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  • Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 by Brian Christopher Thompson
  • Gayle Sherwood Magee
Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891. By Brian Christopher Thompson. ISBN 978-0-773-54555-7. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Cloth. Pp. xxviii, 522. $49.95 CAD.

Brian Christopher Thompson’s volume presents a thoroughly researched biography of Calixa Lavallée within the larger context of the North American music scene of the mid- and later nineteenth century. Lavallée is best remembered as the composer of the music for “O Canada,” written in 1880 yet only officially recognized as the nation’s anthem a full century later. As suggested by the book’s title, Thompson unearths the remainder of Lavallee’s extensive and varied international musical career, utilizing an impressive quantity and variety [End Page 404] of primary source documentation. In so doing, Thompson chronicles a remarkable professional musician whose career encompassed the full range of musical activities of the era.

Born, raised, and educated in and around Montréal, Lavallée spent comparatively little of his adult life in Canada—an irony, given his legacy as a seminal Canadian composer. As Thompson states, “During his thirty-year career, Lavallée spent roughly two years in Europe, seven in Canada, and twenty-one in the United States” (37). He served in the Union Army’s Fourth Rhode Island Regiment as a bandsman during the Civil War; traveled throughout Canada and the United States as a virtuoso pianist; and worked as a church musician, private music teacher, opera director, concert promoter, conductor, writer, arts advocate, and critic. Most revealing is Thompson’s account of Lavallée’s work as a blackface performer, multi-instrumentalist, musical director, and bandleader with such outfits as the Morris Brothers’ Minstrels, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the New Orleans Minstrels on the international minstrel show circuit, which thrived in the decades surrounding the Civil War.

The trajectory of Lavallée’s cosmopolitan and transnational career illustrates a critical transition that took place during his lifetime. On the one hand, the typical model for a mid-nineteenth-century North American musician exemplified professional versatility in conjunction with repertoires, genres, and performance spaces that actively blurred boundaries between “classical” and “popular” musical worlds. (Thompson makes the important point that versatility did not preclude superior performance standards and that minstrel musicians such as Lavallée maintained an extremely high quality of performance whether on the minstrel stage, in the theater pit, or in the concert hall.) On the other hand, the end of the century witnessed an increased emphasis on specialization and canonization, enabled by the rise of conservatories, professional symphony orchestras, and the “sacralization” of mostly European classical traditions. While Lavallée fully embraced popular traditions originating south of the forty-ninth parallel early in his career, he withdrew from minstrel performance in the 1870s, partly due to his nearly two years of study in Paris, through which he was exposed to contemporary music. He returned to North America “determined to raise his compatriots’ views of the arts, cultivate the public’s tastes, and provide training for a new generation of musicians” (xxii).

Through these efforts, he made connections to American composers, classical performers, and institutions of the time. In 1885 he organized two “American concerts” in Boston that featured the works of George Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, and Arthur Foote alongside Lavallée’s own compositions. A year later he performed Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s music in another American-themed program. (Lavallée had met Gottschalk when they performed on the same program with violinist Carlo Patti, the brother of Adelina Patti, in Montréal in 1864.) Lavallée’s efforts on behalf of living composers in these years may have been a direct result of his involvement in the decade-old Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), of which Lavallée was elected president in 1876. As Thompson recounts, Lavallée pledged to “put his heart and soul, and all his energy, into the service of American music” after his election (283).

In addition to assiduously documenting Lavallée’s numerous other...

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