Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 by Brian Christopher Thompson (review)

Since the publication of Eugène Lapierre's landmark biography, Calixa Lavallée, musicien national du Canada (Albums canadiens ([Montréal: Éditions Albert Lévesque, 1936]), many myths, misconceptions, and gaps in knowledge about the composer of the music for Canada's national anthem, "O Canada!," have endured. Brian Christopher Thompson's Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 is therefore a much-needed contribution to the inadequate literature on Lavallée, presenting the first thorough account of his life "as a composer, instrumentalist, conductor, administrator, educator, and critic" (p. xxiii).

Thompson's biography follows Lavallée's trail chronologically, using a wide array of primary and secondary sources (newspapers and periodicals, letters, memoirs, regimental histories, etc.). It explores Lavallée's life and work with regard to "the place of nationalism in music, or the effect of nationalism on music" (p. xxvii). Of particular interest are sections discussing Lavallée's life outside of Canada, about which little was known. Despite being considered Canada's "national musician" (p. xxii), Lavallée spent only seven years of his career in his native land as opposed to twenty-one in the United States (p. 317).

Thompson's book is divided into a prologue, three parts, and an epilogue. The prologue sets the scene by retelling the pomp and circumstance surrounding the repatriation of Lavallée's remains from Massachusetts to Montreal's Côtes-des-Neiges cemetery in 1933. As Thompson remarks, this was "an exercise in nation building that was without precedent in Canada" (p. xx).

The first part, "On the Road, 1842–1873" (chapters 1–3), focuses on Lavallée's childhood and his early professional career in Montreal and the United States. Born December 28, 1842, in Verchères, Québec, Lavallée moved to Montreal in 1855 to continue his musical education. In fall 1859, he became a musician in Charles Duprez's New Orleans Minstrels, "blackening his face each night" (p. xx). During the Civil War, he enrolled as a military band musician in the Fourth Rhode Island Regiment. He wrote "several war-related compositions" (p. 30), among which was The War Fever, grand galop charactéristique, op. 4. Two years later, Lavallée returned to Montreal where he taught, performed, conducted the Montreal City Band, arranged national airs, and composed (chapter 2). He participated actively in politics, in part through publication in the anti-Confederation newspaper L'Union nationale. (Anti-Confederates opposed uniting the British colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the self-governing Dominion of Canada. Instead, they supported independence or annexation of Lower Canada [today the province of Québec] to the United States.) From 1866 to 1873, Lavallée returned to the minstrel show circuit, travelling widely throughout North America with the New Orleans Minstrels, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Morris Brothers' Minstrels (chapter 3). Since "few detailed studies of individual minstrel show performers have been published and none have been written about the musicians who made their careers in blackface," Lavallée's "experience in minstrelsy provides an extraordinary window into what was the most popular form of entertainment in the 1850s and 1860s" (p. xxv).

Between 1873 and 1875, Lavallée studied piano in Paris with Antoine Marmontel and composition with François Bazio and Adrien Louis Victor Boiëldieu (chapter 4). By the time he returned to Montreal in July 1875, Lavallée was a transformed artist. No longer a popular entertainer, he would from now on devote his life to the cause of classical music through his teaching, performances, and large-scale stage productions of Charles Gounod's Jeanne d'Arc and Boiëldieu's La Dame blanche. In 1878, he moved to Québec to...