mself through the
tedious preparation, and when he stood up to conduct the first concert
of the festival, on the evening of November 26, he was so weak that he
could scarcely stand. The next day he was too ill to rise, and, though
he forced himself to go to the opera-house in the evening, he was so
weak as to be unable to conduct the music, and he had to be driven back
to his hotel. The best medical skill watched over him, but his hour had
come, and after three weeks of severe suffering he died, December 18,
1869. The funeral solemnities at the Cathedral of Rio were of the most
imposing character, and all the indications of really heart-felt sorrow
were shown among the vast crowd of spectators, for Gottschalk had
quickly endeared himself to the public both as man and artist. At the
time of Gott-schalk's death, it was his purpose to set sail for Europe
at the earliest practicable moment, to secure the publication of some of
his more important works, and the production of his operas, of which he
had the finished scores of not less than six.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was an artist and composer whose gifts were
never more than half developed; for his native genius as a musician was
of the highest order. Shortly before he died, at the age of forty, he
seemed to have ripened into more earnest views and purposes, and, had
he lived to fulfill his prime, it is reasonable to hazard the conjecture
that he would have richly earned a far loftier niche in the pantheon
of music than can now be given him. A rich, pleasure-loving, Oriental
temperament, which tended to pour itself forth in dreams instead of
action; vivid emotional sensibilities, which enabled him to exhaust
all the resources of pleasure where imagination stimulates sense; and
a thorough optimism in his theories, which saw everything at its best,
tended to blunt the keen ambition which would otherwise inevitably have
stirred the possessor of such artistic gifts. Gottschalk fell far short
of his possibilities, though he was the greatest piano executant ever
produced by our own country. He might have dazzled the world even as he
dazzled his own partial countrymen.

His style as a pianist was sparkling, dashing, showy, but, in the
judgment of the most judicious, he did not appear to good advantage in
comparison with Thalberg, in whom a perfect technique was dominated by
a conscious intellectualism, and a high ideal, passionless but severely
beautiful.

Gottschalk's idiosyn