MacDowell remained in the Conservatory for two years, studying composition with Raff and piano with Heymann.  His stay there was eminently satisfactory and profitable to himself.  He found both Raff and Heymann artistic mentors of an inspiring kind; in Raff, particularly, he encountered a most sympathetic and encouraging preceptor, and an influence at once potent and engrossing—­a force which was to direct the currents of his own temperament into definite artistic channels.

For Heymann as a pianist MacDowell had a fervent admiration.  He spoke of him as “a marvel,” whose technique “seemed mysteriously capable of anything.”  “When I went to him,” MacDowell has said, “I had already transposed most of the fugues and preludes of Bach (Paris ideas of ’thoroughness’!) and had gone through much rough technical work.  Heymann let me do what I wanted; but in hearing him practise and play I learned more in a week than I ever had before.”  When Heymann, who had already begun to show symptoms of the mental disorder which ultimately overcame him, left the Conservatory in 1881, he recommended MacDowell as his successor—­a proposal which was cordially seconded by Raff.  But there were antagonistic influences at work within the Conservatory.  MacDowell’s candidacy was opposed by certain of the professors, on account, it was said, of his “youth”; but also, doubtless, because of the advocacy of Heymann, who was not popular with his colleagues; for he dared, MacDowell has said, “to play the classics as if they had been written by men with blood in their veins.”  So MacDowell failed to get the appointment.  He continued, unofficially, as a pupil of Heymann, and went to him constantly for criticism and advice.

MacDowell began at this time to take private pupils, and one of these pupils, an American, Miss Marian Nevins, was later to become his wife.  He was then living in lodgings kept by a venerable German spinster who was the daughter of one of Napoleon’s officers.  She was very fond of her young lodger, and through her he became acquainted with the work of Erckmann-Chartrian, whose tales deeply engrossed him at this time.  Later he moved to the Cafe Milani, on the Zeil, at that time an institution of considerable celebrity.  As a teacher he made a rather prominent place for himself; the recommendation of Raff—­who had said to one of MacDowell’s pupils that he expected “great things” of him—­had helped at the start, and his personality counted for not a little.  His appearance at this time (he was then nineteen years old) is described as having been strikingly unlike that of the typical American as known in Germany.  “His keen and very blue eyes, his pink and white skin, reddish mustache and imperial and jet black hair, brushed straight up in the prevalent German fashion, caused him to be known as ‘the handsome American.’” Teaching at that time must have been a sore trial to him.  He was, as he continued to be throughout his life, painfully shy; yet he seems, strangely enough, to have had, even then, the knack for imparting instruction, for quickening the interest and stimulating the enthusiasm of those who came under his guidance, which in later years made him so remarkable a teacher.