The Birds of America -- in Music?
John James Audubon, whose name launched a thousand bird-protection societies, led a life every bit as colorful as those of the birds he vividly portrayed. A list of his lesser “accomplishments” includes swindling the brother of the poet Keats, drawing a mysterious woman whom he dubbed the “Fair Incognito” in the altogether (centuries before Leo DiCaprio did the same for Kate Winslet), and faking out a fellow Francophone naturalist, Constantin Rafinesque, with descriptions of phony fish species, which the latter drew and duly reported to science.
None of these incidents reflected very well on Audubon, but in the end, it didn’t matter, because he rocketed to fame on the strength of his bird portraits, collected in the massive volume, The Birds of America, and on his beguiling self-mythology as the “American Woodsman.” He became the darling of British salons while showing off his dramatic life-size illustrations and telling tales of rassling with Indians and frontier bandits.
We have reason to believe that John was a talented musician as well as artist. His upbringing in France cultivated an aptitude in all the arts, including dance. He played the fiddle and the flageolet, the latter a kind of cross between a recorder and oboe. In fact, legend has it that Audubon dreamed up the fake species scam as revenge because Rafinesque, while visiting Audubon at home, smashed John’s prized violin one night in attempting to collect a bat in the guest bedroom. (He may or may not have been naked.)
Lucy Bakewell Audubon, John’s wife and widow, who stood by her man through all his machinations, good and bad, also had musical gifts. During years of hardship and separation while John roamed the country looking for birds to draw, Lucy kept her family in business by tutoring wealthy plantation families in the South, which included giving piano lessons. Later, when the couple was reunited in her natal land, England, Lucy would write happily of attending operas and Drury Lane musicals.
She might well have known one of the professionals—“professors” as they called them back in the day—playing along in the pit orchestra there. He was Anthony Philip Heinrich, a musician who once earned no less an exalted honorific than “the Beethoven of America” and who, at the end of his long life in 1861, in one of history’s more curious twists, was buried in the Audubon family tomb in New York City.
If you’ve never heard of Heinrich, don’t feel bad. Today he is barely a footnote in America’s musical history, rarely performed and little known beyond a small coterie of musicologists. He was born in 1781 in a small village in German-speaking Bohemia, achieved great wealth as an international trader, visiting America several times, and lost everything in a series of worldwide bank failures. More or less stranded in the New World, he made his way to Kentucky and shut himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, outside Louisville, where he taught himself to compose with “nature as his muse.” In 1820 he emerged with his “Opera Prima,” The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature, a collection of songs, sonatas, and dance pieces for piano and voice.
For many reasons, Heinrich’s life story, if not his prolific compositions, deserve some attention. For one thing, his life was nearly as rich in detail and incident as Audubon’s. Someone even smashed his prized Cremona violin.
Or take the day in 1845 when Heinrich visited the White House to perform for the aristocratic President, John Tyler. “The composer labored hard to give the full effect of his weird production, his bald pate bobbed from side to side and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake,” wrote a friend who accompanied him, John Hill Hewitt. “The inspired composer had got about halfway through his wonderful production, when Mr. Tyler arose from his chair, and placing his hand gently on Heinrich’s shoulder, said: ‘That may all be very fine, sir, but can’t you play us a good old Virginia reel?’”
Hewitt continued, describing Heinrich’s stunned reaction after fleeing the White House: “As we proceeded along Pennsylvania Avenue, Heinrich grasped my arm convulsively, and exclaimed, ‘Mein Gott in himmel! De peebles vot made Yohn Tyler Bresident ought to be hung! He knows no more about music than an oyshter!’”
The “weird production” Heinrich “labored” at was probably a piano version of his “The war of the elements and the thundering of Niagara: Capriccio Grande for Full Orchestra,” which included an attempt at musically depicting, yes, the thundering of the great waterfalls. In other grand concoctions of Heinrich’s, he evokes American heroes, popular tunes such as Yankee Doodle, and…wait for it…birds.
