THEY CAME, they played, and they conquered. But first they had to travel, by road, sea, or rail—a tricky matter for any virtuoso musician in search of an audience. The diaries of English historian Charles Burney, who embarked on “the grand tour” of the European continent in the early 1770s, illustrate the problems.
Like many men of his social standing, Burney felt the wide world beckoning, with places to see, people to meet, and music to hear, and he dutifully answered the call. “If knowledge be medicine for the soul,” he wrote, offering a moral argument for his excursions, it is as important “to obtain it genuine as to procure unadulterated medicine for the body.” As he traveled, he recorded his concert experiences, encounters with great musicians (including C. P. E. Bach and Frederick the Great), and, not least, the hardships of the journey.
Trekking to Bohemia, he felt assaulted by excessive heat and cold, “together with bad horses, and diabolical wagons.” As he journeyed, he met “half-starved people, just recovered from malignant fevers, little less contagious than the plague, occasioned by bad food.” At a time when the English upper class routinely enjoyed up to twenty-five dishes at dinner, this was alarming.
Yet it could have been worse. In Burney’s day, additional dangers lurked, like being snatched by pirates—from 1500 to 1800, Algerian and Moroccan corsairs regularly nabbed people at sea, as well as from towns along the English Channel—or attacked by bandits. (Mozart’s contemporary composer Giuseppe Maria Cambini told of being abducted from a ship and released only after a Venetian patron paid his ransom.) Leopold Mozart, who hauled his little prodigies all around Europe in search of celebrity and riches, complained of “impassable roads, uncomfortable carriages, wretched accommodations, avaricious innkeepers, corrupt customs officials, and marauding highwaymen.”
PLAYING IN EXOTIC CLIMES
Even in the late twentieth century, travel to distant regions could present all sorts of challenges. Touring the world in 1960, pianist Joseph Bloch, a fixture at the Juilliard School as professor of piano literature, arrived in Borneo and unexpectedly ended up performing in a leper colony; in Sendai, Japan, the temperature in the concert hall was below freezing, and he had to soak his hands in a bowl of hot water between each piece. And in Iran, he found his piano mysteriously draped in cloth: it turned out to be an upright pretending to be a grand. He thought the performance had gone well nevertheless until an audience member approached him afterward. “Next time,” he asked, “would you play something we like?” “What would that be?” Bloch wondered. “The theme from Dr. Zhivago,” came the reply.
Indeed, young Wolfgang Mozart once had to join a convoy of coaches to avoid Italian outlaws. And there were other hazards as well: he was so lonely on the road that he fantasized an alternate mythical world; hopping from city to city, he was stricken by serious illnesses (as was his sister, who nearly died); and he barely survived a major carriage accident. Conditions for travelers were so dangerous that many Europeans never ventured beyond their borders: in 1784, isolated Venetians, curious about life on the distant shore, eagerly paid to view an imported stuffed horse.
Nevertheless, for professional musicians, there was little choice. Some actually fared well: Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802), whose music Mozart quoted admiringly in his opera Don Giovanni, traveled to Russia at the request of Empress Catherine II and was rewarded with his own village in the Ukraine. But that was unusual. Throughout the eighteenth century, keyboardists were so poorly paid that they were often forced to earn extra income by selling lottery tickets or painting portraits.
A century earlier, the social status of itinerant musicians had been even worse. Dishonorable burials were the norm—reapers had a saying, “There lies a musician,” when they came across large anthills, and musicians were routinely suspected of the worst kind of behavior, including witchcraft. (In 1615, a fiddler seen wading across the Rhine as he played was accused by Dominican monks of sorcery. The local magistrate found that it was possible to wade across the Rhine even without the devil’s help, but nevertheless sentenced the man for mischievous wantonness.)
Mozart was not the only tender soul who found touring psychologically torturous. In the nineteenth century, Clara Wieck (later Clara Schumann), arriving alone in Berlin just short of her twentieth birthday, expressed a litany of worries: about hostile critics, playing the wrong pieces, choosing the right piano, and more. She even developed physical symptoms: “I strained my lungs so much playing yesterday that I still can not catch my breath today,” she wrote to her beloved Robert Schumann. “It is so strange that after playing a difficult piece I always become hoarse and get a sore throat. It makes me really scared.” (Her diaries recount one “unplayable” piano after another at performance venues, which certainly didn’t buoy her confidence.)
