He played in public about the year 1846, in one of the concerts of the Boston Academy of Music, given in the Odeon, which was then the principal concert-hall in Boston. On this occasion he had the accompaniment of a string quartet. This was his first regular appearance in public. About this time, too, he began taking pianoforte lessons of Mr. Henry Schmidt, to whom reference has been made as the conductor of Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" on the occasion of the first performance of this work in Boston. Mr. Schmidt's instrument was the violin, but he was also an excellent pianoforte teacher, and to his careful and skillful instruction he owe very much. He remember that in those days he was more fond of playing "if my habit of improvising in a loose or inaccurate way can be so called "than of careful practicing and close attention to detail. William Mason was nervous at many times at several occasion but Mr. Henry Schmidt taught him very well. During the season of 1846 I played the pianoforte part throughout the series of six concerts of chamber-music given by the Harvard Musical Association. .
Musical Education .
In 1949, he decided to move abroad for music studies accompanied by Mr. Frank Hill of Boston, who had already attained some distinction as a pianist. He faced weird accidents in Paris and one of them was he can't spoke French and people who lived over there thought that he is from England. He also met with Giacomo Meyerbeer who was German opera composer. During in his tour he met with different composers like in Hamburg I met Carl Mayer of Dresden, a fine pianist of the Hummel school, and Mortier de Fontaine, who was very well known in his day as a Beethoven-player "had, in fact, won considerable fame as the first pianist to perform Beethoven's "Sonata, Op. 106" in public. Also he met famous European composers of that time like Ignaz Moscheles, Beethoven, and Fredric Chopin.
However, as William Ashline writes, "To choose all of an infinite number of narrative paths is impossible given the finite confines of a textual world", and, "such a text is practically unfathomable because we could not image what it would look like" (5). ...
