EDWARD 
 MAC DOWELL 
 
 LAWRENCE OILMAN 
 
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 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT or 
 
 1S9X 
 
 _A.3bi4.Tr 1A.M1I-- 
 
'"-r^ell University Library 
 ML 410.M13G481 
 
 Edward MacDowell :a study /By Lawrence G 
 
 3 1924 022 234 391 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022234391 
 
EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
S^^zt,^7^a<-.Ji^^u;^ 
 
EDWARD 
 MACDOWELL 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 By LAWRENCE OILMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "Phases of Modem Music"; " The Musk of To- 
 morrow " ; " Stories of Symfhonic Music " ; "A 
 Guide to Straus^ 'Salome'" ; "Debuss^s 'Pettias 
 et Milisande' : A Guide to the Opera"; " Aspects 
 of Modem Opera" ; etc. 
 
 NEW YORK:: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
 MCMXV 
 
Copyright, 1908, by John Lane Company 
 
 The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. USA. 
 
TO 
 
 HENRY T. FINCK 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This study is based upon the monograph on 
 MacDowell which I contributed in 1905 to the 
 "Living Masters of Music" series. That book 
 could not, of course, remain in the series after 
 the death of MacDowell three years later; it was 
 therefore taken from its place and used as a 
 foundation for the present volume, which super- 
 sedes it in every respect. The biographical por- 
 tion is almost wholly new, and has been greatly 
 enlarged, while the chapters dealing with Mac- 
 DoweH's music have been revised and extended. 
 
 In completing this survey of one who in his 
 art is still of to-day, I have been poignantly con- 
 scious throughout of the fact that posterity has 
 an inconvenient habit of reversing the judgments 
 delivered upon creative artists by their contem- 
 poraries; yet to trim deftly one's convictions in 
 the hope that they may elastically conform to 
 any one of a number of possible verdicts to be 
 expected from a capricious futurity, is probably 
 as dangerous a proceeding as to avow, without 
 equivocation or compromise, one's precise beliefs. 
 
viu PREFACE 
 
 It will therefore be understood that the critical 
 estimates which are offered in the following pages 
 have been set down with deliberation. 
 
 I desire to acknowledge gratefully the assist- 
 ance which I have received from various sources: 
 Primarily, from Mrs. Edward MacDowell, who 
 has rendered help of an indispensable kind; from 
 Mr. Henry T. Finck, who furnished me with his 
 views and recollections of MacDowell as a pianist; 
 and from reminiscences and impressions con- 
 tributed by Mr. W. H. Humiston, Miss J. S. 
 Watson, and Mr. T. P. Currier — pupils and 
 friends of MacDowell — to The Musician, and 
 by Mr. William Armstrong to The Etude, parts 
 of which I have been privileged to quote. Mac- 
 Dowell wrote surprisingly few letters, and com- 
 paratively Httle of his correspondence is of 
 intrinsic or general interest. I am indebted to 
 Mr. N. J. Corey for permission to quote from 
 several in his possession; while for the use of 
 letters written to MacDowell and his wife by 
 Liszt and Grieg my thanks are due to Mrs. 
 MacDoweU. 
 
 L. G. 
 
 DixvniE Notch, New Hamfshisi^ 
 September i8, 1908. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 I Recokss and Events i 
 
 II Fessonal Tkaits and Views 56 
 
 THE MUSIC-MAKER 
 
 III His Art and Its Methods 97 
 
 IV Earlv Experiments 114 
 
 V A Matueed Imfkessiomist 131 
 
 VI The Sonatas i47 
 
 VII The Songs 162 
 
 VIII Summary 171 
 
 List of Works 181 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FLATK FACINO 
 
 NO. PAGE 
 
 I Edwakd MacDowell . . . Frontispiece 
 
 II MacBowell at fourteen 2 
 
 From a sketch drawn by himself 
 
 III MacDowell at eighteen, as a member of 
 
 Raff's class at the Frankfort conserv- 
 atory 8 
 
 IV A SKETCH OF Liszt by MacDowell, drawn in 
 
 1883 14 
 
 V Facsimile of a letter from Liszt to Mac- 
 Dowell 18 
 
 VI A Letter from Liszt to MacDowell ac- 
 cepting THE dedication OF THE FIRST 
 PIANO CONCERTO 23 
 
 VII MacDowell and Templeton Strong . . 30 
 From a photograph taken at Wiesbaden in 1888 
 
 Vin MacDowell in 1892 56 
 
 IX Facsimile of a letter from Grieg to Mac- 
 Dowell, accepting the dedication of the 
 "Norse" Sonata. One of Grieg's rare 
 attempts at English composition ... 72 
 X The house at Peterboro, New Hampshire, 
 