Clara Wieck (Illustration credit 5.1)
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), America’s first international touring virtuoso, summed up the “torments” of a musician’s life with this list: “The horrible monotony of concerts, the invariable repetition of the same pieces, the daily round of railroad cars, isolation in the midst of the crowd (the saddest thing of all) …” Things seemed little changed over a century later, when rock songwriter Billy Joel and rhythm and blues artist Ray Charles recorded a gripping duo performance of Joel’s lament for the pianist whose only solace was his “Baby Grand.”
ANXIETIES OF A PERFORMING MUSICIAN by Yefim Bronfman
I sometimes find hotels and airports irritants, like everyone else. But for me, that doesn’t outweigh the fun of being on the road. It’s often harder to be home, in a way. My greatest concerns involve finding good pianos, adjusting to different altitudes and concert halls, and dealing with repertory. The worst pressures come from having to meet deadlines when you are really busy, making sure that when you get to a place you are ready to perform the promised program. You have to practice months ahead of time, of course, and then face the music, whether you feel ready or not.
Stress is bad enough even when you are well prepared, and I often have sleepless nights and suffer from bad dreams. One is that I am playing the Brahms Second Piano Concerto in Carnegie Hall, and I don’t know the music. Cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich once told me he also had a nightmare—that he was playing the Dvorák Cello Concerto unprepared. “And when I woke up,” he said, “it was true.”
We musicians are involved in a kind of endless self-examination: Why didn’t I do better at my last concert? When should I prepare for the one that is coming up? There are endless questions, and the answers aren’t always forthcoming. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to fail in order to learn.
It was Rostropovich who helped me deal with this anxiety. One night, I was about to play the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto with him and the Vienna Philharmonic. I went to his room and said, “Maestro, I’m so nervous I don’t know what to do.” He had the perfect answer. “Remember,” he told me, “no matter what happens tonight, we’ll go out after the concert and have a nice dinner. It’s not like being a pilot, when if you make a mistake everyone dies!”
Still they traveled, searching out fresh horizons. In Europe, the most practical destinations were big cities and lofty courts, but even faraway regions held temptations.
John Field (Illustration credit 5.2)
Franz Liszt visited Russia several times and left an indelible imprint on the course of pianism there (as well as on the heart of Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who left her husband and followed him to Weimar). Clementi made two separate Russian trips, principally to stir up interest in the instruments he was manufacturing. (Clementi’s piano battle with Mozart in Vienna took place while Emperor Joseph II was entertaining the Grand Duke—the future Tsar Paul I—and Duchess of Russia. No doubt it helped open doors. Although Paul was assassinated in 1801, his son Alexander took over, keeping power in the family.) Clementi brought his student and employee John Field along on the visit. And when Clementi left, Field decided to stay and establish his career there.
At first, Field worked simply as a piano “plugger,” showing off Clementi’s instruments (one thinks of George Gershwin, who got his start a century later by demonstrating songs for a Tin Pan Alley publisher). In both London and on the road, he played for hours as potential customers listened in. “I have still in recollection,” wrote composer Louis Spohr after witnessing one such evening, “the figure of the pale overgrown youth whom I have never seen since. When Field, who had outgrown his clothes, placed himself at the piano, stretched out his arms over the keyboard so that the sleeves shrunk up nearly to his elbows, his whole figure appeared awkward and stiff to the highest degree; but as soon as his touching instrumentation began, everything else was forgotten, and one became all ear.”
Once out from under Clementi’s thumb, however, Field made a fortune performing and teaching in St. Petersburg and Moscow (while developing a reputation for extravagant living and degenerate behavior). As might be expected of the originator of the piano “Nocturne,” music that depicts the night in all its quiet mystery, his playing was dreamy and melancholic rather than blistering. In fact, startled by the intensity of a Liszt recital, he turned to a companion and asked, “Does he bite?”
Yet of the various distant prospects for commercial success, none seemed more inviting than the New World, although views of what awaited musicians there were divided. La France musicale outlined one popular notion in 1845: “The European artist imagines that America is a country of gold, where he will acquire a fortune in two or three months, where the president of the union will have him honored by congress; where the inhabitants of each city will give him serenades and carry him in triumph, for the great satisfaction of his enormous self-esteem.”
