His parents gladly aided his efforts to develop his musical abilities by thorough training, and to his mother he owes much of the success of his juvenile studies. This lady, once famous as Fräulein Almenräder, was herself a distinguished singer, and came of a well-known musical family of the lower Rhine country. She personally attended to the elementary steps of Bruch’s musical curriculum, but he was early sent to Professor Heinrich Karl Breidenstein of Bonn, who took charge of his theoretical studies. These succeeded so well that the compositions of the nine-year-old boy attracted the notice of Ferdinand Hiller, who soon after took him in charge and developed his abilities so rapidly and thoroughly that at fourteen years the boy was able to enter for the Mozart scholarship awarded in Frankfort. The string quartette which he wrote for this occasion won the prize. This obtained for him a yearly _stipendium_ of four hundred gulden, which he enjoyed for four years, and which enabled him to continue his studies with Hiller, and also to obtain instruction from Professors Carl Reinecke and Ferdinand Breuning, studying piano under the latter with especial zeal and success. Long visits to Munich, Leipsic and other musical centers followed, and continued to broaden the musical horizon of the young genius. At Munich he made the personal acquaintance of the poet Emanuel Geibel, who had much influence upon his later work in the large musical forms. The winter of 1857–8, passed in Leipsic, seems to have also wielded a great influence in awakening Bruch’s enthusiasm for the higher walks of music. After this year, we find him once more in his native city of Cologne, enjoying a reputation which even at that time was much more than local. He had, until this time, published only compositions in the small forms, piano pieces, songs, and duets, but with his first two choruses we find the first ocular evidences of talent, and from the very beginning the massing of voices seems to have possessed a peculiar charm for, and to have been well understood by him.