Nevin was born near Pittsburgh in 1862. He had the advantage of early musical studies at home and abroad during a European sojourn of his family and he commenced his professional studies in 1881 under B. J. Lang and Stephen Emery in Boston. In 1884 he went to Berlin, where he worked diligently at his piano studies under Karl Klindworth. Returning home, two years later, he settled at Boston and taught, concertized, and followed more zealously his increasing inclination for composition. In 1891, after the publication of some of the songs and piano pieces which have since become so generally popular, Nevin's fame rapidly increased and he was able to indulge his taste for the roving life which he followed during the last ten years of his life, living at Paris, Berlin, Florence, Algiers, and elsewhere, with intervening visits to America, where he was heard in concerts of his own works. In the fall of 1900 Nevin settled at New Haven, where he died suddenly in February, 1901. The list of Nevin's works comprises almost exclusively short songs and piano compositions. Exceptions to this are several choruses, two pieces for violin and piano, and a posthumously published cantata. That Nevin had larger ambitions in his later life is shown from certain of his letters and the sketches of larger works which he left unfinished. But as the result of his early habits of composition, of the too easy flow of his melody, and perhaps also of his too early successes he was kept within the confines of those miniature and delicate forms which he made his own domain. The characteristics of Nevin's music, as displayed in these works, are, first, a melodic sense which, though lacking in variety because of decided mannerisms that control it, is full of graceful charm and genuine lyrical quality; second, a harmonic sense ever more limited in its scope but of natural and moving expressiveness. Into the naïve fabric of this the composer contrived to instil a flavor which, if not decidedly original, had a strongly individual feeling.