Only two years later, at the age of 13, Gottschalk left the United States and sailed to Europe, as he and his father realized a classical training was required to fulfill his musical ambitions.

The Paris Conservatoire, however, rejected his application without hearing him, on the grounds of his nationality; Pierre Zimmerman, head of the piano faculty, commented that "America is a country of steam engines".

[3] After Gottschalk returned to the United States in 1853, he traveled extensively; a sojourn in Cuba during 1854 was the beginning of a series of trips to Central and South America.

He was quite taken with the music he heard on the island, so much so that he composed a work, probably in 1857, entitled Souvenir de Porto Rico; Marche des gibaros, Op.

A year after meeting Gottschalk, she performed for Abraham Lincoln and would go on to become a renowned concert pianist earning the nickname "Valkyrie of the Piano".

In late 1855 and early 1856 Gottschalk made connections with several notable figures of the New York art world, including the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, composer and musician George William Warren and Hudson River School landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.

[6] Like Gottschalk, Church had traveled extensively in Latin America (primarily Ecuador and Colombia) and produced a series of large-scale canvases of South American subject.

(According to an essay by Jeremy Nicholas for the booklet accompanying the recording "Gottschalk Piano Music" performed by Philip Martin on the Hyperion label, "He died ... of empyema, the result of a ruptured abscess in the abdomen.")

[12] His burial spot was originally marked by a magnificent marble monument, topped by an "Angel of Music" statue, which was irreparably damaged by vandals in 1959.

[13] In October 2012, after nearly fifteen years of fundraising by the Green-Wood Cemetery, a new "Angel of Music" statue, created by sculptors Giancarlo Biagi and Jill Burkee to replace the damaged one, was unveiled.

A melody from Gottschalk's Souvenirs d'Andalousie (Memories of Andalusia) forms the basis of a highly popular 20th century piece "Malagueña" by Ernesto Lecuona.

In 1984, Nimbus Records issued The Lady Fainted, a selection of piano fantasies, caprices, meditations and paraphrases played by Alan Marks.

[16] The music of Gottschalk was used in the soundtrack for the Michel Deville film Aux Petits Bonheurs  [fr], which was played by Noël Lee on a Steinway piano and released by Erato Records in 1994.

[18] A version of Gottschalk's Bamboula, with added lyrics, was recorded in April 1934 by trumpet player Abel Beauregard's dance band, the Orchestre Créole Matou from the French Caribbean Guadeloupe island.