In 1856, four year’s after John’s death, Lucy Audubon wrote a letter to her elder son Victor which says, in part, “I sent old Heinrich some extracts from the wild pigeon and some money for he told me he often had only half a dollar a week….” At the time, Heinrich eked out a living teaching and performing in Lower Manhattan while Lucy lived on the Audubon estate, “Minnie’s Land,” in present-day Washington Heights. The meaning of “extracts from the wild pigeon” could be actual food for the bootstrapped composer to live on, but my guess is that it refers to John’s written account of the migration of the Passenger Pigeon. The following year, Heinrich’s magnum opus, the Columbiad, or, the Migration of the Wild American Passenger Pigeon, would premiere in Europe.
Written in two parts and twelve movements, the Columbiad marshals enormous orchestral forces in attempting to musically recreate what was once America’s most abundant bird, described with awe by Audubon, his predecessor Alexander Wilson, and many others as flocks of millions darkened the skies. (The last of its kind, named “Martha,” died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.) In one fleeting movement, Heinrich employs only crashing percussion to illustrate the sound of the dense flocks descending into the trees to roost. For anyone keeping score, this is music significantly daring for its time, not to mention “weird,” in Hewitt’s words.
It should come as no surprise that birds and nature were the wellsprings of artistic inspiration for Anthony Philip Heinrich as much as they were for John James Audubon. At the time both men pursued their artistic visions to fruition, wilderness and wildlife defined the United States as much as her national heroes and burgeoning commerce. Much of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired 1803, the same year an 18-year-old Audubon immigrated to America, remained uncharted by European settlers. Moreover, the Romantic notion of vast, untamed wilds and the “noble savages” that inhabited them was taking hold in America and, even more so, in Europe. Not coincidentally, then, Audubon and Heinrich played up their frontier personae—one the “American Woodsman,” the other the “Log-house Composer”—to seduce Old World audiences. Some contemporary writers, myself included, refer to Heinrich as “The Musical Audubon.”
The parallels between Audubon and Heinrich go much deeper, however, and extend to what must have been a lifelong friendship involving the entire Audubon family, as well as sharing space in the afterlife. Most likely John, Lucy, and Heinrich met in Kentucky around the time of Heinrich’s log-cabin sojourn, or shortly after, when the itinerant composer was taken in by the prominent Kentucky Speed family at their Farmington estate near Louisville. John and Lucy had been leading a prosperous life, John running a frontier store and mill farther west, in Henderson, and Lucy raising their two boys. Their closest friends were a Dr. Adam Rankin and his wife, Harriett Speed Rankin. Although no definitive evidence has been found, the Audubons probably spent time as guests at Farmington, too.
The Audubons’ misfortunes began at almost the same time that Heinrich was reinventing himself as a composer, and had similar outlines to Heinrich’s. A bank crash and some bad investments wiped out the Audubons in 1819. Back in Louisville, Audubon was briefly jailed for bankruptcy. That was the time he cheated George and Georgianna Keats and also stabbed a man in a duel over a barge full of goods. This would not have been the most auspicious time for the meeting between the Audubons and Heinrich, tempting as it is to imagine their all seeking refuge at Farmington and entertaining their hosts, perhaps John and Heinrich on the fiddle and Lucy at the piano.
What really happened is that Audubon made the same fateful decision that Heinrich had some years earlier: he decided to turn his avocation, drawing birds, into his life’s work, just as Heinrich, newly destitute, had drawn on his musical talents to survive. April 1826 finds Audubon—famously prone to mal de mer—sailing for England to find a publisher for his impressive paintings, on the cusp of his overnight fame. Just months later, Heinrich, too, sailed for England, where he spent most of the next several years composing, teaching, and playing in theaters where one day, perhaps, he and the Audubons would cross paths again.
References to Heinrich pop up frequently in Audubon correspondence of their European years, and a few pass directly between them. In 1835, for example, Lucy writes,
“Dear Mr Heinrich, Your few lines so like yourself in goo[d]ness I have just read whilst Mr A is in attendance upon the painters, or he would write himself to tell you how much he values your worth and uniform propriety, so rarely to be met with nowadays, if he has time he will write if not be assured of his good wishes joined to those of my sons and myself.”
