the position of an American master.  We may have no distinctive school of music, but here is one young man who has placed himself on a level with the men owned by the world.  This D-minor concerto is a strong, wholesome, beautiful work of art, vital with imagination, and made with masterly skill.”  And Mr. James Huneker observed that “it easily ranks with any modern work in this form.  Dramatic in feeling, moulded largely, and its themes musically eloquent, it sounds a model of its kind—­the kind which Johannes Brahms gave the world over thirty years ago in his D-minor concerto.”  In March of the following year MacDowell gave two piano recitals in the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, New York, playing, beside a number of his smaller pieces, his “Tragica” sonata, which made, if anything, an even profounder impression than it had made in Boston two years before.  Probably the most signal of the honours that came to him at this time was paid him when the Boston Symphony Orchestra placed both his “Indian” suite and his first concerto on the programme of its New York concert on January 23, 1896, at the Metropolitan Opera House.

[6] A single movement of the “Sonata Tragica,” the third, was played by MacDowell in Boston on March 18, 1892, at the last of the three recitals which he gave in that season at Chickering Hall.

In the spring of 1896 it was determined to found a department of music at Columbia University, New York.  This was made possible by a fund of $150,000 given to the trustees by Mrs. Elizabeth Mary Ludow, with the proviso that the income was to be applied in such ways as should “tend more effectually to elevate the standard of musical instruction in the United States, and to afford the most favourable opportunity for acquiring musical instruction of the highest order.”  In May of that year the professorship was offered to MacDowell, the committee who had the appointment in charge announcing the consensus of their opinion to be that he was “the greatest musical genius America has produced.”  MacDowell, though he valued greatly the honour of his selection, considered anxiously the advisability of accepting the post.  He now had more pupils than he could take, and his pecuniary circumstances would not be improved by the change, save that a settled income would be assured to him.  This was of course a tempting prospect; on the other hand, the task of organizing de novo a new department in a large university, and the curtailed freedom which the position would necessitate, made him hesitate.  But the assurance of an income free from precariousness finally decided him in favour of acceptance; and in the following autumn he moved from Boston to New York, and began his duties at Columbia.