The older generation of concert-goers will have read with interest
and regret of the death, last week,. of Madame Arabella Goddard, the most famous English pianist of the mid-Victorian era. She had retired as long ago as 1878, after thirty years of concert-playing not only in England but also on the Continent and in America and the colonies. Madame Arabella Goddard was, however, one of the many performers who begin young. At seven she played to Chopin, and at fourteen, after studying under Thalberg, she made her first appearance at a London concert in the year 1859. She offended the Philharmonic Society
in 1853 by playing a concerto by Sterndale Bennett instead of a work by one of " the great masters." She married; in 1859, the late J. W. Davison, who was for many years the musical critic of the Times, but her reputation was won long before. Her husband, indeed, vainly implored the majestic Delano to
him to ignore his wife's public performances.
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