Other than the interesting reference to “Mr A in attendance upon the painters,” meaning, no doubt, that he was checking up on the artists who hand-colored every print produced in the shop of Havell, his London publisher, the letter is fairly quotidian. But a letter dated the following year, written to the composer from Edinburgh by the Audubon’s then 26-year-old son, Victor, pulls back a curtain on Heinrich’s lifelong travails:
“My dear Friend [Victor begins], We thank you heartily for your kind present of your late publications, which we took to a young friend of ours last night, and she played with great difficulty the Oak, and the other pieces more easily, we left the whole with her for a week or so. She is highly gifted I assure you, as will appear from her playing the Oak at first sight, but she did not play it perfectly as you may suppose. Your Fantasia Dolorosa was much admired & several other pieces, but all regret the difficulty of fingering & time in your otherwise so delightful compositions….
[He continues] You may well be pleased with their expressions of approbation—they all hope you will write, now that you have published so many difficult works, in a more simple & easy style, which will enable the lovers of music to get at you….
P.S. The Sensitive Plant pleased very much.”
It is impossible to mistake the harsh criticism in Victor’s words. Although Heinrich achieved a modicum of fame in his lifetime, becoming a kind of elder statesman on the New York music scene—dubbed in later life “Father Heinrich”—and helping to found the New York Philharmonic Society, Heinrich saw the chasm between his music and audience tastes grow. From the time he was chased out of Boston by the parishioners of Old South Church, who were perplexed by his stylings on the organ, to his disappointing visit with President Tyler in the White House, and well into his later years, Heinrich felt perpetually misunderstood and aggrieved. I like to picture him recoiling like a sensitive plant at Victor Audubon’s verbal assault.
It was not a real sensitive plant, however, but rather the name of a piano composition, part of a collection of pieces Heinrich called the Musical Week, which also included the “Oak” and the “Fantasia Dolorosa.” There were more than a dozen pieces in all, each assigned a number and a day, with multiple pieces on most days. Thus, the “Oak” was “No. 2,” i.e. Tuesday, of the Musical Week, while the “Sensitive Plant” was “the first number of Friday” and the “Fantasia Dolorosa,” also called the “Willow,” was “No. 2 of Friday” (the second piece written for that day), and so on.
Most important for our topic, Heinrich did Audubon the ultimate honor by dedicating “The Brown Beurrée” (“the First Number of Wednesday”) to “the Author of the Birds of America.” Thus is their connection in life sealed. Why this piece in particular? The clue may be in the subject of the title: “beurrée” is a variant of beurre, French for butter, and “brown buerrée” describes a type of Bosc pair that, according to some sources, was originally cultivated in Nantes, France—the city where John James Audubon grew up before coming to America. Heinrich also could have been making a pun, a favorite pastime of his, on the French musical dance form, the bourrée.
In 1838 the final number of the Birds of America rolled off Havell’s press, and John and Lucy returned to America victoriously, settling in Minnie’s Land a few years later. That same year, 1842, Heinrich would sit in on the founding meetings for the New York Philharmonic. Havell, meanwhile, decamped for Ossining, New York, to join the Hudson River School of painters, who celebrated the grandeur of American wilderness in enormous oils. They were in many ways spiritual kin, a fine art analogue to both Audubon and Heinrich.
Music continued to play a key role in the Audubons’ lives, as it always had, and famishment in Heinrich’s. “Dear Sir [Lucy writes to ‘A.P. Heinrich, Esq.’ on July 1, 1850, from Minnie’s Land]:
“I now send you another piece of family cake which I hope you will enjoy. I wish you would send us out a good Piano Tuner as we have several wires broken in ours and I am desirous of having the instrument in tune when John comes home to hear his little girls play –
When will you come and see us? The Country is very pleasant now. Hoping you are quite well I remain
Your friend
Lucy Audubon”
On February 2, 1851, Lucy writes to Heinrich again:
“My Dear Sir, Your kind and most excellent letter, I received and read with much interest, for your sincere sympathy, under my severe bereavement, accept my warm acknowledgement, time as you say blunts the edge of grief, but such a companion, though partially lost to me for some time past, must be missed and to my mind’s eye ever present.”
