Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Pasquinade
The first American virtuoso, Louis Moreau Gottschalk defined the landscape of classical music in the mid-nineteenth century without really being there.
A testament to his unbridled charisma and venerable musical aptitude, Gottschalk was able to influence such far-flung peoples as his own Louisiana Creoles, the Parisian elite, wilderness ensconced Canadians and the tribes of South America and the Greater Antilles. Hopelessly imbued with the Romantic zeitgeist, Gottschalk--the man--was even greater than his persona--"akin to Byron, Shelley and Poe," the public deemed. Hailed as the "pianiste-compositeur-Louisianais," he was also a fastidious journalist, delightful raconteur and confirmed rogue.
As scholar Vernon Loggins asserts, in his own lifetime, "Gottschalk was an iconoclast." Mentioned among the likes of Liszt, Chopin, and Sigismond Thalberg, Gottschalk ran with such greats as Berlioz, Bizet, Saint-Saëns and Giacomo Meyerbeer. A globetrotter par excellence, wherever he travelled, he too absorbed. And it wouldn't be long before L.M. Gottschalk would assimilate those experiences into his own work.
Perhaps his most outstanding achievement regarding the development of the American musical voice was his almost frightening anticipation of ragtime.
Long before Copland, Bernstein, Gershwin or Darius Milhaud ever put pen to paper, Gottschalk was consciously transforming his popular, somewhat trite salon piano pieces into syncopated ragtime gems. In one such piece, his Pasquinade (Caprice), Op. 59, the transformation is quite audible. Cataloged as RO 189 in Robert Offergeld's lengthy, but certainly not exhaustive Centennial Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Compositions of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the "pasquinade" in the title is usually translated as "lampoon."
Written in the style of a French gavotte, author Richard Freed claims that the Pasquinade does have an apparent "minstrel-show air about it." The gavotte, a dance in simple, quadruple meter popularized at the Bourbon court of Louis XIV (where Lully was Lord of the dance), was an ideal form for Gottschalk to utilize because of its characteristic pickup on beat three. Given two whole beats to syncopate before the entrance of the first strain, this dance was innately conducive to Gottschalk gone ragtime.
Ever the performer, of course, Gottschalk does not begin the transmutation process until the last reiteration of the principal theme. Thus far, the Pasquinade has proceeded in a manner befitting its typical place of performance--a bougie salon. However, as the piece reaches its conclusion, its whimsical fancy gives way to a steadfast left hand and a right hand of consistently syncopated ornamentation.
The Pasquinade (Caprice), Op. 59 (RO 189) now belongs in Storyville brothel.
Gottschalk's stylistic metamorphosis within his Pasquinade helped to inaugurate the great tradition that pianist, scholar and Gottschalk expert Eugene List describes:
"...it is worth noting that many of the French gavottes were remarkably transmuted into ragtime pieces by the New Orleans piano 'professors' at the turn of the century."
By establishing a performance practice that would soon become the standard of performance, itself, the celebrated "pianiste-compositeur-Louisianais" anticipated the coming ragtime craze with extraordinary accuracy. Out of an antiquated peasant dance, the prophecy of Louis d'Orléans was sublimely manifested. Furthermore, Gottschalk's manifestation provided a fledgling nation with a voice, albeit untrained, that would eventually sing the arrival of America's most significant music.
