Green-Wood's Famous Residents
Everybody loves a great story, and Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery has many of New York's great stories to tell. Everyone who was anybody in 19th-century New York wanted to be buried there, and they were. As The New York Times succinctly put it it 1866, "It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon Fifth Avenue, to take his airings in the [Central] Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood."
The famous and infamous have continued to come to Green-Wood for over a century and a half now, bringing their lively stories and dark secrets with them. Green-Wood has more than 560,000 permanent residents, including Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed, Charles Ebbets, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Horace Greeley, Civil War generals,... More >
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born in New Orleans to a German-Jewish father and a Creole mother who was an accomplished singer. At an early age he showed musical ability, and went off to Europe to study the piano. But when he applied for admission to the Paris Conservatory, he was rejected without an audition, the director of classes explaining that his school was no place for someone from America, “the country of railroads but not of musicians.”
Gottschalk managed to find a teacher in Paris, was befriended by Hector Berlioz, and toured Europe to acclaim. At the age of sixteen he played for Chopin, who was duly impressed, predicting Gottschalk would “become the king of pianists.” In 1853, Gottschalk made his American debut at Niblo’s Garden in New York City, then toured the United States, Mexico, and South America. He was the first important American composer, was the first American musician with a national and international reputation, was the first from his country to popularize concert music, and was a brilliant pianist who shone playing his own very difficult compositions. Gottschalk’s music combined Creole, black, minstrel, South American, Spanish, mariachi, West Indian, and Cuban sounds.
Though music critics were divided on Gottschalk’s talents, his popularity in America was enormous, rivaled only by that of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. At his concerts, he always wore white gloves, then dramatically removed them on stage one finger at a time. Female admirers would the storm the stage, tearing the gloves to pieces as they fought for souvenirs. A showman and a Don Juan, Gottschalk was fluent in five languages. Gottschalk, who never married, was run out of San Francisco for his romantic escapade, and was threatened by men throughout the country who believed that he had used his good looks and matinee-idol status to corrupt the morals of their wives.
A committed Unionist and abolitionist, Gottschalk toured Civil Was camps, playing for the troops. On November 24, 1869, while leading 600 musicians in a performance of his own composition, Morte!! (She is Dead), he fell ill, and succumbed a month later.
--from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, New York’s Buried Treasure by Jeffrey I. Richman