[Illustration:  MACDOWELL AND TEMPLETON STRONG From a photograph taken at Wiesbaden in 1888]

They settled in Boston, as being less huge and tumultuous than New York, and took lodgings in Mount Vernon Street.  In later years they lived successively at 13 West Cedar Street and at 38 Chestnut Street.  Though all of his more important music was as yet unwritten, MacDowell found himself already established in the view of the musical public as a composer abundantly worthy of honour at the hands of his countrymen.  He made his first public appearance in America, in the double capacity of pianist and composer, at a Kneisel Quartet concert in Chickering Hall, Boston, on November 19, 1888, playing the Prelude, Intermezzo, and Presto from his first piano suite, and, with Kneisel and his associates, the piano part in Goldmark’s B-flat Quintet.  He was cordially received, and Mr. Apthorp, writing in the Transcript of his piano playing, praised his technique as “ample and brilliant,” and as being especially admirable “in the higher phases of playing”; “he plays,” wrote this critic, “with admirable truth of sentiment and musical understanding.”  Of the early and immature suite he could not well write with much enthusiasm, though he found in it “life and brightness.”

In the following spring MacDowell made a more auspicious appearance, and one which more justly disclosed his abilities as a composer, when, on March 5, he played his second concerto, for the first time in public, at an orchestral concert in Chickering Hall, New York, under the direction of Mr. Theodore Thomas.  His success was then immediate and emphatic.  Mr. Krehbiel, in the Tribune, praised the concerto as “a splendid composition, so full of poetry, so full of vigor, as to tempt the assertion that it must be placed at the head of all works of its kind produced by either a native or adopted citizen of America”; and he confessed to having “derived keener pleasure from the work of the young American than from the experienced and famous Russian”—­Tchaikovsky, whose Fifth Symphony was performed then for the first time in New York.  “Several enthusiastic and unquestionably sincere recalls,” concluded the writer, “were the tokens of gratitude and delight with which his townspeople rewarded him.”  A month later MacDowell played the same concerto in Boston, at a Symphony concert, under Mr. Gericke; his performance of it evoked “rapt attention,” and “the very heartiest of plaudits, in which both orchestra and audience joined.”

In the summer of that year (1889) MacDowell and his wife went abroad.  He had been invited to take part in an “American Concert” at the Paris Exposition, and on July 12, under Mr. Van der Stucken’s direction, he played his second concerto.[4] After a short stay on the continent, he returned with his wife to America.

[4] The rest of the programme, it may be interesting to note, contained Arthur Foote’s overture, “In the Mountains,” Van der Stucken’s suite, “The Tempest,” Chadwick’s “Melpomene” overture, Paine’s “Oedipus Tyrannus” prelude, a romance and polonaise for violin and orchestra by Henry Holden Huss, and songs by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Dudley Buck, Chadwick, Foote, Van der Stucken.  The concert ended with an “ouverture festivale sur l’Hymne Americaine, ’The Star Spangled Banner,’” by Dudley Buck.