Edward MacDowell was a celebrated American composer in the nineteenth century. He was born in New York City on December 18th, 1860. He grew up in a Quaker household, the son of Thomas MacDowell and Frances “Fanny” Knapp MacDowell.
Edward began piano lessons at the age of eight, and went on to enroll in the Paris Conservatoire. He then went on to Germany to continue his studies at the Frankfurt Conservatory. In Germany, MacDowell met Franz List. He played his own Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 15 for Liszt. Liszt was impressed and was instrumental in having MacDowell’s First Modern Suite, Op. 10, performed and then published by a prestigious firm in Leipzig.
MacDowell began working as a music teacher and fell in love with and married one of his students, Marian Nevins. MacDowell’s compositions include two piano concertos, two orchestral suites, four symphonic poems, four piano sonatas, piano suites, forty-two songs, and choral music, as well as dozens of piano transcriptions of eighteenth-century keyboard pieces.
You can share Edward MacDowell and His Cabin in the Pines, a sensitive, appealing and lively biography of America’s beloved composer, with your children. Learn about MacDowell’s Quaker beginnings, his irrepressible interest in music, his youthful triumphs abroad, his visit to the master, Franz Liszt, his romance with his pupil, the lovely Marian Nevins, their marriage and return to America, the launching of the Peterboro, New Hampshire, colony, which bears his name - these are some of the delightful stories included in this book by Opal Wheeler.