Notes of a Pianist chronicles the life of one of the most remarkable musical minds of the American experience, the great nineteenth-century New Orleans-born composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). An important cultural and historical work, the book recounts Gottschalk's experiences as he traveled and performed throughout the last decade of his life.

Born to an English-Jewish father and a Haitian mother, Gottschalk is remembered as one of the great New Orleans musicians and composers, his music a combination of the classical tradition in which he...