begged to propose to Mrs. MacDowell that she submit her son to him for a three-years’ course of free instruction under his personal supervision, offering also to be responsible for his support during that time.  The issue was a momentous one, and Mrs. MacDowell, in much perplexity of mind as to the wisest settlement of her son’s future, laid the matter before Marmontel, who, fearful of losing one of his aptest pupils, urgently advised her against diverting her son from a musical career.  The decision was finally left to MacDowell, and it was agreed that he should continue his studies at the Conservatory.  Although it seems not unlikely that, with his natural facility as a painter and draughtsman and his uncommon faculties of vision and imagination, he would have achieved distinction as a painter, it may be questioned whether in that case music would not have lost appreciably more than art would have gained.

Conditions at the Conservatory were not to the taste of MacDowell, for he found his notions of right artistic procedure frequently opposed to those that prevailed among his teachers and fellow students.  His growing disaffection was brought to a head during the summer of 1878.  It was the year of the Exposition, and MacDowell and his mother attended a festival concert at which Nicholas Rubinstein played in memorable style Tchaikovsky’s B-flat minor piano concerto.  His performance was a revelation to the young American.  “I never can learn to play like that if I stay here,” he said resolutely to his mother, as they left the concert hall.  Mrs. MacDowell, whose fixed principle it was to permit her son to decide his affairs according to his lights, thereupon considered with him the merits of various European Conservatories of reputation.  They thought of Moscow, because of Nicholas Rubinstein’s connection with the Conservatory there.  Leipsic suggested itself; Frankfort was strongly recommended, and Stuttgart seemed to offer conspicuous advantages.  The latter place was finally determined upon, and Mrs. MacDowell and her son went there from Paris at Thanksgiving time, having agreed that the famous Stuttgart Conservatory would yield the desired sort of instruction.

The choice was scarcely a happy one.  It did not take MacDowell long to realise that, if he expected to conform to the Stuttgart requirements, he would be compelled to unlearn all that he had already acquired—­would have virtually, so far as his technique was concerned, to begin de novo.  Rubinstein himself, MacDowell was told by one of the students, would have had to reform his pianistic manners if he had placed himself under the guidance of the Stuttgart pedagogues.  Nor does the system of instruction then in effect at the Conservatory appear to have been thorough even within its own sphere.  MacDowell used to tell of a student who could play an ascending scale superlatively well, but who was helpless before the problem of playing the same scale in its descending form.