O really? Anthems and Minstrel Shows Review in Montreal Gazette

ANTHEMS AND MINSTREL SHOWS, Brian C. Thompson’s biography of Calixa Lavallée, the composer of “O Canada,” was reviewed in The Montreal Gazette this past weekend. The following is an excerpt from Ian McGillis’ piece, O really? The little-known origins of O Canada.

One summer, without having planned it, I spent late June and early July in a town close enough to the U.S.-Canada border that you could easily stroll back and forth between countries. Finding myself on American ground on the fourth of July, I decided to conduct an informal poll: how many citizens could tell me who wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, and under what conditions? It turned out the answer — Francis Scott Key, either during or just after a naval battle — was known, in some form, to almost everyone. Back on home ground I tried something similar and found that the number of respondents who could tell me anything about the origin of O Canada was precisely zero — a number among which I counted myself. Here, one guesses, might be found a clue to the essence of our Canadianness. Leave it to us, always among the least blustering of nations, to be self-effacing about our own national anthem.

That state of indifference may begin to change with the publication of Brian Christopher Thompson’s Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842-1891 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 522 pp, $49.95), a remarkably detailed and evocative biography of the peripatetic Quebec-born musician who composed O Canada in 1880.

“I was surprised such a fascinating story was so little known,” said Thompson, who candidly admits to being among the majority who knew nothing of Lavallée until he came across an entry in Hellmut Kallmann’s History of Music in Canada. “The more I learned, the more I realized that Lavallée’s story was still very relevant to our time.” Read more >

Music, Words, and National Holidays: Read Brian C. Thompson’s guest blog post on La Fête Nationale et la Fête Du Canada.

ANTHEMS AND MINSTREL SHOWS

By Brian C. Thompson

Calixa Lavallée, the composer of “O Canada,” was the first Canadian-born musician to achieve an international reputation. While primarily remembered for the national anthem, Lavallée and his work extended well beyond Canada.

In Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Thompson analyzes Lavallée’s music, letters, and published writings, as well as newspapers and music magazines of the time, to provide a detailed account of musical life in 19th-century North America and the relationship between music and nation.

Previously portrayed as a humble French Canadian forced into exile by ignorance and injustice, Lavallée emerges here as ambitious, radical, bohemian, and fully engaged with the musical, social, and political currents of his time.

To learn more about Anthems and Minstrel Shows, click here.
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