Louis Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born in New Orleans on May 8, 1829. His music study took place in Paris where he specialized in the piano. He gave many successful concerts as pianist in France, Switzerland and Spain before returning to the United States in 1853. He then began the first of many tours of the country, to become the first significant American-born piano virtuoso. At his concerts he featured many of his own works; his reputation as a composer was second only to that as virtuoso. He was on tour of South America when he was stricken by yellow fever. He died in Rio de Janeiro on December 18, 1869.
Gottschalk was the composer of numerous salon pieces for the piano, enormously popular in his day—a favorite of young pianists everywhere. One of these pieces is “The Banjo,” familiar on semi-classical programs in orchestral arrangements. In his music Gottschalk often employed either Spanish or native American idioms.
The contemporary American composer, Ulysses Kay, used several of Gottschalk’s piano pieces for a ballet score, Cakewalk. This ballet, with choreography by Ruthanna Boris based on the minstrel show, was introduced by the New York City Ballet in New York on June 12, 1951. The dancers here translate the routines of the old minstrel show into dance forms and idioms. An orchestral suite, derived from this ballet score, has five sections: “Grand Walkaround,” in which the performers strut around the stage led by the interlocutor; “Wallflower Waltz,” music to a slow, sad dance performed solo by a lonely girl; “Sleight of Feet,” a rhythmic specialty accompanying feats of magic performed by the Interlocutor; “Perpendicular Points,” a toe dance performed by the two end men, one very tall, the other very short; and “Freebee,” an exciting dance performed by the girl, as other performers accompany her dance with the rhythm of clapping hands.