Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:
By turns dreamy, rollicking, and dramatic, Rip van Winkle shows just how well Chadwick absorbed the lessons of his German teachers, in that it marries 19th-century European symphonic technique to a quintessentially American subject. In 1880, the year Chadwick returned to Boston, he was invited to conduct the work with the city’s prestigious Handel and Haydn Society. This early compositional period produced, among other pieces, a comic opera called Tabasco, which was so popular in its day that, in the words of the conductor Karl Krueger, “some of its tunes were whistled from one end of the country to the other.”
After a period of giving private music lessons, Chadwick accepted a position at the New England Conservatory, eventually becoming its director—he would not relinquish the post until just before his death.
more here.