It was only six days after John, beset with dementia for the last years of his life (“partially lost to me for some time past”) died at Minnie’s Land. But by then Audubon was an American legend, whose work would set the standard for bird artists for generations to come and fetch millions of dollars on auction—and whose name would be permanently memorialized by the Audubon Societies that emerged at the turn of the 20th century.
Here is where Heinrich’s story sharply diverges from Audubon’s. By the time of his death in 1861, ten years after John’s, Heinrich had already sunken into obscurity, not to mention poverty. He died of “carbuncles” (painful boils) in a flat in what is now Chinatown. Although definitive proof is lacking, we can safely assume that Lucy, who lived on to the ripe old age of 87, made arrangements for Heinrich’s burial in the family crypt; better that than a potter’s field.
On one hand, some would say that Heinrich bears the responsibility for his own eclipse. As an autodidact, he wanted for discipline and cohesion in his music, however exuberant and imaginative it is. And it is. Listen to any recording on YouTube, such as The War of the Elements, as an enormous orchestra careers about wildly in search of a harmonic resolution, or the end of the Columbiad when the orchestra breaks into a giddy set of variations on “Yankee Doodle.”
On the other hand—as an avatar for a time and place in American history when the young republic was struggling for a national and cultural identity—Heinrich deserves his due. He tried to put American music on an equal footing with the European “greats,” without having the musical resources to pull it off (there were few professional American orchestras, and fewer still that could handle Heinrich’s scores), while portraying American subject matter in music. Being “the Beethoven of America” was no easy task. Even in this country, you could hardy avoid being overshadowed by the actual Beethoven (who died in 1827), Mozart, Haydn, and other well-established composers of the era.
Heinrich carved out a distinctively American niche for himself as a musician, as Audubon did as an artist and naturalist. They both loved their adopted country, having both been immigrants, and all it had to offer. In retrospect, maybe it is not so surprising that their paths crossed and their lives intersected. Perhaps even now, if you pay attention, a spectral vision emanates from under the Audubon marker in Trinity Cemetery, the skies darkening under the flocks of millions of Passenger Pigeons, Audubon furiously sketching, Heinrich’s music playing triumphantly.
None of these incidents reflected very well on Audubon, but in the end, it didn’t matter, because he rocketed to fame on the strength of his bird portraits, collected in the massive volume, The Birds of America, and on his beguiling self-mythology as the “American Woodsman.” He became the darling of British salons while showing off his dramatic life-size illustrations and telling tales of rassling with Indians and frontier bandits.
We have reason to believe that John was a talented musician as well as artist. His upbringing in France cultivated an aptitude in all the arts, including dance. He played the fiddle and the flageolet, the latter a kind of cross between a recorder and oboe. In fact, legend has it that Audubon dreamed up the fake species scam as revenge because Rafinesque, while visiting Audubon at home, smashed John’s prized violin one night in attempting to collect a bat in the guest bedroom. (He may or may not have been naked.)
Lucy Bakewell Audubon, John’s wife and widow, who stood by her man through all his machinations, good and bad, also had musical gifts. During years of hardship and separation while John roamed the country looking for birds to draw, Lucy kept her family in business by tutoring wealthy plantation families in the South, which included giving piano lessons. Later, when the couple was reunited in her natal land, England, Lucy would write happily of attending operas and Drury Lane musicals.
She might well have known one of the professionals—“professors” as they called them back in the day—playing along in the pit orchestra there. He was Anthony Philip Heinrich, a musician who once earned no less an exalted honorific than “the Beethoven of America” and who, at the end of his long life in 1861, in one of history’s more curious twists, was buried in the Audubon family tomb in New York City.
If you’ve never heard of Heinrich, don’t feel bad. Today he is barely a footnote in America’s musical history, rarely performed and little known beyond a small coterie of musicologists. He was born in 1781 in a small village in German-speaking Bohemia, achieved great wealth as an international trader, visiting America several times, and lost everything in a series of worldwide bank failures. More or less stranded in the New World, he made his way to Kentucky and shut himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, outside Louisville, where he taught himself to compose with “nature as his muse.” In 1820 he emerged with his “Opera Prima,” The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature, a collection of songs, sonatas, and dance pieces for piano and voice.
