Edward MacDowell

Trained in Paris and then in Frankfurt with Joachim Raff, Edward MacDowell built his early career as a pianist in Germany and settled permanently in the United States in 1888. Two piano concertos and a group of orchestral suites stand beside the piano cycles — Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces, New England Idylls, Fireside Tales — including To a Wild Rose. Columbia University made him its first professor of music in 1896. The farm he acquired at Peterborough, New Hampshire, later became, in the hands of the pianist Marian MacDowell, the artists' residency that still bears the name. He died in 1908. Raff brought him to Liszt in 1882, and with Liszt's help his first Modern Suite was heard in Zurich; the Second Piano Concerto was first played in 1889. He had married Marian Nevins, formerly his pupil, while the two were still living in Germany. At Columbia he was asked to build a department of music and advocated a broader place for the arts in university education, resigning in 1904 after the disputes that followed; the same year he was among the first seven Americans elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.