Eva Gauthier, “The First Woman to Introduce Jazz and Oriental Music to America”

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus

So then, we learn from Vernon Duke that he met George Gershwin through Eva Gauthier, “the fine artist who did so much for new music.  Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them…”  She also was the first one to introduce George Gershwin’s songs in an experimental jazz-classical concert on November 1, 1923 in Aeolian Hall, the Alice Tulley Hall of its time. Her program included Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. It also included a selection of songs from American musical revues by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Walter Donaldson and George Gershwin, accompanied by Gershwin himself, “shy and awkward and earnest at the piano.”

And yet what do we really know of Eva Gauthier, we ask, racing toward the Wikipedia?  Some sites say she was, “the first woman to introduce Jazz and Oriental Music to America,” another, “the first Western classically trained female to study the music of the Orient and Javanese gamelan ensemble,” still another, “high priestess of modern song,” that she “sang with the Sultan’s wives” and “upset the musical establishment.”

H.C. Colles, a music critic for The Times in 1923 wrote, “Eclecticism in the making of a program is an excellent thing, and Miss Eva Gauthier was evidently determined to exploit its excellence to the full in the song recital which she gave last night at Aeolian Hall…Between [the classical pieces], Miss Gauthier offered half a dozen ragtime songs straight from the vaudeville entertainments of Broadway, accompanied by Mr. George Gershwin, one of the ablest exponents of the craft, beginning with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ending with songs by Mr. Gershwin, continued by request of the audience until the singer had to confess that her repertory in this ‘lovely music’ was exhausted…and so the thing was a failure.  It [ragtime and jazz] has developed into all it is capable of.  It has become a thing which captivates people all over the world and hypnotized them into dancing the night away: It is impossible to say why.  But its home is not the concert room.”

However, in viewing some photographs of her, one cannot escape the conviction that the serious face with its expression of royalty and discernment and equine power has stamped itself upon the minds of people who remember Eva Gauthier, so that we wish for the voice to come ringing out at us from the computer screen.

Her grandson, simply known as “Mark” in a review of the online article, “Grand tradition: Eva Gauthier: 1885-1958: Great Canadian Musical Figures of the Past” at Amazon.com in 2006, has left us a personal and pleading reflection:

“Eva Gauthier was my great-grandmother and I obtained this article from another (public) source instead of Amazon. I gave it 3 stars because it is very short and does not even come close to describing my great-grandmother’s rich and interesting history. There’s a lot of other available information about how Eva is credited with giving George Gershwin his start, and that she was very close friends with Maurice Ravel (wrote “Bolero”). I have a photo in my living room featuring Eva, Gershwin, Ravel and others at a birthday party she hosted for Ravel in 1928. Beautiful!”

Ned Rorem, an American composer especially praised for his song settings, has described her as he encountered her in 1957:

“Eva Gauthier, she of the blue hair and endless supply of satin hats, inhabited a tiny flat in the now defunct Hotel Woodward on East Fifty-third, with an upright Knabe, ten crates of scores, and a yapping Pekingese. Mme. Gauthier was four feet ten inches worth of experienced opinion, always precise, sometimes precisely wrong. She was already seventy when I began playing for her coaching sessions in 1957…Debussy had taught her “Yniold” in Pelléas et Mélisande by rote, she claimed.

She also claimed intimacy with Ravel and Gershwin, showing us her programs devoted exclusively to this pair. During those programs she changed garb with each group, involving vast swatches of stuff from Java, where for years she had lived with an importer husband…”

In all these records, except for her grandson, one feels that the recorder, even when he was in her actual presence, kept his distance and caricatured this innovative woman and failed to measure the significance of the cross-continental musical experiments of her early years.  Only her grandson seems to know the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In concert singing, where so much of the personality is subsumed into the song, the absence of a imaginative intelligence is a great lack; and her critics, who have been mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, the great abundance of a quality which has been held to be distasteful, especially in her day.  Eva Gauthier was not unwise; she was not a dabbler; though she did not read music and possessed some inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.

One feels that to most people now, as to Ned Rorem in 1957, that she was “a fantastic teacher, if ‘teacher’ means one whose enthusiasm is transferable—who leads horses to water and makes them drink. Gauthier’s enthusiasm was for the intelligence of music, and though she couldn’t read music she could talk it…What students sought from Pierre Bernac in Paris and from Maggie Teyte in London—French repertory from someone who knew the words—they could find from the Canadian Gauthier in New York, plus the bonus of native literature… After her death, Jennie Tourel remained the only active singer in New York (the musical center of the world!) equipped to coach Franco-American repertory. Today, no one.”

And if we consider these portraits more closely, we find that they are the records of a daring woman, a woman who had crossed oceans and languages back and forth and from whom issued a desire to make unknown things knowable. We do know about her days of youth; we know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame and the influence were all built upon a strong foundation—she was the daughter of an explorer and astronomer and the niece of Canada’s first French-Canadian Premier.

One of the few remaining recordings of her singing is preserved.

Panis Angelicus by Franz Liszt
(based on a gregorian chant with a very loose paraphrase translation
by the narrator)

Panis angelicus…….The angels’ bread
fit panis hominum…….is our bread
Dat panis coelicus…….heaven’s bread
figuris terminum…….ends all symbols
O res mirabilis!…….O what a miracle!
Manducat Dominum…….our teacher becomes our food
Pauper, servus et humilis…….poor, serving endlessly, and humble.

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus