William Mason (ii)

William Mason (Boston, 1829 – New York, 1908) was a pianist, teacher and composer, the son of the musician Lowell Mason, one of the central figures in music education in the United States. His career helps explain how the European Romantic piano tradition reached American musical life in the mid-nineteenth century.

He was first trained by his father and by Henry Schmidt, and made his debut at the Boston Academy of Music in March 1846. In 1849 he travelled to Europe to study in Leipzig with Moscheles, Hauptmann and Richter, in Prague with Dreyschock, and in Weimar with Liszt, during stays that fall in 1853 and 1854. While on the Continent and in London, where he performed with the Harmonic Union in 1853, he appeared in numerous countries and enjoyed the prestige of being a virtuoso pupil of Liszt. His memoirs, Memories of a Musical Life, are a valuable source for their anecdotal account of Liszt's circle in Weimar. He returned to the United States in July 1854.

He was possibly the first pianist to give concerts in the United States without guest artists, although the life of touring did not appeal to him, and he chose to settle in New York to devote himself to teaching. There he wrote several important piano manuals and championed a fingering technique known in the country as 'the Mason touch'. In 1855, together with Theodore Thomas and others, he founded the Mason and Thomas Chamber Music Soirées, which for thirteen years introduced American audiences to Romantic works.

His output includes more than fifty virtuoso pieces for piano, in a conventional, elegant and often excessively refined style, as well as numerous choral pieces gathered in his collections, among them The Social Glee Book and Asaph, or The Choir Book, produced in collaboration with other authors. In 1872 he received a doctorate in music from Yale College. He is remembered today above all for his pedagogical work and for having been a bridge between Liszt's piano school and American teaching.