However, a contrasting outlook was expressed by the director of the Paris Opéra, who claimed that the young nation across the Atlantic was “excellent for electric telegraphs and railroads but not for art.” He received a swift rebuttal from American composer William Henry Fry, who admitted that his countrymen “excelled in making electric telegraphs to carry ideas without persons,” but also insisted that “it was not a necessary consequence that we built railroads to carry persons without ideas.” Moravian-born opera impresario Max Maretzek, an American transplant, nevertheless dismissed the idea that his new countrymen had any understanding of art. “Instead of having been provided with a delicately palpitating heart like other races of mankind,” he declared, they had in its place “a silver dollar coined in their own mint.”
That perspective was so prevalent that Gottschalk was actually turned down for an audition at the Paris Conservatory with the explanation that “America was only a country of steam engines.” (He was in good company: twelve-year-old Liszt had also been denied admission to that institution, simply because he was a foreigner.) Perhaps this belief is what discouraged Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner from embarking on the voyage to America, despite the financial incentives. But by the 1840s, ocean steamers had shortened the trip to just two or three weeks. For many, it seemed well worth the risk.
Leopold de Meyer (Illustration credit 5.3)
VISITORS SOON DISCOVERED that Americans were not so culturally deprived after all. One writer in 1830 found the country as piano-mad as England: “In cities and villages, from one extremity of the union to the other, wherever there is a good house … the ringing of the piano wires is almost as universal a sound as the domestic hum of life within.” But, as P. T. Barnum found, it helped to have a gimmick, and touring pianists quickly learned the value of a little showmanship.
This was already the modus operandi of Austrian pianist Leopold de Meyer (1816–1883), who began his American adventure in 1845. During his travels in Russia and Eastern Europe, he had developed a reputation as “the Lion Pianist.” Caricatures typically depicted him as a crouched figure playing the keyboard with hands, elbows, and a knee, as if he had just sprung from a hiding place in the jungle foliage.
He billed himself as “the Paganini of the Piano” (after Niccolò Paganini, the fire-breathing Romantic violinist who was said to be in league with the devil) or, simply, as “the Greatest Pianist of Modern Times.” Critics noted the great mass of sound he produced. His virtuoso compositions “are to other musical works,” said the New York Daily Tribune, “what the Niagara at the Falls is to other rivers.” He attributed his overwhelming power to one simple fact: he was, he said, “the only one of the great pianists who is fat.” “Indeed,” reported the influential Dwight’s Journal of Music, “his physique is extraordinary; he is himself a Grand Piano, and can stand any amount of violent vibrations without any symptom of exhaustion.”
He had some very odd quirks, like gawking at the audience while he played, with what the Brooklyn Star called “a kind of insane stare.” But his theatrical instincts were impeccable. He invited “Ladies and Gentlemen who have a desire to become acquainted” with his technique to take seats on stage next to him. And he designed programs especially suited to his newfound public. Variations on “Hail, Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle” caused such a furor that in Philadelphia one critic worried for his safety. In a Pittsburgh church, wrote a correspondent, “men, women and children would be standing up in the pews, or leaning forward with breathless attention to catch each succeeding note—and then, falling back as if in utter exhaustion from the intensity of the feeling, excited by the performance, [they would] listen with silent astonishment! They were literally music mad.”
“The Lion” had other tricks up his sleeve. He imported grand pianos—still a rarity in the United States, where uprights and squares were the norm—and called them “Monster pianos,” to attract attention. The ploy backfired in St. Louis when city authorities charged him the exorbitant fee of seventy-five dollars for a license to perform. “Mein Gott!—shust for play mein piano two-tree night?” he exclaimed. “I know it’s more than usual,” was the reply. “But then, Mr. de Meyer, your piano is such a large one!”
By 1846, the publicity schemes hatched by de Meyer and his business partner, G. C. Reitheimer, who happened to be his brother-in-law, were starting to generate bad press. Reports appeared that they were paying for good reviews (not an uncommon practice), and that Reitheimer was handing out free tickets to fill halls—something then called “deadheading,” and now known as “papering the house.” The Morning Telegraph christened him “the Lyin’ Pianist.” His career was never quite the same.
