Dubbed “the Chopin of the Creoles”, Gottschalk provides one of the most colourful chapters in the history of American music. Above all, he was the first to capture the syncopated music of New Orleans and the Caribbean in an iconoclastic style that anticipates ragtime and jazz by half a century. The piano miniatures, of which there are more than one hundred, embrace the vernacular melodies of New Orleans streets, South American dance halls and North American music halls, as might be expected from a child prodigy pianist who, as a teenager, toured Europe as a virtuoso concert soloist before moving on to North America, Guadaloupe, Cuba and South America. The Dying Poet was the most famous piano work of the Civil War era. The Union, a musical declaration of Gottschalk’s patriotism, contains elements of the yet-undeclared national anthem and was dedicated to the head of the Union Forces.