 WHERE MacDowell spent his summers. . 90 
 xi 
 
xii ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLATE FACING 
 
 NO. PAGE 
 
 XI The piazza and garden walk at Peteeboro io8 
 XII A winter view of the Peterboro house . 126 
 
 XIII The "house of dreams untold" — the log 
 
 cabin in the woods at Peterboro where 
 MacDowell composed, and where most of 
 his later music was written .... 144 
 
 XIV Facsimile of a portion of the MS. of the 
 
 "Sonata Tragica" 148 
 
 XV Facsimile of a passage from the original MS. 
 
 of the "Keltic" Sonata 156 
 
 XVI The music-room at Peterboro 168 
 
... we grow immortal, 
 And that . . . barp awakens of itself 
 To cry aloud to the grey birds; and dreams, 
 That have had dreams for fathers, live in us. 
 
 — The Shaiowy Waters. 
 
THE MAN 
 
THE MAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 RECORDS AND EVENTS 
 
 Edward MacDowell, the first Celtic voice 
 that has spoken commandingly out of musical 
 art, achieved that priority through natural if not 
 inevitable processes. Both his grandfather and 
 grandmother on his father's side were born in 
 Ireland, of Irish-Scotch parents. To his paternal 
 great-grandfather, Alexander MacDowell, the 
 composer traced the Scottish element in his 
 blood; his paternal great-grandmother, whose 
 maiden name was Ann McMurran, was born 
 near Belfast, Ireland. Their son, Alexander, 
 born in Belfast, came to America early in the 
 last century and settled in New York, where he 
 married a countrywoman, Sarah Thompson, 
 whom he met after his arrival in the New World. 
 A son, Thomas (Edward's father), was born to 
 them in New York — where, until his retirement 
 some time ago, he was engaged in business for 
 many years. He married in 1856 Frances M. 
 Knapp, a young American woman of English 
 antecedents. Five years later, on December 18, 
 
2 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 1861, their third son, Edward Alexander (he 
 discarded the middle name toward the end of his 
 life), was born at 220 Clinton Street, New York 
 — a neighbourhood which has since suffered the 
 deterioration common to many of what were 
 once among the town's most irreproachable resi- 
 dential districts. 
 
 From his father, a man of genuine aesthetic 
 instincts, Edward derived his artistic tendencies 
 and his Celtic sensitiveness of temperament, to- 
 gether with the pictorial instinct which was later 
 to compete with his musical ability for decisive 
 recognition; for the elder MacDowell displayed in 
 his youth a facility as painter and draughtsman 
 which his parents, who were Quakers of a devout 
 and sufficiently uncompromising order, discour- 
 aged in no uncertain terms. The exercise of his 
 own gift being thus restrained, Thomas Mac- 
 Dowell passed it on to his younger son — a some- 
 what superfluous endowment, in view of the fact 
 that the latter was to demonstrate so ample a 
 gift for an equally effective medium of expression. 
 
 Edward had his first piano lessons, when he 
 was about eight years old, from a friend of the 
 family, Mr. Juan Buitrago, a native of Bogota, 
 Colombia, and an accomplished musician. Mr. 
 Buitrago was greatly interested in the boy, and 
 had asked to be permitted to teach him his 
 
,>^- 
 
 r 
 
 t 
 
 
 MacDowell at fourteen 
 
 (.From a Sketch dr.mn by Himself) 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 3 
 
 notes. Their piano practice at this time was 
 subject to frequent interruptions; for when strict 
 supervision was not exercised over his work, 
 Edward was prone to indulge at the keyboard 
 a fondness for composition which had developed 
 concurrently with, and somewhat at the expense 
 of, his proficiency in piano technique. He was 
 not a prodigy, nor was he in the least preco- 
 cious, though his gifts were as evident as they 
 were various. He was not fond of drudgery 
 at the keyboard, and he lacked the miraculous 
 aptness at acquirement which belongs to the true 
 prodigy. He v/as imusual chiefly by reason of 
 the versatility of his gifts. His juvenile exercises 
 in composition were varied by an apt use of the 
 pencil and the sketching board. He liked to 
 cover his music books and his exercises with 
 drawings that showed both the observing eye and 
 the naturally skilful hand of the born artist. 
 Nor did music and drawing form a sufficient 
 outlet for his impulse toward expression. He 
 scribbled a good deal in prose and verse, and 
 was fond of devising fairy tales, which were 
 written not without a hint of the imaginative 
 faculty which seems always to have been his 
 possession. 
 