For many reasons, Heinrich’s life story, if not his prolific compositions, deserve some attention. For one thing, his life was nearly as rich in detail and incident as Audubon’s. Someone even smashed his prized Cremona violin.
Or take the day in 1845 when Heinrich visited the White House to perform for the aristocratic President, John Tyler. “The composer labored hard to give the full effect of his weird production, his bald pate bobbed from side to side and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake,” wrote a friend who accompanied him, John Hill Hewitt. “The inspired composer had got about halfway through his wonderful production, when Mr. Tyler arose from his chair, and placing his hand gently on Heinrich’s shoulder, said: ‘That may all be very fine, sir, but can’t you play us a good old Virginia reel?’”
Hewitt continued, describing Heinrich’s stunned reaction after fleeing the White House: “As we proceeded along Pennsylvania Avenue, Heinrich grasped my arm convulsively, and exclaimed, ‘Mein Gott in himmel! De peebles vot made Yohn Tyler Bresident ought to be hung! He knows no more about music than an oyshter!’”
The “weird production” Heinrich “labored” at was probably a piano version of his “The war of the elements and the thundering of Niagara: Capriccio Grande for Full Orchestra,” which included an attempt at musically depicting, yes, the thundering of the great waterfalls. In other grand concoctions of Heinrich’s, he evokes American heroes, popular tunes such as Yankee Doodle, and…wait for it…birds.
In 1856, four year’s after John’s death, Lucy Audubon wrote a letter to her elder son Victor which says, in part, “I sent old Heinrich some extracts from the wild pigeon and some money for he told me he often had only half a dollar a week….” At the time, Heinrich eked out a living teaching and performing in Lower Manhattan while Lucy lived on the Audubon estate, “Minnie’s Land,” in present-day Washington Heights. The meaning of “extracts from the wild pigeon” could be actual food for the bootstrapped composer to live on, but my guess is that it refers to John’s written account of the migration of the Passenger Pigeon. The following year, Heinrich’s magnum opus, the Columbiad, or, the Migration of the Wild American Passenger Pigeon, would premiere in Europe.
Written in two parts and twelve movements, the Columbiad marshals enormous orchestral forces in attempting to musically recreate what was once America’s most abundant bird, described with awe by Audubon, his predecessor Alexander Wilson, and many others as flocks of millions darkened the skies. (The last of its kind, named “Martha,” died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.) In one fleeting movement, Heinrich employs only crashing percussion to illustrate the sound of the dense flocks descending into the trees to roost. For anyone keeping score, this is music significantly daring for its time, not to mention “weird,” in Hewitt’s words.
It should come as no surprise that birds and nature were the wellsprings of artistic inspiration for Anthony Philip Heinrich as much as they were for John James Audubon. At the time both men pursued their artistic visions to fruition, wilderness and wildlife defined the United States as much as her national heroes and burgeoning commerce. Much of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired 1803, the same year an 18-year-old Audubon immigrated to America, remained uncharted by European settlers. Moreover, the Romantic notion of vast, untamed wilds and the “noble savages” that inhabited them was taking hold in America and, even more so, in Europe. Not coincidentally, then, Audubon and Heinrich played up their frontier personae—one the “American Woodsman,” the other the “Log-house Composer”—to seduce Old World audiences. Some contemporary writers, myself included, refer to Heinrich as “The Musical Audubon.”
The parallels between Audubon and Heinrich go much deeper, however, and extend to what must have been a lifelong friendship involving the entire Audubon family, as well as sharing space in the afterlife. Most likely John, Lucy, and Heinrich met in Kentucky around the time of Heinrich’s log-cabin sojourn, or shortly after, when the itinerant composer was taken in by the prominent Kentucky Speed family at their Farmington estate near Louisville. John and Lucy had been leading a prosperous life, John running a frontier store and mill farther west, in Henderson, and Lucy raising their two boys. Their closest friends were a Dr. Adam Rankin and his wife, Harriett Speed Rankin. Although no definitive evidence has been found, the Audubons probably spent time as guests at Farmington, too.
