I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in
music. Schell, his name was, and they called him “Professor.” He lived
over in Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian
refugees into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year—at
first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to
Washington City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and
Handel and Mozart—nothing so modern as Mendelssohn—into my not
unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to
compose dramas, and in the end operas.
Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national
capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a
charity concert. She had sung “The Last Rose of Summer,” and I had
played her brother-in-law’s variation upon “Home, Sweet Home.” The
audience was enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we
came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at
the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations
upon “Old Folks At Home,” which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the
words. Then they fairly took the roof off.
Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She
was in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the
patronage of Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: “The time
may come when you will be giving concerts.” She was indignant.
“Nevertheless,” I continued, “let me teach you a sure encore.” I played
her Stephen Foster’s immortal ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was
that it served her even a better turn than it had served Adelina Patti.
I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as
they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy’s
Minstrels.