Heymann. Mrs. MacDowell and her son were not slow to avail themselves
of this proposal, and the end of the year 1878 found them in
Wiesbaden. Here they met Heymann, who had just concluded a
triumphantly successful _tournee_ of the European capitals. They
heard him play, and were impressed by his mastery and poetic feeling.
Heymann was not, however, to begin teaching at the Frankfort
Conservatory until the following autumn, so MacDowell remained in
Wiesbaden, studying composition and theory with the distinguished
critic and teacher, Louis Ehlert, while his mother returned to
America.

[Illustration: MACDOWELL AT EIGHTEEN (THE FIGURE AT THE EXTREME LEFT
OF THE GROUP) AS A MEMBER OF RAFF'S CLASS AT THE FRANKFORT
CONSERVATORY]

"Ehlert," MacDowell has written, "was very kind to me, and when I
asked him for 'lessons' he refused flatly, but said he would be glad
for us to 'study together,' as he put it. This rather staggered me,
as my idea in leaving Paris was to get a severe and regenerating
overhauling. I worked hard all winter, however, and heard lots of new
music at the _Cur Haus_, which was like manna in the desert after my
long French famine. Ehlert, who thought that Heymann was not the man
for me, spoke and wrote to Von Bulow about me; but the latter,
without even having seen me, wrote Ehlert a most insulting letter,
asking how Ehlert dared 'to propose such a silly thing' to him; that
he was not a music teacher, and could not waste his time on an
American boy, anyway. So, after all, I went to Frankfort and entered
the conservatory." MacDowell's first interview with Raff, in the
autumn of 1879, was, as he relates, "not promising." "Heymann took me
to him and told him, among other things, that, having studied for
several years the 'French School' of composition, I wished to study
in Germany. Raff immediately flared up and declared that there was no
such thing nowadays as 'schools'--that music was eclectic nowadays;
that if some French writers wrote flimsy music it arose simply from
flimsy attainments, and such stuff could never form a 'school.'
German and other writers were to be criticised from the same
standpoint--their music was bad, middling, or good; but there was no
such thing as cramping it into 'schools' nowadays, when all national
musical traits were common property."

MacDowell remained in the Conservatory for two years, studying
composition with Raff and piano with Heymann. His stay there was
eminently sa