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.