Ernst Pauer, Ebenezer Prout, John Stainer and Arthur Sullivan. By the age of 14, he was winning public praise from The Times as "a bravura player of no mean order" in a concert in October 1878. He played Schumann's Piano Concerto at the Crystal Palace in 1880, receiving more encouragement from The Times: "A finer rendering of the work has seldom been heard." Also in 1880, d'Albert arranged the piano reduction for the vocal score of Sullivan's sacred music drama The Martyr of Antioch, to accompany the chorus in rehearsal. He is also credited with writing, under Sullivan's direction, the overture to Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 opera, Patience. For many years d'Albert dismissed his training and work during this period as worthless. The Times wrote that he "was born and educated in England, and won his earliest successes in England, although, in a freak of boyish impetuosity, he repudiated some years ago all connexion with this country, where, according to his own account, he was born by mere accident and where he learnt nothing." In later years, however, he modified his views: "The former prejudice which I had against England, which several incidents aroused, has completely vanished since many years." Career In 1881 Hans Richter invited d'Albert to play his first piano concerto, which was "received with enthusiasm". This seems to have been d'Albert's lost concerto in A major, not the work published three years later as his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B minor, Op. 2. In the same year d'Albert won the Mendelssohn Scholarship, enabling him to study in Vienna, where he met Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt and other important musicians who influenced his style. D'Albert, retaining his early enthusiasm for German culture and music ("hearing Tristan und Isolde had a greater influence on him than the education he received from his father or ... at the National Training School for Music") changed his first name from Eugène to Eugen and emigrated to Germany, where he became a pupil of the elderly Liszt in Weimar. In Germany and Austria d'Albert built a career as a pianist. Liszt called him "the second Tausig", and d'Albert can be heard in an early recording of Liszt works. He played his own piano concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1882, the youngest pianist who had appeared with the orchestra. D'Albert toured extensively, including in the United States from 1904 to 1905.