Edward Alexander MacDowell was born in New York City on 18 December 1860, the son of a Manhattan milk dealer, and had his first piano lessons from Juan Buitrago, a Colombian violinist then living with the family, and from Buitrago’s friends the Cuban pianist Pablo Desverine and the Venezuelan Teresa Carreño. His mother took him to Paris, where in 1877 he won a scholarship place at the Conservatoire and studied for two years with Antoine-François Marmontel at the top of his class. He continued at Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt with Carl Heymann for piano and Joachim Raff for composition; Liszt heard him there in 1880, and in 1881 recommended his First Modern Suite to the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein and introduced him to Breitkopf & Härtel. He married his Frankfurt pupil Marian Griswold Nevins in 1884, and died on 23 January 1908.

He stayed in Germany after his studies, teaching in Darmstadt and Wiesbaden and from 1885 devoting himself almost entirely to composition, which brought financial trouble and a return to the United States in the autumn of 1888. He settled in Boston as a concert pianist and teacher, appearing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and in 1896 was invited by Seth Low to become Columbia University’s first professor of music and to build its music department, where he stayed until 1904. He is remembered chiefly for the Second Piano Concerto and the piano suites Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces and New England Idylls — the first of which contains “To a Wild Rose” — and in 1904 was one of the first seven Americans elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_MacDowell
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q450467