Conditions there, however, were not just to his liking, and after two years he began to think the school was not the place for him.  It was the summer of 1878, the year of the Exposition.  Edward and his mother attended a festival concert and heard Nicholas Rubinstein play the Tschaikowsky B flat minor piano Concerto.  His performance was a revelation.  “I can never learn to play the piano like that if I stay here,” exclaimed Edward, as they left the hall.

They began to consider the merits of the different European schools of music, and finally chose Stuttgart.  Mrs. MacDowell and her son went there in November hoping that in this famous Conservatory could be found the right kind of instruction.

But alas, MacDowell soon found out his mistake.  He discovered that he would have to unlearn all he had acquired and begin from the beginning.  And even then the instruction was not very thorough.

They now thought of Frankfort, where the composer Joachim Raff was the director and Carl Heymann, a very brilliant pianist, was one of the instructors.

After months of delay, during which young MacDowell worked under the guidance of Ehlert, he at last entered the Frankfort Conservatory, studying composition with Raff, and piano with Heymann.  Both proved very inspiring teachers.  For Heymann he had the greatest admiration, calling him a marvel, whose technic was equal to anything.  “In hearing him practise and play, I learned more in a week than I ever knew before.”

Edward MacDowell remained in close study at the Frankfort Conservatory for two years, his mother having in the meantime returned to America.  He had hoped to obtain a place as professor on the teaching staff of the institution.  Failing to do this he took private pupils.  One of these, Miss Marian Nevins, he afterwards married.  He must have been a rather striking looking youth at this time.  He was nineteen.  Tall and vigorous, with blue eyes, fair skin, rosy cheeks, very dark hair and reddish mustache, he was called “the handsome American.”  He seemed from the start, to have success in teaching, though he was painfully shy, and always remained so.

In 1881, when he was twenty, he applied for the position of head piano teacher in the Darmstadt Conservatory, and was accepted.  It meant forty hours a week of drudgery, and as he preferred to live in Frankfort, he made the trip each day between the two towns.  Besides this he went once a week to a castle about three hours away, and taught some little counts and countesses, really dull and sleepy children, who cared but little if anything for music.  However the twelve hours spent in the train each week, were not lost, as he composed the greater part of his Second Modern Suite for piano, Op. 14; the First Modern Suite had been written in Frankfort the year before.  He was reading at this period a great deal of poetry, both German and English, and delving into the folk and fairy lore of romantic Germany.  All these imaginative studies exerted great influence on his subsequent compositions, both as to subject and content.