One of the most celebrated vocalists of his day, the Dutch baritone Johannes Martinus Messchaert (1857–1922) enjoyed an illustrious career as a soloist, pedagogue, and choral conductor. (See Plate 24.) It was not as an opera singer that Messchaert made his name but as a singer of lieder and oratorio; above all, his performances of Schubert lieder and his role as Christ in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion earned him accolades in the German and Dutch press. Having studied with the Frankfurt-based vocal pedagogue Julius Stockhausen, Messchaert went on to collaborate with the pianist Julius Röntgen, with whom he established his solo career and helped co-found the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music in the 1880s. While Messchaert and Röntgen concertized throughout the Dutch- and Germanspeaking lands, no city received them as openly as Vienna, where Messchaert won the admiration of Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Mahler, among others.

Messchaert was by all accounts, then, a master of vocal technique and of song, and it is no wonder that Schenker too would laud him as one of the greatest singers of his age. While still in the early stages of his career as a music critic, Schenker reviewed at least two performances by Messchaert and Röntgen favorably in February of 1896 (“A deep feeling for the text and its tones makes [Messchaert’s art] true to both poetry and music, and with artistic truth beauty is achieved.” ). In that year Schenker had also become personally aquainted with the baritone, and in 1899 Schenker and Messchaert put together their own small concert tour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from January 8 to February 3), with Schenker as Messchaert’s accompanist. Although Schenker seems to have tired somewhat of the tour, the musical collaboration with Messchaert undoubtedly had left a lasting impression. Some twenty-nine years after their collaboration, Schenker wrote to Felix-Eberhard von Cube: