eighty-fi ve concerts in four and a half months and
traveled fi fteen thousand miles by train in a country where long-simmering sec-
tional confl ict had erupted into civil war. (An ardent foe of slavery, he supported
the Northern cause.) Among at least a dozen new compositions he introduced in
1862 was “The Union,” a war-inspired fantasy on national songs, featuring “The Star-
Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle.”
Gottschalk toured eastern North America until early 1865, then sailed for
California by way of Panama, arriving in San Francisco in April. After perfor-
mances in several California towns, June found him in Virginia City, Nevada,
which he declared “the saddest, most wearisome, the most inhospitable place on
the globe.” Not long after his return to the coast, however, he was
involved in an incident whose outcome made San Francisco seem
even less hospitable than Nevada. That it involved a young woman
will surprise no reader of his journal, which confesses that, from
time to time during performances, his eyes might sweep the audi-
ence in search of feminine beauty. In September 1865 the pianist
failed to return a local schoolgirl to her residence on time after an
outing with another couple, offending local propriety to the point
that vigilante justice was threatened. Though Gottschalk stoutly
denied any wrongdoing, he took the precaution of fl eeing by sea
to South America, and there he spent the rest of his life, perform-
ing in Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. He died in
Rio de Janeiro of pneumonia, aggravated by extreme exhaustion,
after organizing and performing in a monster concert involving
some 650 musicians. His death was marked by a hero’s funeral.
No other American-born musician of the 1800s matched
Gottschalk’s impact, which continued after he died at the age of
forty. Biographies were written, and his journal was edited andLouis Moreau Gottschalk
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