Bamboula!: the life and times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Abstract

In Bamboula!, S. Frederick Starr presents an authoritatively researched, engagingly written biography of America's first authentic musical voice. Starr paints for us a striking portrait of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's childhood in 1830s New Orleans, a city madly devoted to music, where opera companies, music halls, fiddlers and banjo-pickers, church choirs, and Army bands all contributed to what Starr calls most stunning manifestation of Jacksonian democracy in the realm of culture to be found anywhere in America. We meet Gottschalk's French-speaking maternal grandmother and also his African-American nurse Sally, both of whom regaled him with the songs, legends, and lore of the Creole world, which would inform some of his finest music. We travel with to Paris, where he was a sensation, playing in fashionable salons for the likes of Lamartine, Gautier, and Dumas; and we join his flight from the Revolution of 1848 to a town north of Paris, where he composed his first great works - Bamboula, La Savane, Le Bananier, and Le Mancenillier - all published over the name Gottschalk of Louisiana. Starr describes Gottschalk's successful return to New York City in the early 1850s, where he enjoyed a degree of popularity never before accorded to an American performer or composer, becoming our first homegrown concert idol. But Starr also examines the life-long struggle between the Catholic and earnest Protestant champions of serious music, a battle that pitted the austere values of northern Europe against the brighter sensibilities of Paris, Louisiana, and the West Indies.