The Audubons’ misfortunes began at almost the same time that Heinrich was reinventing himself as a composer, and had similar outlines to Heinrich’s. A bank crash and some bad investments wiped out the Audubons in 1819. Back in Louisville, Audubon was briefly jailed for bankruptcy. That was the time he cheated George and Georgianna Keats and also stabbed a man in a duel over a barge full of goods. This would not have been the most auspicious time for the meeting between the Audubons and Heinrich, tempting as it is to imagine their all seeking refuge at Farmington and entertaining their hosts, perhaps John and Heinrich on the fiddle and Lucy at the piano.
What really happened is that Audubon made the same fateful decision that Heinrich had some years earlier: he decided to turn his avocation, drawing birds, into his life’s work, just as Heinrich, newly destitute, had drawn on his musical talents to survive. April 1826 finds Audubon—famously prone to mal de mer—sailing for England to find a publisher for his impressive paintings, on the cusp of his overnight fame. Just months later, Heinrich, too, sailed for England, where he spent most of the next several years composing, teaching, and playing in theaters where one day, perhaps, he and the Audubons would cross paths again.
References to Heinrich pop up frequently in Audubon correspondence of their European years, and a few pass directly between them. In 1835, for example, Lucy writes,
“Dear Mr Heinrich, Your few lines so like yourself in goo[d]ness I have just read whilst Mr A is in attendance upon the painters, or he would write himself to tell you how much he values your worth and uniform propriety, so rarely to be met with nowadays, if he has time he will write if not be assured of his good wishes joined to those of my sons and myself.”
Other than the interesting reference to “Mr A in attendance upon the painters,” meaning, no doubt, that he was checking up on the artists who hand-colored every print produced in the shop of Havell, his London publisher, the letter is fairly quotidian. But a letter dated the following year, written to the composer from Edinburgh by the Audubon’s then 26-year-old son, Victor, pulls back a curtain on Heinrich’s lifelong travails:
“My dear Friend [Victor begins], We thank you heartily for your kind present of your late publications, which we took to a young friend of ours last night, and she played with great difficulty the Oak, and the other pieces more easily, we left the whole with her for a week or so. She is highly gifted I assure you, as will appear from her playing the Oak at first sight, but she did not play it perfectly as you may suppose. Your Fantasia Dolorosa was much admired & several other pieces, but all regret the difficulty of fingering & time in your otherwise so delightful compositions….
[He continues] You may well be pleased with their expressions of approbation—they all hope you will write, now that you have published so many difficult works, in a more simple & easy style, which will enable the lovers of music to get at you….
P.S. The Sensitive Plant pleased very much.”
It is impossible to mistake the harsh criticism in Victor’s words. Although Heinrich achieved a modicum of fame in his lifetime, becoming a kind of elder statesman on the New York music scene—dubbed in later life “Father Heinrich”—and helping to found the New York Philharmonic Society, Heinrich saw the chasm between his music and audience tastes grow. From the time he was chased out of Boston by the parishioners of Old South Church, who were perplexed by his stylings on the organ, to his disappointing visit with President Tyler in the White House, and well into his later years, Heinrich felt perpetually misunderstood and aggrieved. I like to picture him recoiling like a sensitive plant at Victor Audubon’s verbal assault.
It was not a real sensitive plant, however, but rather the name of a piano composition, part of a collection of pieces Heinrich called the Musical Week, which also included the “Oak” and the “Fantasia Dolorosa.” There were more than a dozen pieces in all, each assigned a number and a day, with multiple pieces on most days. Thus, the “Oak” was “No. 2,” i.e. Tuesday, of the Musical Week, while the “Sensitive Plant” was “the first number of Friday” and the “Fantasia Dolorosa,” also called the “Willow,” was “No. 2 of Friday” (the second piece written for that day), and so on.
