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Petersburg, and at the end of that time had accumulated a mass of manuscripts destined to make his name famous all over Europe, while his reputation as a skilful pianist was already world-wide. He visited England again in 1857, and the next year returned home and settled in St. Petersburg, about which time he was made Imperial Concert Director, with a life-pension.
A new pianist and fresh officers arrived about nine o'clock, and dancing was continued until one or two in the morning. To yawning subalterns the house in Mount Street seemed at first like a little paradise. The incessant dancing was considered fatiguing, but there were interludes in which claret was drunk, cigarettes smoked, and loose conversation permitted in the dining-room. Then the dinners!
The pianist who has worked for hours to get such a composition as near as possible to his conception of perfection is never given the credit for his work, except by a few connoisseurs, many of whom have been through a similarly exacting experience.
She was thankful for the shelter afforded by the great silver tea-pot. Mamie's back was turned to her, but Edna seemed desirous of including her in the conversation. "Have you heard Avenel, Miss Agar?" she asked presently in her gentle, drawling way. "No. Is he very famous? I have never heard of him as a pianist." "Oh, his professional name is Meryon, of course.
It would be a matter of difficulty to decide in which quality Mendelssohn excelled the most whether as composer, pianist, organist, or conductor of the orchestra. Nobody ever knew better how to communicate, as if by an electric fluid, his own conceptions of a work, to a large body of performers.
Dancing was the main attraction, and in the principal room were the usual iron-fisted pianist and red-faced cornet-player, who should be such profound moralists with all their nightly experiences; and dainty little girls were whirling round with the fortunate boys who had elder sisters at home to bully them into acquiring the mysteries of the valse, while the less favoured stood in doorways gibing with the scornfulness of envy.
Let us by all means preserve it. Imagine the future of music if every piece were to be played in the selfsame way by every player like a series of ordinary piano playing machines. The remarkable apparatus for recording the playing of virtuosos, and then reproducing it through a mechanical contrivance, is somewhat of a revelation to the pianist who tries it for the first time.
Bayreuth from the first had attracted a very disagreeable set of persons, men whom fathers would not allow to speak to their daughters or to their sons. Wagner himself had invited ridicule by claiming that his theatre was not to be a mere opera-house, but, as he told Sir Charles Hallé, the centre of the intellectual and artistic world. "A noble ambition!" scornfully replied the pianist.
In the spring of 1896 a Department of Music was founded at Columbia University, of New York, the professorship of which was offered to MacDowell. He had now been living eight years in Boston; his fame as a pianist and teacher was constantly growing; indeed more pupils came to him than he could accept.
This morning he again played at Raimund Härtel's, in a way to make us all tremble and rejoice, some études of Chopin, a number of the Rossini soirées, and other things." Of other contemporary pianists Hummel, "ten years behind the time," and Thalberg, whom he liked better as pianist than as composer, are alluded to.
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