Classically Black: The Creole Romantics

4 pm Friday, February 20, 2004
7:06 pm Tuesday, February 24, 2004 (Mardi Gras)
4:06 pm Sunday, February 29, 2004

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Cooper’s Classically Black Profiles Rediscovered Creole Romantics

Free black men found it increasingly difficult to compose music in 19th-century New Orleans in the period around the Civil War. Three pioneering African-American composers left New Orleans for the relative freedom of Paris, where black American artists were traditionally welcomed with open arms.

These men, Charles Lucien Lambert, his son Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert, and Edmond Dede, along with the white Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, are the focus of WILL-FM host Roger Cooper’s new Classically Black program, The Creole Romantics. 

The Creole Romantics provides a generous sampling of their artistry, a cross-cultural blending of western European concert music with Afro-Caribbean rhythms and harmonies. It is music notable for its catchy rhythms, ornamentations and variations. “It’s café-style music,” Roger said. “I’d call it ‘light classical,’ a forerunner of blues, jazz, and ragtime.”

The Lamberts, Dede and Gottschalk all had been music students of Charles Richard Lambert, a free black musician in New Orleans who conducted the orchestra of the Orleans Theater and the Philharmonic Society. He was Charles-Lucien’s father and Lucien-Leon Guillaume’s grandfather. “He founded a music dynasty,” Roger said.

Gottschalk, a mesmerizing pianist who played compositions inspired by African-Caribbean rhythms, was the most well known of the Creole Romantics, Roger said. Audiences clamored to see the handsome virtuoso. “He was the Elvis Presley of his day. He performed around the world in big spectaculars sometimes with as many as 31 pianists performing on 31 pianos simultaneously,” Roger said.

The other composers are not as well known, but have been rediscovered, in part due to Richard Rosenberg, who found their music in the French National Library and transcribed it. Roger interviews Rosenberg, who coined the phrase Creole Romantics and who featured the music of the Creole Romantics in his Hot Springs (Arkansas) Music Festival. 

The Creole Romantics, said Roger, emerged as world-class artists in their day, and may have inspired others, such as Ernesto Nazareth and Heitor Villa-Lobos, to follow in their footsteps by embracing the folk elements in their respective cultures and giving them a “classical voice.”

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