At the last concert I received a request from two or three people to play "Yankee Doodle" with one hand and "Old Hundred" with the other. Possibly they had heard me do so in 1855. Remembering my experience then, I made a few remarks, in which I told them that some little feeling had been created fifteen years before by my doing the same thing, but that—and here I got a little mixed—in playing "Yankee Doodle" with "Old Hundred" I did not intend any disrespect to "Yankee Doodle." At this the audience began to laugh. Schuyler Colfax, who was then Vice-President of the United States, was on the stage behind me, and I could hear him chuckling. I thought to myself, "Well, I have made some funny mistake, though I don't know what it is, so I won't go back and try to correct it."
Afterward Mr. Colfax, who was a noted speaker, told me that whenever he made a lapsus linguae, if it amused the audience he never attempted to correct it.
On my return from this concert tour to New York, I established the series of chamber-music concerts which, begun as an experiment, continued thirteen years. I also settled down as a teacher. While I had returned from Weimar with the full intention of continuing my career as a piano-virtuoso, and while my concert tour had been promising enough, I found that the public demanded a constant repetition of pieces to which it happened to take a liking, and I knew that I should soon weary of playing the same things over and over again. Moreover, I felt that from my father I had inherited a certain capacity for giving instruction, and that the chamber-music concerts and engagements with the Philharmonic and at other concerts in New York and elsewhere would serve to keep up my practice as a virtuoso.
SETTLING DOWN TO TEACH
In 1855 I accepted as pupils some four or five young ladies who were being educated at a fashionable boarding-school in New York. One of these girls was very bright and intelligent but without special musical talent. She was extremely averse to application in study, and the problem for me was to invent some way by which mental concentration could be compelled, for from the moment she sat down to the piano to practise she was constantly looking at the clock to see if her practice-hour was up. After a little study I found that in playing a scale up one octave and back, without intermission, in 9⁄8 time, there are necessarily nine repetitions of the scale before the initial tone falls again on the first part of the measure. Thus,
and so on until another accent falls upon the initial C. Such an exercise is called a rhythmus, and the repetitions compel mental concentration just as surely as the addition of a column of figures does. I found that if the compass was extended four octaves, thus, from
the nine repetitions of the scale would require from three to four minutes if played at a moderate rate of speed. I saw at once that a state of mental concentration could not be avoided by the pupil, and that in this exercise lay a basic principle. I gave the exercise to my pupil. The result was that when the next lesson-hour came around and I asked her how she found the new exercise, she exclaimed: "How do I like it? Why, you have played a pretty trick on me! It took me nearly an hour to accomplish it; but I like it. Why did you not give it to me before!" "Because," I said, "I invented it simply in order to compel your attention to your work." Following up the principle of grouping the tones, I applied the rhythmic process not only to all sorts of scale passages, but included in the treatment arpeggios, broken chords, octaves, and in fact all passages idiomatic of the pianoforte. The work of amplification was readily accomplished, and the result was a complete method in which for the first time, so far as I am aware, scientific rhythmic treatment was elaborated. This "Accentual Treatment of Exercises," as I called the system, was first published in the Mason & Hoadley Method, New York, 1867. The importance of accentual treatment is now recognized in every modern method.
The idea of starting a series of matinées of chamber-music occurred to me. I wished especially to introduce to the public the "Grand Trio in B Major, Op. 8," by Johannes Brahms, and to play other concerted works, both classical and modern, for this kind of work interested me more than mere piano-playing. So I asked Carl Bergmann, who was the most noted orchestral conductor of those days, and thus well acquainted with musicians, to get together a good string quartet. This he accomplished in a day or two, and made me acquainted with Theodore Thomas, first violin; Joseph Mosenthal, second violin; and George Matzka, viola, Bergmann himself being the violoncellist. We very soon began rehearsing, and our first concert, or rather matinée, took place in Dodworth's Hall, opposite Eleventh street, and one door above Grace Church in Broadway. The program was as follows: