Although popular with the students and an ‘extremely gifted man’ with a portfolio of successful compositions, including an ‘exquisitely graceful’ orchestral suite The Three Graces, Greig was passed over as candidate for the Reid Professorship in favour of the Düsseldorf-born musician and scholar Frederick Niecks. According to respected music historian, Henry Farmer, the musical establishment ‘sniffed’ at the idea of a Scotsman in the post, even though that Scotsman was the first ever to gain a doctoral degree in music at Oxford. To be fair, Niecks – a native German speaker and published authority on Chopin, who had come to Scotland as a young man, played viola in the Edinburgh Quartet of Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie, extended his education in Leipzig and become an expert on Schumann – was an obvious choice for his links to the European Continent. Master tradesman’s son Greig, for all his skills, had not the private means to compete with that.