That piece was a high point of a livestreamed recital that Jeremy Denk gave in October at Caramoor. Davis also offers a compelling account of Wiggins’s most remarkable piece, “The Battle of Manassas,” a nearly eight-minute work written around 1863, when he was 14, that evokes the first major victory of the Confederate army, an event that had been recounted to Wiggins in detail. Many were published and circulated widely during his prime performing years.Īmong the pieces are bewitching scores like “Oliver Galop,” “Virginia Polka” and “The Rainstorm,” which evoke 19th-century classical styles, as well as parlor songs and dance music of the day.
BLIND PIANO PRODIGY SERIES
Perhaps the truest insights into Wiggins’s music - and, in a way, his life - are the compositions he wrote from childhood on, which were transcribed by a series of tutors who sometimes joined him on the road and who attested to their authenticity. The nearly 50-year career of “Blind Tom” Wiggins had begun. One day, without warning, he started playing a piece he had heard one of the daughters practicing. Tom was allowed to plunk out notes and pound the keys on the piano.
He soon became a kind of mascot at the main house when the young Bethune daughters sang and played the piano and he listened, seemingly in ecstasy.
But he had an obsession with sounds: rain, wind, clanking tools, kitchen pans, roosters crowing, rattling chains and, especially, clapping, shouting, songs and music. From what is known, as a young boy Tom could barely walk or express his needs. Wiggins’s life is shrouded in misinformation and exploitative mythologizing. He had a habit of gyrating and moving his body spasmodically while performing, and even while being promoted as the “Wonder of the World,” many described him as an “idiot,” even an “imbecile.” (It is possible that he was on the autism spectrum.) Though his talents were astonishing, Wiggins’s concerts became outlandish spectacles.
The composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles deemed him a “singular and inexplicable phenomenon.” The Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, though insisting that Wiggins was no prodigy in the traditional sense, described him as a “marvelous freak of nature.” Mark Twain followed Wiggins’s career for years. During a tour to Europe when Wiggins was 16, he won praise from major musicians. There are countless testimonies to his fathomless skills, even if they often reek of paternalistic or white supremacist attitudes. One of his tricks involved playing “Fisher’s Hornpipe” with one hand and “Yankee Doodle” with the other, while singing “Dixie.” He could repeat political speeches he had heard months before, mimicking the vocal cadences of the speaker, even in foreign languages unknown to him.
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