Charles Lucièn Lambert (1828/29-1896) was born in New Orleans, LA, to Richard Lambert, a well-known New Orleans performer and teacher, and  an unidentified free Creole mother. Charles Lucièn’s first lessons (piano) were with his father and by the late 1840s he and another New Orleans native, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (born in 1829), had established a friendly rivalry as virtuoso pianists. In 1853 Lambert, unhappy with the racial discrimination he faced in the US, left for France, where his performing and compositions were welcomed. He published his first work for piano in Paris in 1854; subsequently he wrote many more works, some of which because quite popular. In the early 1860s Lambert relocated his family to Brazil, where he was a successful performer, composer, and (later) manufacturer of pianos for the rest of his life. Although the majority of his life was spent elsewhere, the fundamentals of his musical career were established in the US.