Musical Genius, American Style : Great Galloping Gottschalk : BAMBOULA! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, <i> By S. Frederick Starr (Oxford University Press: $35; 564 pp.)</i>

Dance fans will recall the American Ballet Theater production some seasons ago of “Great Galloping Gottschalk,” in honor of a rediscovered 19th-Century American composer. Earlier, the great choreographer George Balanchine paid homage to Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s jaunty, syncopated tunes in his 1956 classic, “Cakewalk.” People feel like dancing to Gottschalk (1829-1869) because he seems to prefigure the ragtime tunes of Scott Joplin and later African American musicians. The Louisiana-born Gottschalk owed much to Creole songs he heard as a child, which formed the basis of his later musical inspiration. Far-flung travels produced musical “souvenirs” of 19th-Century Buenos Aires, Cuba, Lima, Puerto Rico, Andalusia, and the Antilles. By listening to indigenous rhythms, and offering them back to locals in extravagant piano recitals, Gottschalk won audience’s hearts in a permanent way. One such notorious “monster” recital featured 80 pianists on 40 pianos, all banging away at once. But then, P.T. Barnum-style showmanship was needed at the time to distract from current events like the American Civil War.

A new biography of Gottschalk takes as its title an early work, “Bamboula,” referring to Afro-Caribbean drums. This ponderous tome fills in much detail about the bachelor pianist, who died at 40 in Brazil of a burst appendix. S. Frederick Starr’s new book pegs Gottschalk as a suppressed homosexual (the author discreetly refers to “some unacknowledged uncertainty regarding (Gottschalk’s) sexual identity”). A total lack of involvement with women, ardent loving male friendships, a Michael Jackson-style annexing of an 8-year-old Spanish boy during a tour, and a mysterious “bashing” incident all seem readily identifiable elements in gay life 150 years ago. Recent historical research into the lives of Schubert and Brahms has established some signposts for recognizing 19th-Century homosexual lives in music. Louis Moreau Gottschalk conforms to these criteria entirely.

Bringing Gottschalk out of the closet as a Great Galloping Gay has direct applications to his musical career. Recent studies explain how Benjamen Britten’s tragic opera “Peter Grimes” reflects the composer’s homosexuality, while Schubert’s angst-ridden song cycle “Die Winterreise” has the same motivating reason. Gottschalk was born of Jewish ancestry, and was probably gay--suppressed or not. In the 19th Century, as today, a gay Jewish creative artist would usually have a strong sense of minority identity and would indeed be interested in other minority cultures. Gottschalk’s endless exotic tours may be seen as a way of escaping a restrictive American social life of the time, and a rejection of 19th-Century family norms. But there were other motivations as well for travel (and not just money).

Gottschalk had problems with Western music’s authority figures--he couldn’t stand Bach or Mozart, and thought that Verdi’s “La Traviata” was “nothing more than a mosaic of insufferable vulgarities.” Although he on rare occasions performed Beethoven in public, he found Ludwig’s music “unidiomatic” for the piano. A victim of Oedipal nightmares, Gottschalk really enjoyed performing Gottschalk, and his own works lacked the intellectual and musical ambition that we find in the greatest classics. Rather than confronting the great tradition, Gottschalk sidestepped it, creating music in a classical idiom, for enjoyment, not for highbrow values. Hence his vital inspiration from local cultures in South America, etc, widely seen in the 19th Century as “primitive” and thus non-intellectual societies. The liberation inherent in a wild title like “Bamboula” suggests that potential savagery in a musician impelled to lead a conventional life when his emotional makeup was not geared to do so. The wear and tear on Gottschalk was considerable--a bundle of psychosomatic and real ailments, he was a nervous nail-biter who bloodied his fingers before recitals, gnawing away at them anxiously.

Starr, former head of Oberlin College, and the “team of student research assistants” who helped him write this book, point out that Gottschalk epitomizes an American debate over high culture and pop. Yet the present book itself has an uneasy stance about culture--there are numerous errors about literature, music, and foreign languages. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier is identified here as a “musicologist” (when in fact he just wrote a book about Cuban music), the great pianist Arthur Loesser is called a “historian,” when once again, he simply authored one book about musical history--typical evidence of student research teams working from library catalogues rather than a general knowledge of the subjects. Hershy Kay, a noted Broadway orchestrator who worked with Leonard Bernstein, is bizarrely called “an expert on Chinese cuisine.” The ballet administrator Lincoln Kirstein is presented as a choreographer. Would an Oberlin doctoral thesis with such sloppy errors be accepted? Bamboula, Mr. Starr!

These and other bloopers stymie the author’s attempt to find a larger significance in Gottschalk’s achievement. Starr seems irked that Gottschalk is not ranked among the great, permanent American composers, yet his book offers no discography that might portray the composer’s exact position in the music world today. In fact, numerous CD’s of Gottschalk’s works are available from Nimbus Records, EMI, Warner Music, and Vanguard. None of these are mentioned by Starr. Instead, he offers stuffy moralizing about the Gottschalk revival in the 20th Century. He hates almost all of it, curiously enough.

Gottschalk was first widely revived in the 1930s when John Kirkpatrick arranged the second movement of “Night in the Tropics,” a symphony the composer wrote for an army of pianos. In the 1940s, Arthur Loesser performed some of Gottschalk’s four-handed cakewalks. One of America’s greatest and unjustly forgotten pianists, Loesser played Bach majestically, but he also favored forgotten popular composers of yore, like Moszkowski and Gottschalk, whom he played (and recorded) in witty recitals entitled “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

Loesser’s elegance in everything he played communicated to Gottschalk, of whose sentimental piece, “The Last Hope,” he wrote: “By the rarefied monastic standards of latter-day highbrows, “Last Hope” ranks as trash. However, if there is value in something because it has given satisfaction to a great many people for a long time, then “The Last Hope” must count as an important piece of music.” Instead of examining an artist like Loesser’s approach to Gottschalk, Starr just dismisses almost every recorded performance as “ham-handed overplaying.” Starr particularly dislikes the ballets “Great Galloping Gottschalk” (“condescension”) and “Cakewalk” (“Hollywood schlock”), but can a historian and Gottschalk fan really hate such works, even if imperfect, which brought the composer’s name to wide audiences?

Happily though, if the author doesn’t know everything about music, literature, or dance, he sure does know Gottschalk. The archival research and documentation in the present volume, even if not carried out by Starr himself, have a real value. Questions for further study might include why in Gottschalk’s youth, it was possible to see Meyerbeer’s opera “Robert le Diable” in New Orleans, with minstrel acts during intermissions, while this is impossible today at the Met. But looming above any such general questions is the poignant, sad-eyed, nail-biting Louis Moreau Gottschalk, ardently embracing male friends, fleeing female admirers, noting down native rhythms, and suffering the hardships of world travel in the 19th Century. A touching personality, to have written all those pleasantly jaunty tunes which still charm us today. Bravo Gottschalk, and long may he gallop!