The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

there. Whatever his background, Jean Blasini settled on Curaçao in 1820. Within a short period of time, he had enough money at his disposal to buy three slaves. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a country estate was worth a pittance and most whites had at least five slaves, so he would not have amassed any great fortune.

      Only the wealthiest families in the nineteenth century could afford to send their children to Europe to study. It is possible that Jules was given a place to stay by his relatives in Paris, with a Corsican aunt or uncle. But neither money nor relations helped the slightest bit when it came to being admitted to the conservatory. You had to be extremely talented—and exceptional talent was precisely what helped Jules get accepted. It must have been the case that his teacher Jan Gerard Palm had found a patron to finance his passage to France.

      Once back on Curaçao, Blasini began composing. Only twenty of his works have survived. This is not just because he did not live long; it was the rule and not the exception for someone to die at forty-one in the days of tuberculosis and the galloping consumption. Many of his compositions must just have been lost. Blasini heralded the beginning of Dutch Antillean classical music, but in those pioneer days few works were filed away into archives. Livio Hermans found a few scores in Caracas; he suspects there are quite a few more to be found there. My own investigations have led to nothing; in Venezuela it is easier to find gold than printed paper.

      We also do not know what he looked like; there are no drawings or paintings of Blasini in existence. According to oral tradition he was short and had a sharp facial features, but then so do all Corsicans. He did not marry, had no children, at least no legitimate ones. When he died no one felt the need to sort out or see to his personal belongings.

      I first heard two of Blasini’s compositions on the CD Danza! by Harold Martina, which was released in 1992. After studying at the Instituto de Bellas Artas in Medellín and the Music Academy in Vienna, Harold Martina (b. 1935) made a name for himself as a concert pianist in Colombia. Wherever he performed, he made it a point to propagate the music of his native island of Curaçao. He put it into a broader Caribbean perspective and always highlighted the similarities with other parts of the Antilles more than the differences. On the CD he plays dances of Jules Blasini alongside those by the Cubans Ignacio Cervantes and Ernesto Lecuona and the Colombian Louis Calvo, major nineteenth-century composers totally unknown in Europe.

      The two works by his fellow countryman were called Los ojitos de una Mexicana and ¿Para cuál de las tres? The titles betray the fact that Blasini was a womanizer. “Which One of the Three?” referred to a gentleman who frequently paid a call to the yellow ochre house in Otrobanda where the three unmarried sisters Estela, Josefina, and Elodia Chapman lived. Evidently he had an eye on one of these three young ladies, and all of Willemstad wondered which one of the three it was. Judging by the music itself, Blasini had no chance whatsoever with any of them; a deep melancholy resounds throughout the dance. It is a dreamy piece of music I heard at practically every party I went to in the years to come.

      Blasini was an unrivalled Prince Charming. He did not charm just with his music; in Paris he had patiently observed how the ladies did their hair. Back in Willemstad his fingers conjured up towering hairdos. He was a frequent and highly sought-after guest in upper-class boudoirs, in which he not only touched the locks of hair, but shoulders and waists as well. The title of one of his cantatas alludes to this—Adagio: Ne m’oubliez pas.

      Blasini had young Curaçaoans play mazurkas and waltzes during the many piano lessons he gave. Chopin’s influence is clearly in evidence in the nocturne he composed. He found his own style in the dances in which he made use of the local rhythms. According to the prominent Curaçaoan pianist and composer Robert Rojer, they can only be played by a Curaçaoan; the rubato requires an extremely delicate touch down to the tenth of the measure. Toward the end of his life, Jules Blasini signed his compositions Julio Blasini. The half Frenchman had become fully Latin American.

      It is also possible that it was Blasini’s teacher Jan Gerard Palm (1831–1906) who introduced the works of Chopin on Curaçao. He lived a great deal longer than Blasini and composed more than a hundred miniature pieces, including six mazurkas and forty waltzes. Just where Jan Gerard Palm acquired his musical knowledge will always remain a mystery. In the waltz El Sueño y el Triste Presente he flew back and forth between the opposing musical themes with playful ease, and in the funeral march to commemorate Brion, the Curaçaoan general who had fought side by side with Simón Bolívar, he assimilated the latest trends from the Old World. Jan Gerard, who never left Curaçao, wanted to be called Gerry, pronounced the English way. He had been able to pilot his pupil Blasini into the Paris Conservatory thanks to a cunning letter of recommendation in impeccable French, and was in constant touch with Cuba, where the local phenomenon Gottschalk performed for packed houses.

      Louis Moreau Gottschalk had been the most fanatic of all of Chopin’s disciples. He carried his musical message throughout the Caribbean and even deep into the South American continent.

      Gottschalk dressed like Chopin, cut his hair like Chopin, behaved like Chopin, and played the piano like Chopin: a virtuoso with fluency, gentleness, and a mastery of the use of the pedal.

      8

       Oh My Sweet Darling, Spare Me

      Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) spent the first years of his life in New Orleans, within hearing distance of Congo Square, where black musicians were given the exceptional privilege during the years of slavery of performing every Sunday afternoon in a frenzied atmosphere.

      His mother, Aimeé Brusle, was a Cajun from Louisiana, his father a German Jew who had immigrated at a young age to America from London, where his parents had sought their fortune.

      Aimée spoke French at home and could not read English. Her ancestors had exchanged Louisiana in the middle of the eighteenth century for Saint-Domingue, and forty-five years later, after the declaration of the black republic, came back to the United States by way of Jamaica. At first they had not disapproved of the slave revolt; Gottschalk was named after his uncle Moreau Bruslé, who for a short time had been the revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture’s secretary.

      So on his mother’s side he clearly had ties to Haiti, which he even referred to as “a mysterious affinity.” His father imported goods from Bremen and Hamburg but earned considerably more in the slave trade. In New Orleans Edward Gottschalk supported two families from the proceeds, the official one with Aimée, and the illegitimate one with Judith Françoise Rubio, a so-called free woman of color, whose forebears, like Aimée’s, had come from Saint-Domingue. He had seven children with the first and four with the latter. He recognized all eleven of them, which caused him to be in constant need of money.

      Louis Moreau was not very fond of his father. He refused to learn German and on his later travels he avoided going to Germany and England. He did, however, absolutely adore his Creole mother, which he expressed in countless compositions and which he would always convey in the way he spoke English: a little like Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie films.

      Edward Gottschalk pushed his son into music, with the singular aim of making money. Edward could not read a single note of music but had read in the newspaper that child prodigies were making fortunes. He invested in his son like real estate, and when the young man became famous, he came to collect the money he felt he was entitled to as some kind of landlord would.

      Louis Moreau took piano lessons, violin lessons, and composition from the age of seven; when he was twelve he was sent to further his musical studies at the Paris Conservatory, where Blasini had also studied. That did not happen, however: as an American he did not stand a ghost of a chance to be admitted, and he lacked the extraordinary letter that had led to Blasini’s admission; all he could do was take private lessons from Camille Stamaty, a student of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Besides Gottschalk, Stamaty was molding another talent, Camille Saint-Saëns, in a ruthless but efficient way: Saint-Saëns was soon regarded a child prodigy. A month before his sixteenth birthday Louis Moreau made his debut in the Salle Pleyel, on April 2, 1845.

      Among his audience was Sigismund Thalberg, “the