Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was born to a Jewish businessman from London and a white Haitian Creole in New Orleans, where he was exposed to a wide variety of musical traditions. Gottschalk played the piano from an early age and was soon recognized as a wunderkind by the New Orleans bourgeois establishment. In 1840, he gave his informal public debut at the new St. Charles Hotel.
Two years later, at the age of 13, Gottschalk left the United States and sailed for Europe to study classical music. The Paris Conservatoire, however, initially rejected his application on the grounds of his nationality. (His examiner quipped: “America is a country of steam engines.”) Gottschalk gradually gained access through family friends.
Returning to the United States in 1853, he traveled extensively through North, Central, and South America. By the 1860s, Gottschalk had established himself as the foremost pianist in the New World. Although born and raised in New Orleans, he was a supporter of the Union during the Civil War. He returned to his native city only occasionally for concerts, but always introduced himself as a New Orleans native. In 1865, he was forced to leave the United States because of a scandalous affair with a student at the Oakland Female Seminary.
Gottschalk traveled to South America, continuing to give frequent concerts. During a performance in Rio de Janeiro on November 24, 1869, he collapsed with malaria. (Ironically, he had just finished playing his romantic piece, Morte!!.) He never recovered from the collapse, dying three weeks later at his hotel in Brazil, probably from an overdose of quinine. In 1870, his remains were returned to the United States and interred at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Gottschalk’s Grand Tarantelle for Piano and Orchestra, op. 67 was discovered in a two-piano version among twenty-five other works in his personal papers shortly after his untimely death. Hershy Kay would later orchestrate the Grand Tarantelle into a dazzling showcase for piano and orchestra. George Balanchine would also choreograph a ballet, Tarantella, to the piece. As a dance form, the tarantella is surrounded by confusion: The stately courtship tarantella is danced by a couple or couples, short in duration, graceful and elegant, and features characteristic music. The supposedly curative or symptomatic tarantella, which is agitated in character and may last for hours or even days, is danced solo by a supposed victim of a tarantula bite. The confusion is apparently because the spiders, condition, its sufferers ("tarantolati") and the dances all derive their names from the city of Taranto. In modern music, the tarantella is usually based on the later concept, and usually takes the form of a fast, almost erratic 6/8 dance in which the victim not only dances out the tarantula bite, but perhaps stomps a few tarantulas as well.