Up came another European visitor, the Viennese-born, Parisian-educated Henri Herz (1803–1888), who began to give de Meyer some competition. Herz’s concert tours had taken him to Belgium, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Russia, and he was now ready to vanquish the American audience. “My idea,” he wrote his brother, Charles, “is to take music everywhere money is to be made.” Arriving in America in 1846, he found the response a bit tepid at first. So he hired manager Bernard Ullman and developed a strategy.
The great virtuosos who visited America had the advantage of playing an instrument that had grown in heft and volume over early models. In fact, during the early nineteenth century the piano changed from a delicately constructed and lightly strung five-octave instrument, like that made by Johann Andreas Stein (1728–1792), to a six-and-a-half-octave instrument, like those produced by Stein’s son-in-law, Johann Andreas Streicher (1761–1833), and by another maker, Conrad Graf (1782–1851). By the end of Beethoven’s life (in 1827), seven-octave instruments were available.
They were increasingly brighter. The early Stein pianos had string tensions of several thousand pounds, but by 1830 pianos made by Streicher and Graf were capable of supporting fourteen thousand pounds of tension. This still pales in comparison with the modern piano, of course, which sustains forty thousand pounds of tension by means of a three-hundred-pound cast-iron plate.
In England, piano maker Joseph Smith began experimenting with iron braces as early as 1799; by the 1820s, some English and French firms were using iron bars screwed to the wood framework, and the full cast-iron frame was patented in 1825 by the American Alpheus Babcock (1785–1842). It was not adopted in Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century.
There were other substantial changes as well. In 1821, the London branch of the French piano firm Érard developed and patented the double-escapement mechanism, the kind used in the modern grand piano, which facilitated greater speed in musical performance (because the hammers were made ready to repeat their movements more quickly after striking). In 1826, the French piano maker Jean-Henri Pape (1789–1875) obtained a patent for felt-covered hammers (layered atop leather), which produced a much sweeter sound than earlier models. Then Alfred Dolge (1848–1922) had the bright idea of using a single, thick layer of felt, and it quickly became the norm.
The invention of cross-stringing in the 1820s, a method of arranging piano strings inside the case so that they overlapped each other diagonally, produced a more efficient use of space, and allowed the bass strings to resonate across the center of the instrument rather than to one side; though credited to Alpheus Babcock and Jean-Henri Pape, its first patented use in grand pianos in the United States was by Henry Steinway Jr. in 1859.
Henri Herz (Illustration credit 5.4)
Herz was far more refined than his rival—“de Meyer may break a piano,” purred one critic, “but Herz can break a heart”—yet, realizing that “the Lion” had discovered a winning formula, he set about composing his own arrangements of American patriotic tunes. Then he launched a series of “monster concerts” with multiple instruments played by a gaggle of performers. It had been done before, even in the best European cities: writing from Vienna about Carl Czerny (1791–1857), the former Beethoven protégé, Frédéric Chopin noted with some condescension that Czerny had “arranged another overture for eight pianos and sixteen pianists, and seems quite happy about it.” But Herz had few cares about potential snobs: one of his events, with eight pianos and sixteen players, featured his arrangement of the Overture to Rossini’s opera Semiramide, and it was a rousing success. The Evening Mirror estimated the audience at 2,600 to 2,800. (In the twentieth century, pianist Eugene List resurrected the monster-concert idea, with even larger numbers of pianos and performers, often employing students and amateurs.)
Apparently the production values were not very high. One reviewer noted that the pianos were out of tune with each other, and expressed the hope that the pianists would “mind the conductor’s arm and baton a little better on the next occasion.” Another thought that Herz had “buried” the music, and that the pianos, scattered all around the stage, looked like a “coffin-maker’s exhibition at a National fair.” The very concept itself sometimes caused head scratching. In San Francisco, Herz announced a “Monstre Concert” in which a Marche Nationale would be performed on four pianos; but some music lovers showed up in the mistaken belief that the pianist was going to singlehandedly play all four instruments at once, and a local paper criticized him for raising false expectations.
Nevertheless, he regarded his concert programs as a success. Bernard Ullman’s definition of music, revealed Herz, was “the art of attracting to a given auditorium, by secondary devices which often become the principal ones, the greatest possible number of curious people so that when expenses are tallied against receipts the latter exceed the former by the widest possible margin.” And Ullman’s mind continued to percolate with plans for musical spectacles, like a “thousand candles concert,” in which the hall was illuminated entirely by candlelight (though, according to Herz, one customer shouted out that he had counted only 998 flames). But a proposed “political concert” in Philadelphia, with a Constitution Concerto, was, in Herz’s view, over the line. (He also refused a concert offer made by freed slaves in New Orleans; apparently, the possibility of offending important patrons put the idea off limits.) This pianist’s greatest opportunity came not in the big Eastern cities, though, but in the fledgling towns of California, where in 1849 forty thousand people raced to find their fortunes in gold.
