The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

memory: the delicate, reserved, and sensitive performance of Chopin in a Parisian salon. He was not to be compared with Liszt, whom he had also heard in Paris and whom he reproached as having “an insatiable thirst for fame”—a little like the sort of criticism one high flyer gives another.

      In Lima, he reverted to organizing simpler concerts for ten pianos. In Peru he was inspired by the local zamacuecas and listened intently to the tristos or Indian flute.

      He travelled seven hundred kilometers into the interior of the country on the back of a donkey. These sojourns were not without danger: Gottschalk never forgot to take his pistol with him nor his walking stick, which sheathed a hidden sword. He regularly was forced to pull his gun, and with his walking stick he successfully warded off an assailant, though not in some obscure backlands but in Buenos Aires; and the man who attacked him was a drunken Frenchman. South America gave him plenty to write about—from the darkened recesses of his lodgings he spied on the rebels on horseback in Lima, and he survived a cholera epidemic in Buenos Aires that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims—but in musical terms he had reached the end of his tether. His interest in native melodies and rhythms faded. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, and Guadeloupe had made an impression on him, since the local music constantly reminded him of his grandmother, mother, and his nanny’s roots in Saint-Domingue. In Argentina he used local rhythms that foreshadowed the tango in his compositions Dernier amour and Souvenir de Buenos Aires, though in Brazil he was not at all taken with the local rhythms. In Chile he listened intently to the mecapaqueña; in Uruguay, where quite a few German colonists had settled, he studied the scores of Wagner.

      “New, admirable, picturesque, outrageously distinguished,” were the terms he used to describe Wagner’s music in his Notes, and this made him think it was time to return to Europe and head for Germany. It was the land of his father, after all, “and France in recent years had no more to offer than Offenbach and champagne”; and he had reached the age at which he had been able to put the frustrations of childhood behind him. In preparation for his impending trip to Germany he wrote a couple of Lieder. A case of food poisoning put an abrupt end to his plans; the poisoning led to an inflammation of the appendix, and since it went untreated, to a case of peritonitis. The Brazilian emperor Dom Carlos II had him rushed to the mountains, but the fresh air did little more than ease his suffering.

      Gottschalk directed his last words to the administering physician. “I have travelled much and have often been dangerously ill but never have I found a friend as devoted as you. A father or brother could not have done more. Your efforts are truly superhuman.” He made the sign of the cross, kissed the doctor’s hand, and drew his last breath.

      A gentleman to the last.

      Had he lived longer he would have become a universal composer. His untimely death limited his influence on Caribbean music, but indeed gave it form and direction. Joseph Sickman Corsen understood this all too well. When the first theatre was opened on Curaçao in 1872, he played Gottschalk’s Souvenir de Porto-Rico. The applause was just as thunderous as it had been in Havana, when after a performance Gottschalk was showered under a mass of women’s hats, and three hundred and fifty bouquets.

      10

       An Island of Defaulters

      In 1886 Curaçao boasted seven composers with a population of no more than twenty-six thousand souls. By the start of the twentieth century their number had tripled. The printing presses of music publishers Librería A. Bethencourt e Hijos rolled from early in the morning until sunset. Composers from Willemstad, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo all had their musical scores printed there either by Imprenta Capriles or Tipografía Excelsior.

      The local composers lived on an insignificant rock sixty-one kilometers long and eleven kilometers wide, and were in seventh heaven. They could choose from no less than three music publishers who were all keen to acquire new works. Chopin had to hawk his wares all his life and a third of his work was never published. And he lived in the cultural capital of the world.

      Don Agustín Bethencourt laid the basis for publishing music on Curaçao. Born in 1826 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, at the age of fourteen he decided to try his luck in the New World and exchanged the Canary Islands for Venezuela. He became merchant, teacher, justice of the peace, and pharmacist—the nineteenth-century man could still have all this on his plate in the vast country that was Venezuela, which had in common with the Wild West that it lay waiting with open arms for new settlers to arrive. In Valencia he had presumably already started printing pamphlets and lampoons; in any case he learned how to print. After nineteen years of residence he had to suddenly flee for political reasons. He sailed to Curaçao, taking in Willemstad’s ambience while waiting there for a ship to take him back to Santa Cruz de Tenerife—lighthearted, hard-working, free, for whites at least. Bethencourt was as white as his Norman forefathers, who had settled large areas of the Canary Islands. He mingled easily in the company of Huguenots and Jews who ruled the roost in Curaçao, and he did not have to learn another language to make himself understood. He rented a store, began importing sheet music from Schonberger Musique in Paris, and quickly established his own bookstore and music publishing house.