I got most of it but I still have trouble figuring out what a ground floor romantic might be.
ground floor is an idiom for “in at the beginning”. Maybe if I knew who the composer was? In music, the Romantic era began around 1830 … who is this guy?
Or, the idiom was misused, as is so regrettably common, and is supposed to mean something quite different.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), from New Orleans, the toast of Paris. I found the link in the Wikipedia article on his piano piece “Le Bananier,” which made the curious connection with Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor.
The author is not to blame, but the website editor who scanned the text from a book into digital format and didn’t copy-edit thoroughly: