''Le Bananier'' (The Banana Tree) in

C minor C minor is a minor scale based on C, consisting of the pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Its key signature consists of three flats. Its relative major is E major and its parallel major is C major. The C natural minor scale is: Cha ...

, Op. 5, is a composition for piano by American composer

Louis Moreau Gottschalk Louis Moreau Gottschalk (May 8, 1829 – December 18, 1869) was an American composer, pianist, and virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works. He spent most of his working career outside the United States. Life and career Gottschalk ...

. Dedicated to the famous pianist

Alexandre Goria Alexandre Édouard Goria (21 January 1823 – 6 July 1860) was a French virtuoso pianist and composer of salon pieces. Biography Alexandre Goria was born in Paris and admitted as a student at the age of seven to the Conservatoire de Paris on 15 ...

, it was written in France around 1846 as one of the four "Louisiana Creole pieces" that Gottschalk composed between 1844 and 1846. Based on the Creole folk melody ''En avan' Grenadie'' (contraction of ''Grenadiers''), it was alternatively published with the subtitle ''Chanson nègre,'' and was widely popular in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

at the time of its release.

Musical analysis

The composition is an irregular sentence of 128 bars in two strain lines. The first of the two, which make up the piece, has a musette accompaniment, being the melody in the second strain supported by two other contrapuntal voices. Harmonically, this bass evokes the "musette" attached to many an eighteenth-century gavotte.

Market impact

According to expert Robert Offergeld, after more than 2.000 copies sold in Paris alone, the publishing company, which held the rights to the piece, earned 250,000

Franc The franc is any of various units of currency. One franc is typically divided into 100 centimes. The name is said to derive from the Latin inscription ''francorum rex'' (King of the Franks) used on early French coins and until the 18th century ...

s in sales before deciding to sell it to another for more 25,000 francs in profits. And since unlicensed copies abounded in Leipzig, London, Berlin, Brussels and Milan, this amount was just a partial estimative of the impact that it aroused on the musical scene of the time."'Benacci', a publisher of Lyon who came to Paris expressly to induce me to sell him a manuscript... offered 10,000 francs for the copyright of the ''Bamboula'' and ''Bananier,'' notwithstanding more than 2,000 copies of the latter had been sold here: my publishers, the 'Escudiers', answered: ''If you were to offer us 60,000, we should refuse it.''" (Gottschalk, in a letter to his father dated May 1850) Source: The last allotment received by Gottschalk from the publisher 'Escudiers' for ''Le Bananier'' was so large that he came to think about pushing all his pupils, with the exception of the best ones, over to other teachers at the conservatoire on his return to Paris from Switzerland. The demand for the bulk of his music by the Swiss retailers was surprisingly large enough that his publishing company in Paris could not supply it.

Emile Prudent Emile or Émile may refer to: * Émile (novel) (1827), autobiographical novel based on Émile de Girardin's early life * Emile, Canadian film made in 2003 by Carl Bessai * '' Emile: or, On Education'' (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a treatise o ...

introduced it to Central Europe.

Carl Czerny Carl Czerny (; ; 21 February 1791 – 15 July 1857) was an Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist of Czech origin whose music spanned the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His vast musical production amounted to over a thousand works an ...

made a four-hand arrangement of the piece, and

Georges Bizet Georges Bizet (; 25 October 18383 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic music, Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, ''Carmen'', w ...

kept it in his repertoire for years, as well as the great pianists Józef Wieniawski and

Alfred Jaëll Alfred Jaëll (5 March 183227 February 1882) was an Austrian pianist. His students included Benjamin Johnson Lang and Samuel Sanford (the eponym of the Sanford Medal). Life He was born in Trieste, then in the Austrian Empire. He studied under ...

. Moreover, the piece was actually played on the cello by

Jacques Offenbach Jacques Offenbach (; 20 June 18195 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera ''The Tales of Hoffmann''. He was a p ...

, while the French violinist

Léon Reynier Léon Reynier (11 August 1833 – 5 May 1895) was a well known and greatly appreciated French virtuoso violinist. Life Reynier was born in Saint-Cloud. He is said to have been presented by Napoleon III with a richly varnished 1681 orange-reddish S ...

rescore it for his instrument, and even a hand-written copy of the piece was found in

Alexander Borodin Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (12 November 183327 February 1887) was a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was one of the prominent 19th-century composers known as " The Five", a group dedicated to prod ...

's personal belongings by the Soviet mathematician and musicologist Serge Dianin, which some scholars insist was used as a model for his

Polovtsian Dances The Polovtsian Dances, or Polovetsian Dances (), form an exotic scene at the end of act 2 of Alexander Borodin's opera '' Prince Igor''. The opera remained unfinished when the composer died in 1887, although he had worked on it for more than a d ...

in his opera ''

Prince Igor ''Prince Igor'' (, ) is an opera in four acts with a prologue, written and composed by Alexander Borodin. The composer adapted the libretto from the early Russian epic '' The Lay of Igor's Host'', which recounts the campaign of the 12th-centur ...

.''

Notes

References

External links

*
Le Bananier, Op. 5 - Louis Moreau Gottschalk
on

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bananier, Le Solo piano compositions by Louis Moreau Gottschalk 1846 compositions Piano compositions in the Romantic era Compositions in C minor