Charles Lucien Lambert was born in New Orleans to a transplanted New Yorker and a free Creole woman of color. The Lamberts were an active musical family in a city where Free people of color constituted a special class, with privileges not available to most free blacks. In fact, Charles’ father Richard conducted the Philharmonic Society… the Crescent City’s first concert orchestra, staffed with both white players and musicians of color.
Footloose, Lambert would move to France and then, in the 1860s, to Rio de Janeiro, where he became a member of the Brazilian National Institute of Music and operated a piano and music store. He was so associated with French romantic music there that some historians have mistakenly referred to him as a Frenchman.
In 1869 he had a reunion with another famed New Orleans musician, the visiting white French creole Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Lambert and his son helped perform a huge work of Gottschalk's requiring 31 pianos!
As a teacher, Lambert’s legacy lived on in the great Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth… and in his own son Lucien-Léon Guillaume Lambert.
Referred to as Lambert Jr. he studied in France with Jules Massenet and became a better-known musician and composer than his father. In 1905 he recorded three wax cylinders for the Pathè Company in Portugal… believed to be the first classical music recordings ever made by a performer of African descent.
Charles Lucien and Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert… classically black.
