During his last years spent in New York, he was poverty-stricken and miserable, and sold his songs, as soon as they were written, for a few dollars in order to live. It seems too bad to have to say that much of his money and his life were squandered thoughtlessly.
Curiously enough, his favorite poet was Edgar Allan Poe, whose life resembled his own in many sad details. He loved to go up and down in the Broadway stages, often thinking out his melodies as he rode. This reminds us of Walt Whitman, who rode up and down Fifth Avenue alongside his friend Pete Dooley, the driver of the stage coach!
Stephen Foster died in New York in 1864 as the result of an accident in which he had severed an artery. He was saved from burial in Potter’s Field, by the arrival of his brothers and his wife, and he was buried in Pittsburgh beside his parents whom he had immortalized in The Old Folks at Home.
CHAPTER XXXI
America Comes of Age
For many years Boston was a center of musical life.
At the close of the Civil War a school was well under way in New England, which we might call the classical period of American music.
B. J. Lang
Although Benjamin J. Lang (1837–1909) never published his compositions and never allowed them to be heard, he had much influence on Boston’s musical life, having been conductor of the Handel and Haydn and of the St. Cecilia societies, and the piano teacher of such musicians as Arthur Foote, William Apthorp, Ethelbert Nevin and Margaret Ruthven Lang, his daughter.
John Knowles Paine
John Knowles Paine (1839–1906), was the first professor of music at Harvard. In 1862, he gave his services without pay for a course of lectures on music, but they were not appreciated. When President Eliot became head of the University, music was made part of the college curriculum with Professor Paine at the head of the department. In 1896, Walter R. Spalding was made assistant and since Professor Paine’s death has been full professor.