Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s The Last Hope:

The Commodification of Music, Sentimentalism, and

Religion

Laura Moore PruettMerrimack CollegeNorth Andover, MA

Laura.Pruett@merrimack.eduSociety for American Music 37th Annual

Conference11 March 2011, Cincinnati, OH

The Cult of Sentiment• Immanuel Kant

(1724-1804)• Friedrich Schiller

(1759-1805)• Charles Dickens

(1812-1870)• D.H. Lawrence

(1885-1930)• Samuel Richardson

– Clarissa (1748)

Sensibility in 19th-Century America

• Susan Warner– The Wide, Wide World

(1850)• Harriet Beecher

Stowe– Uncle Tom’s Cabin

(1852)• Louisa May Alcott

– Little Women (1868)

Louis Moreau Gottschalk(1829-1869)

• Stephen Foster (1826-1864)– “Jeannie with the

Light Brown Hair”• 2nd Great Awakening

– 1800-1840s• Nature• Spiritualism

Music, Sensibility, and Religion

The Last Hope - Music

The Last Hope – Cover Art

Hymn Settings of The Last Hope

• Hubert Platt Main, music; Thomas Raffles, text; 1867

• Edwin Pond Parker, arranger– Charles S. Robinson, A Selection

of Spiritual Songs With Music for Use in Social Meetings, 1878• “Holy Ghost! With Light Divine”• “In the dark and cloudy day”• Cast thy burden on the Lord”• ‘Tis my happiness below”

• Charles Ives, Psalm 90 (1893)

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s The Last Hope:

The Commodification of Music, Sentimentalism, and

Religion

Laura Moore PruettBoston, MA

lmpruett@bellsouth.netC19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century

Americanists23 May 2010, State College, PA