Vieuxtemps (and Ole Bull) in New Orleans

Abstract

During the first three months of 1844 and again in 1858, the great Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps came to New Orleans, where he received great acclaim. According to Lev Ginsburg, Vieuxtemps's biographer, no other American city so warmly received the violinist.' New Orleans, the Crescent City, was a very special place for classical European music in the antebellum years, and its concert-going public was a unique one. During the 1830s the city grew from thirty-one thousand to over a hundred thousand inhabitants, and the new citizens included a large number of Europeans nostalgically loyal to the best European culture. Among the older residents were white Creoles, native Louisianians of French and Spanish ancestry, whose plantation and city gentry life-style gave the city a mystique of Southern graciousness and elegant sophistication. Black Creoles -French-speaking and Frencheducated free blacks well aware of their common African heritage with black slaves--added much to the unique cosmopolitanism of New Orleans. The combination of European taste and both black and white Creole atmosphere stimulated Vieuxtemps not only to play many more concerts than he originally intended but to compose a violin piece based on a black dance he heard while visiting among the Creoles. This short work, only recently discovered, is the earliest known classical setting of Creole music and one of the very few bits of notated AfricanAmerican music from before the Civil War.

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