When as a new Professor of Musicology at the famous Leipzig Conservatory in the late 1990s I started studying the nineteenth-century influx of foreign students to that institution, I stumbled upon George Whitefield Chadwick. Although several summaries of the history of the international student clientele of this renowned conservatory had been published, no particular focus had ever been placed upon the enormous number of Americans coming to this Saxon “Mecca of music” for study purposes.

Nineteenth-century Leipzig was not only well-known for its international flair as a centre of commerce. It also had an enormous reputation as a musical city because of its vivid musical life based on the Gewandhaus, the Opera, and the Thomaskirche. The famous names of those who once had performed here and those who were still active, as well as the many resident music publishers and instrument makers contributed to this overall reputation. The Conservatorium der Musik, founded in 1843 by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) added a further promising element to the musical and academic landscape of “Pleiß-Athen,” as the city was nicknamed.

The unexpected discovery of a composer whose music I had never heard before, and despite all my attempts, found very difficult to access, led to a further and constantly growing interest in both the American background and context of this composer, and the results and effects studying in Leipzig had produced. How were nineteenth-century music history in America and Germany linked to each other? What types of crosscurrent could be observed?

A grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and a sabbatical at the Hochschule fuer Musik und Theater Leipzig gave me the chance to start researching on this particular transatlantic relationship in the United States; therefore I am indebted to both organizations for their support. The encounter with Chadwick's family, mainly his grandson, the late Theodore Chadwick Jr. (II), and his great-grandson Theodore Chadwick (III), gave me the opportunity of identifying a part of Chadwick's thus far unknown legacy. Likewise I am very grateful to the family. Without their aid my friendship with the composer George Whitefield Chadwick would not have had a chance to grow. Being a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Music of Harvard University enabled me to build up my research project.