Most important for our topic, Heinrich did Audubon the ultimate honor by dedicating “The Brown Beurrée” (“the First Number of Wednesday”) to “the Author of the Birds of America.” Thus is their connection in life sealed. Why this piece in particular? The clue may be in the subject of the title: “beurrée” is a variant of beurre, French for butter, and “brown buerrée” describes a type of Bosc pair that, according to some sources, was originally cultivated in Nantes, France—the city where John James Audubon grew up before coming to America. Heinrich also could have been making a pun, a favorite pastime of his, on the French musical dance form, the bourrée.
In 1838 the final number of the Birds of America rolled off Havell’s press, and John and Lucy returned to America victoriously, settling in Minnie’s Land a few years later. That same year, 1842, Heinrich would sit in on the founding meetings for the New York Philharmonic. Havell, meanwhile, decamped for Ossining, New York, to join the Hudson River School of painters, who celebrated the grandeur of American wilderness in enormous oils. They were in many ways spiritual kin, a fine art analogue to both Audubon and Heinrich.
Music continued to play a key role in the Audubons’ lives, as it always had, and famishment in Heinrich’s. “Dear Sir [Lucy writes to ‘A.P. Heinrich, Esq.’ on July 1, 1850, from Minnie’s Land]:
“I now send you another piece of family cake which I hope you will enjoy. I wish you would send us out a good Piano Tuner as we have several wires broken in ours and I am desirous of having the instrument in tune when John comes home to hear his little girls play –
When will you come and see us? The Country is very pleasant now. Hoping you are quite well I remain
Your friend
Lucy Audubon”
On February 2, 1851, Lucy writes to Heinrich again:
“My Dear Sir, Your kind and most excellent letter, I received and read with much interest, for your sincere sympathy, under my severe bereavement, accept my warm acknowledgement, time as you say blunts the edge of grief, but such a companion, though partially lost to me for some time past, must be missed and to my mind’s eye ever present.”
It was only six days after John, beset with dementia for the last years of his life (“partially lost to me for some time past”) died at Minnie’s Land. But by then Audubon was an American legend, whose work would set the standard for bird artists for generations to come and fetch millions of dollars on auction—and whose name would be permanently memorialized by the Audubon Societies that emerged at the turn of the 20th century.
Here is where Heinrich’s story sharply diverges from Audubon’s. By the time of his death in 1861, ten years after John’s, Heinrich had already sunken into obscurity, not to mention poverty. He died of “carbuncles” (painful boils) in a flat in what is now Chinatown. Although definitive proof is lacking, we can safely assume that Lucy, who lived on to the ripe old age of 87, made arrangements for Heinrich’s burial in the family crypt; better that than a potter’s field.
On one hand, some would say that Heinrich bears the responsibility for his own eclipse. As an autodidact, he wanted for discipline and cohesion in his music, however exuberant and imaginative it is. And it is. Listen to any recording on YouTube, such as The War of the Elements, as an enormous orchestra careers about wildly in search of a harmonic resolution, or the end of the Columbiad when the orchestra breaks into a giddy set of variations on “Yankee Doodle.”
On the other hand—as an avatar for a time and place in American history when the young republic was struggling for a national and cultural identity—Heinrich deserves his due. He tried to put American music on an equal footing with the European “greats,” without having the musical resources to pull it off (there were few professional American orchestras, and fewer still that could handle Heinrich’s scores), while portraying American subject matter in music. Being “the Beethoven of America” was no easy task. Even in this country, you could hardy avoid being overshadowed by the actual Beethoven (who died in 1827), Mozart, Haydn, and other well-established composers of the era.
Heinrich carved out a distinctively American niche for himself as a musician, as Audubon did as an artist and naturalist. They both loved their adopted country, having both been immigrants, and all it had to offer. In retrospect, maybe it is not so surprising that their paths crossed and their lives intersected. Perhaps even now, if you pay attention, a spectral vision emanates from under the Audubon marker in Trinity Cemetery, the skies darkening under the flocks of millions of Passenger Pigeons, Audubon furiously sketching, Heinrich’s music playing triumphantly.