Herz went, hoping to garner a piece of the action. He learned that miners could be a rough audience—the publication Alta California complained of “uproar and confusion, and disorderly and disgraceful behavior” at one concert. (Context is everything: rock pianist Bruce Hornsby once grumbled when an audience didn’t engage in that mode of conduct.) And conditions were often primitive: Sacramento had no concert hall to play in, and one had to be cobbled together. In Benicia, Herz arrived to find that there wasn’t even a piano on hand. When one was located at the other side of town, he rallied the audience to go fetch it and carry it back.
Yet he certainly knew how to deliver what the people wanted. He entertained with fanciful versions of familiar melodies, including his own published variations on “Oh Susannah.” At his final concert, in San Francisco, he shared the stage with one Signor Rossi, a magician and ventriloquist who also offered imitations of animals and insects. It was hardly the kind of performance found in the salons of Paris, but no one in the audience complained.
They kept coming. Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871) had challenged Liszt to a piano duel, and survived. Arriving in America in 1856 ready to display his brilliant technique, he turned to (who else?) Ullman, who set up a grueling schedule of performances every night (except Sunday) for eight months, sometimes engaging the pianist for two or three recitals a day (including special presentations for schoolchildren).
In the view of the critics, his note-perfect renditions were too “dry and monotonous.” (In New York, one writer claimed that an Englishman who had followed Thalberg for three years in the hope of hearing a wrong note finally “blew out his brains in despair.”) But his skill was impressive, especially for giving the impression of having three hands going at once. In Dwight’s Journal of Music, a correspondent described the approach: “This man plays a few notes of the melody in the middle of the piano with his right hand; at the same time his left, full of ‘muttering wrath,’ crawls up and attacks the melody, and then the right steals way up to high C, sees what’s to be seen, and then softly tumbles back just in time to carry on the melody, while the left hand leaves for the lower regions.” His matinee performances attracted ladies of leisure in large numbers, especially once Ullman provided them the added incentive of being served chocolate, cake, and ice cream during the intermissions by black waiters dressed in livery uniforms.
Thalberg’s American tour also signaled another new wrinkle in the concert business. The piano maker Chickering, based in Boston, began supplying him with pianos in different cities while advertising his endorsement of their product. It was the start of what would soon become an all-out manufacturing war in the piano world.
Caricature of Gottschalk conducting his monster concert in Rio de Janeiro, October 5, 1869 (A Vida Fluminense, October 2, 1869) (Illustration credit 5.5)
These and other European musicians all made their mark on the American scene. But the United States also offered musical exports, beginning with Louis Moreau Gottschalk. This son of New Orleans, trained in Paris and having played throughout Europe, then swept through the Caribbean and South America like a force of nature. “You wonder that you never knew before that the piano was capable of such power,” glowed the New York Herald.
His success was due in part to a willingness to tap into the national pride of each host country along the way. He “flattered the Swiss with his arrangement of excerpts from Rossini’s William Tell,” wrote Jeanne Behrend, who edited Gottschalk’s diaries. He drove “the Spanish populace wild with his Siege of Saragossa, a ‘symphony’ for ten pianos based on Spanish tunes and national airs. It had all the effects dear to the battle pieces that had raged in parlors and concert halls since Franz Kotzwara’s popular Battle of Prague (1789)—trumpet calls, military marches, drum rolls, cannon fire, etc.—effects later used stunningly by Tchaikovsky in his 1812 Overture.” He composed similar works geared to audiences in Chile, Uruguay, Cuba, and Brazil—where he presented the world’s largest monster concert, featuring eight hundred musicians.
