Nevin was born in 1862, at Vineacre, on the banks of the Ohio, a few miles from Pittsburgh. There
he spent the first sixteen years of his life, and received all his schooling, most of it from his father,
Robert P. Nevin, editor and proprietor of a Pittsburgh newspaper, and a contributor to many
magazines. It is interesting to note that he also composed several campaign songs, among them
the popular "Our Nominee," used in the day of James K. Polk's candidacy. The first grand piano
ever taken across the Allegheny Mountains was carted over for Nevin's mother.

From his earliest infancy Nevin was musically inclined, and, at the age of four, was often taken
from his cradle to play for admiring visitors. To make up for the deficiency of his little legs, he used
to pile cushions on the pedals so that he might manipulate them from afar.

Nevin's father provided for his son both vocal and instrumental instruction, even taking him abroad
for two years of travel and music study in Dresden under Von Böhme. Later he studied the piano
for two years at Boston, under B. J. Lang, and composition under Stephen A. Emery, whose little
primer on harmony has been to American music almost what Webster's spelling-book was to our
letters.

At the end of two years he went to Pittsburgh, where he gave lessons, and saved money enough
to take him to Berlin. There he spent the years 1884, 1885, and 1886, placing himself in the hands
of Karl Klindworth. Of him Nevin says: "To Herr Klindworth I owe everything that has come to me
in my musical life. He was a devoted teacher, and his patience was tireless. His endeavor was not
only to develop the student from a musical standpoint, but to enlarge his soul in every way. To do
this, he tried to teach one to appreciate and to feel the influence of such great minds of literature
as Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. He used to insist that a man does not become a musician
by practising so many hours a day at the piano, but by absorbing an influence from all the arts and
all the interests of life, from architecture, painting, and even politics."

The effect of such broad training—enjoyed rarely enough by music students—is very evident in
Nevin's compositions. They are never narrow or provincial. They are the outpourings of a soul that
is not only intense in its activities, but is refined and cultivated in its expressions. This effect is
seen, too, in the poems Nevin chooses to set to music,—they are almost without exception verses
of literary finish and value. His cosmopolitanism is also remarkable, his songs in French, German,
and Italian having no trace of Yankee accent and a great fidelity to their several races.

In 1885, Hans von Bülow incorporated the best four pupils of his friend, Klindworth, into an artist
class, which he drilled personally. Nevin was one of the honored four, and appeared at the unique
public Zuhören of that year, devoted exclusively to the works of Brahms, Liszt, and Raff. Among the
forty or fifty studious listeners at these recitals, Frau Cosima Wagner, the violinist Joachim, and
many other celebrities were frequently present.

Nevin returned to America in 1887, and took up his residence in Boston, where he taught and
played at occasional concerts.

Eighteen hundred and ninety-two found him in Paris, where he taught, winning more pupils than
here. He was especially happy in imparting to singers the proper Auffassung (grasp, interpretation,
finish) of songs, and coached many American and French artists for the operatic stage. In 1893 the
restless troubadour moved on to Berlin, where he devoted himself so ardently to composition that
his health collapsed, and he was exiled a year to Algiers. The early months of 1895 he spent in
concert tours through this country. As Klindworth said of him, "he has a touch that brings tears," and
it is in interpretation rather than in bravura that he excels. He plays with that unusual combination of
elegance and fervor that so individualizes his composition.

Desirous of finding solitude and atmosphere for composition, he took up his residence in Florence,
where he composed his suite, "May in Tuscany" (op. 21). The "Arlecchino" of this work has much
sprightliness, and shows the influence of Schumann, who made the harlequin particularly his own;
but there is none of Chopin's nocturnity in the "Notturno," which presents the sussurus and the
moonlit, amorous company of "Boccaccio's Villa." The suite includes a "Misericordia" depicting a
midnight cortège along the Arno, and modelled on Chopin's funeral march in structure with its hoarse
dirge and its rich cantilena. The best number of the suite is surely the "Rusignuolo," an exceedingly
fluty bird-song. From Florence, Nevin went to Venice, where he lived in an old casa on the Grand
Canal, opposite the Browning palazzo, and near the house where Wagner wrote "Tristan und Isolde."
One day his man, Guido, took a day off, and brought to Venice an Italian sweetheart, who had lived
a few miles from the old dream-city and had never visited it. The day these two spent gondoliering
through the waterways, where romance hides in every nook, is imaginatively narrated in tone in
Nevin's suite, "Un Giorno in Venezia," a book more handsomely published even than the others of
his works, which have been among the earliest to throw off the disgraceful weeds of type and
design formerly worn by native compositions.

The Venetian suite gains a distinctly Italian color from its ingenuously sweet harmonies in thirds and
sixths, and its frankly lyric nature, and "The Day in Venice" begins logically with the dawn, which is
ushered in with pink and stealthy harmonies, then "The Gondoliers" have a morning mood of gaiety
that makes a charming composition. There is a "Canzone Amorosa" of deep fervor, with interjections
of "Io t'amo!" and "Amore" (which has the excellent authority of Beethoven's Sonata, op. 81, with its
"Lebe wohl"). The suite ends deliciously with a night scene in Venice, beginning with a choral "Ave
Maria," and ending with a campanella of the utmost delicacy.

After a year in Venice Nevin made Paris his home for a year, returning to America then, where he
has since remained.