MacDowell composed this work in 1884 and 1885, and played the first performance with Theodore Thomas and his eponymous orchestra in Chickering Hall, New York City, on March 5, 1889. The accompaniment is scored for two each of winds and trumpets, four horns, three trombones, timpani, and strings. In American Music since 1910, Virgil Thomson cited MacDowell as "our nearest to a great composer before [Charles] Ives. His short works for piano still speak to us." Let us add that the Second Piano Concerto remains among the most popular of way too few staples in the concerto genre by American composers. Only Gershwin's Concerto in F, composed 40 years after, enjoys a comparable status in the repertory, followed distantly by Aaron Copland's single endeavor (1926), and Samuel Barber's lone essay.

MacDowell was 15 when his mother took him abroad to study—at the Paris Conservatoire for three years (where Debussy was a fellow student), then in Stuttgart and Frankfurt for three years (where Joseph Raff was his composition professor and Carl Heymann his piano pedagogue). In 1881 the Darmstadt Conservatory made MacDowell its chief piano instructor. In 1882 he took his First Piano Concerto to Liszt, who advised him to concentrate on composition, and persuaded the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf & Härtel to publish Modern Suites Nos. 1 and 2, thereby establishing MacDowell here and abroad as the first notable "American" composer.

He returned briefly to the U.S. in 1884, to marry, then returned to Germany. On his honeymoon he sketched what became the scherzo in this concerto, which was completed at Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. Grieg (to whom MacDowell dedicated one of his four piano sonatas) is reflexively cited along with Liszt as a major influence on MacDowell's music. But the Second Piano Concerto, not to deny its own voice or expertise, is plainly in the tradition of Saint-Saëns' Second, especially the scherzo movement. MacDowell absorbed more during his unhappy years at Paris than he may consciously have realized.

What stands out in the first movement is the organic relationship of themes throughout—the lengthy Larghetto calmato introduction, the impassioned subjects of a Poco più mosso con passione section (in sonata form), and a quiet coda that echoes the opening reveal obvious and suble linkages to the attentive listener. The brief, fleet, frolicsome Presto giocoso second movement is a rondo in 2/4 time, with a roller-coaster main subject and two more that are rhythmically sprung (the second one anticipates the second subject of the finale, which is also related to the main theme of movement one). Like the first movement, the third and final movement begins slowly, with a variant of the former's main subject. It becomes a triple-meter Molto allegro whose principal theme is introduced by winds before the piano takes over. A calm patch near the end ties it to the coda of the opening movement. Really, the whole is a masterful construction, with impassioned themes only a smidgen less memorable than Grieg's, or Rachmaninov's and technical fireworks befitting an American who had impressed Europe's best.

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