Back home, Gottschalk took portions of his Siege, substituted American anthems for the Spanish ones, and called his piece Grand National Symphony for Ten Pianos: Bunker Hill. He fashioned a solo piano piece out of it as well, National Glory, by adding to the conglomeration “Oh! Susanna” and another Stephen Foster song, “Old Folks at Home.” As the Civil War raged, he produced a similar composition, The Union, with references to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Hail, Columbia.” President Abraham Lincoln attended a Gottschalk concert and became a fan. (“Tall, thin, his back bent, his chest hollow, his arms excessively long, his crane-like legs, his enormous feet, that long frame whose disproportionate joints give him the appearance of a grapevine covered with clothes,” is how the pianist described the president.)
TWOSOMES, THREESOMES,
AND MORE
The hands of piano team Vronsky and Babin (Illustration credit 5.6)
As monster concerts waned, the idea of smaller piano ensembles still flourished: two-piano teams like those of Robert (1899–1972) and Gaby (1901–1999) Casadesus of France, Vitya Vronsky (1909–1992) and Victor Babin (1908–1972) of Russia, and America’s Arthur Ferrante (1921–2009) and Louis Teicher (1924–2008) continued to find large, enthusiastic audiences.
Today, the tradition is carried on by piano duos like the French sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque and by slightly larger assemblages like the American Piano Quartet, which features four players on two pianos, and the British-based Piano Circus, a six-piano ensemble created in 1989 that specializes in new music. But these acts bear little resemblance to the massive piano gatherings staged by Gottschalk and his ilk.
Piano circus (Illustration credit 5.7)
The piano duo was, in a way, just an extension of the duet for two people at a keyboard that had flourished from the pens of Mozart, Schubert, and many others. Those tended to have a certain domestic quality because of the close physical proximity of the players. (The famous Mozart family portrait of about 1780 by Johann Nepomuk della Croce shows Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, performing together at a single instrument.) Nevertheless, some composers continuously pushed the boundaries, increasing the population on the piano bench even to the point of danger: W. F. E. Bach wrote Das Dreyblatt for three performers at one keyboard—as pianist Joseph Smith has written, “It provides a male pianist with a fine pretext for embracing two female colleagues” (or, he adds, a woman pianist with the opportunity to enjoy the intimate company of two males). Rachmaninoff and Percy Grainger also published works for three players at a piano. Cécile Chaminade (better known for her solo piano piece Scarf Dance) wrote a work for four players squeezed together on one bench. But of course, she was Parisian.
At the time, keyboard cannon fire and patriotic marches were a specialty of another unusual pianist named Blind Tom (1849–1908), a black, autistic savant celebrated for his ability to duplicate at the keyboard anything he heard. Born into slavery and sold to a Georgia lawyer, General James Neil Bethune, who presented him as a carnival attraction throughout the South, Tom was strangely gifted with an extraordinary memory. People were invited to play or recite anything and have him re-create it on the spot.
His original musical compositions included piano tone poems like The Battle of Manassas, in which the Union and Confederate armies are heard to draw closer to each other, with patriotic themes clashing amid the fist-pounding bombast of explosions in the instrument’s bass.
As his fame spread, he performed at the White House for President James Buchanan and, while on a European tour, played for pianists Ignaz Moscheles and Charles Hallé, who both attested to his talent. A musician named Joseph Poznanski was hired to tutor Tom and transcribe his musical creations for publication; he told the Washington Post in 1866 how the collaboration between them worked: “I would play for him and he would get up, walk around, stand on one foot, pull his hair, knock his head against the wall, then sit down and play a very good imitation of what I had played with additions to it.”
Gottschalk became aware of Blind Tom when he read an article about him in the Atlantic Monthly, but he dismissed the legitimacy of the report. Musically uneducated audiences who were so impressed, he said, reminded him of an assembly he once saw that was called to witness a mathematical prodigy solve “the most complicated problems instantaneously from memory.” Who could judge the performance? asked Gottschalk. “He might have answered what he wished. The honest people did not know a word of algebra, and ingenuously thought that what they heard was really marvelous.”
Gottschalk’s own music offered a great deal of Americana. Much of it can still thrill: The Banjo, with its strums and patterns reminiscent of American folk traditions; Bamboula, an exciting, rhythmically charged homage to New Orleans; and the sweetly melancholic The Last Hope, which became so popular that he couldn’t escape performing it at every stop. The pianist came to call it his “terrible necessity.”
His diaries reveal all the highs and lows of an adventurous musical career on the road. “Unfortunately, yellow fever rages cruelly at St. Thomas,” he recorded while traveling through the Caribbean. “Two days after our arrival our steamer had already lost seven men belonging to it; three servants on board who were attacked with the same plague succumbed in a few hours.” On another occasion, he noted that “the latest political events at Barcelona [Venezuela] are of a nature to cure radically all artists who have the insane idea of making a tour there.” After an arduous trip across the North American continent, he felt despondent: “The devil take the poets who sing the joys of an artist’s life.”
On the other hand, after returning to New York in 1862, he paused to remember the pleasures he had experienced during years of roaming “at random under the blue skies of the tropics, indolently permitting myself to be carried away by chance, giving a concert wherever I found a piano, sleeping wherever the night overtook me—on the grass of the savanna, or under the palm-leaf roof of a veguero [tobacco grower] with whom I partook of a tortilla, coffee, and banana …” He saw “the seasons succeed each other in perpetual summer” and found, in the evenings, under palm trees, “beautiful, dreamlike girls” who would whisper words of love in his ear. “The moralists, I well know, condemn all this; and they are right,” he admitted. “But poetry is often in antagonism with virtue.”
Its ways are also unpredictable. In December of 1869, at the age of forty, the pianist collapsed while giving a piano recital in Rio de Janeiro. He died soon after. In a poetic twist of fate, the original piece he had been playing was entitled Morte!! (Death). Writing from Berlin, Liszt’s American piano student Amy Fay described her shock. “But what a romantic way to die!—to fall senseless at this instrument, while he was playing La Morte. [sic] … The infatuation that I and 999,999 other American girls once felt for him still lingers in my breast!” He would have been pleased to hear it.
DEATH BY KEYBOARD
Gottschalk wasn’t the only artist to either die in the midst of a performance, or soon after. Organist Anton Cajetan Adlgasser (1729–1777), an acquaintance of Mozart’s, fell over and died of a stroke while performing at the Salzburg Cathedral. Mozart succeeded him as court cathedral organist in 1779. (Once, when Wolfgang and his father heard an organist who was so drunk he could barely play, Mozart suggested that they walk over to him, lean in to his ear, and whisper, “Adlgasser!”)
Like Gottschalk, Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888) also wrote piano pieces about the end of life. He was plagued by constant worries about his health, though they seem to have been entirely unfounded. Early pieces included Morte (Death) and Le Mourant (The Dying), a portrait of a man at the moment of his demise. The composer lived another fifty years after writing it, finally succumbing to an accident at home.
Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867–1916) was killed when his ship was torpedoed in World War I. But he wouldn’t have been on the ship if his trip home from New York had not been delayed because of an invitation to perform at the White House. Indirectly, it was the music that led to his demise.
Virtuoso Simon Barere (1896–1951) holds the distinction of being the only pianist to drop dead (literally) on the stage of New York’s Carnegie Hall. This Russian-American pianist was known for a blazing technique, and he gave annual recitals at the hall. On April 2, 1951, he was just beginning the Grieg Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
Some well-known musicians took their own lives (or attempted to). Robert Schumann jumped into the Rhine, only to be rescued by a fisherman. Hungarian composer and pianist Rezsö Seress (1889–1968) composed a 1933 song called “Gloomy Sunday” that was banned by the BBC after it set off a spate of suicides (many by people clutching the sheet music as they died). The composer himself jumped out a window, years after surviving the Holocaust.
Perhaps the saddest example of death by keyboard, however, is the case of Alexander Kelberine (1903–1940). He programmed his very last concert to include only works dealing with death. (In a mixed review, a critic observed that the pianist demonstrated “not lack of musicianship so much as a psychic turmoil.”) With a pending divorce instigated by his wife, the despondent pianist took an overdose of sleeping pills and expired at the age of thirty-six.
As the twentieth century approached, legendary pianists continued to travel the world, sharing the unique musical traits that had been fostered in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, America, and elsewhere—creating musical history, establishing schools and competitions, and fostering new audiences. Strategically positioned to promote the piano, some formed alliances with the instrument’s makers, often with tumultuous and even disastrous consequences. The golden age was really just beginning.
Meanwhile, composers of every sort continued to supply pianists with music to perform. Despite the large swath they cut across time and geography, many of these creators fell naturally into a handful of stylistic categories: there were the Combustibles, the Alchemists, the Rhythmitizers, and the Melodists. Their stories will be revealed in the pages that follow.