 He continued his lessons with Mr. Buitrago for 
 several years, when he was taken to a; professional 
 
4 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 piano teacher, Paul Desvernine, with whom he 
 studied until he was fifteen. He received, too, 
 at this time, occasional supplementary lessons 
 from the brilliant Venezuelan, Teresa Carreno. 
 When he was in his fifteenth year it was 
 determined that he should go abroad for a course 
 in piano and theory at the Paris Conservatory, 
 and in April, 1876, accompanied by his mother, 
 he left America for France. He passed the 
 competitive examination for admission to the 
 Conservatory, and began the Autumn term as 
 a pupil of Marmontel in piano and of Savard in 
 theory and composition — having for a fellow 
 pupil, by the way, that most remarkable of 
 contemporary music-makers, Claude Debussy, 
 whom MacDowell described as having been, 
 even then, a youth of erratic and non-conformist 
 tendencies. 
 
 MacDowell's experiences at the Conservatory 
 were not unmixed with perplexities and embar- 
 rassment. His knowledge of French was far 
 from secure, and he had considerable difficulty 
 in following Savard's lectures. It was decided, , 
 therefore, that he should have a course of tuition 
 in the language. A teacher was engaged, and 
 Edward began a resolute attack upon the linguis- 
 tic chevaux de frise which had proved so trouble- 
 some an impediment — a move which brought 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 5 
 
 him, unexpectedly enough, to an important crisis 
 in his affairs. 
 
 On one occasion it happened that, during these 
 lessons in French, he was varying the monotony 
 of a study hour by drawing, under cover of his 
 lesson-book, a portrait of his teacher, whose most 
 striking physical characteristic was a nose of 
 extravagant bulk. He was detected just as he 
 was completing the sketch, and was asked, much 
 to his confusion, to exhibit the result. It appears 
 to have been a remarkable piece of work as well 
 as an excellent hkeness, for the subject of it was 
 eager to know whether or not MacDowell had 
 studied drawing, and, if not, how he acquired his 
 proficiency. Moreover, he insisted on keeping 
 the sketch. Not long after, he called upon Mrs. 
 MacDowell and told her, to her astonishment, 
 that he had shown the sketch to a certain very 
 eminent painter — an instructor at the Ecole de 
 Beaux Arts — and that the painter had been so 
 much impressed by the talent which it evidenced 
 that he begged to propose to Mrs. MacDowell 
 that she submit her son to him for a three-years' 
 course of free instruction under his personal 
 supervision, offering also to be responsible for his 
 support during that time. The issue was a 
 momentous one, and Mrs. MacDowell, in much 
 perplexity of mind as to the wisest settlement of 
 
6 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 her son's future, laid the matter before Mar- 
 montel, who, fearful of losing one of his aptest 
 pupUs, urgently advised her against diverting her 
 son from a musical career. The decision was 
 finally left to MacDowell, and it was agreed that 
 he should continue his studies at the Conserva- 
 tory. Although it seems not unlikely that, with 
 his natural facility as a painter and draughtsman 
 and his imcommon faculties of vision and imagi- 
 nation, he would have achieved distinction as a 
 painter, it may be questioned whether in that 
 case music would not have lost appreciably more 
 than art would have gained. 
 
 Conditions at the Conservatory were not to the 
 taste of MacDowell, for he found his notions of 
 right artistic procedure frequently opposed to 
 those that prevailed among his teachers and 
 fellow students. His growing disaffection was 
 brought to a head during the summer of 1878. 
 It was the year of the Exposition, and MacDowell 
 and his mother attended a festival concert at 
 which Nicholas Rubinstein played in memorable 
 style Tchaikovsky's B-flat minor piano concerto. 
 His performance was a revelation to the young 
 American. "I never can learn to play like that 
 if I stay here," he said resolutely to his mother, 
 as they left the concert hall. Mrs. MacDowell, 
 whose fixed principle it was to permit her son to 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 7 
 
 decide his affairs according to his lights, there- 
 upon considered with him the merits of various 
 European Conservatories of reputation. They 
 thought of Moscow, because of Nicholas Rubin- 
 stein's connection with the Conservatory there. 
 Leipsic suggested itself; Frankfort was strongly 
 recommended, and Stuttgart seemed to offer con- 
 spicuous advantages. The latter place was finally 
 determined upon, and Mrs. MacDowell and her 
 son went there from Paris at Thanksgiving time, 
 having agreed that the famous Stuttgart Con- 
 servatory would yield the desired sort of instruc- 
 tion. 
 
 The choice was scarcely a happy one. It did 
 not take MacDoweU long to realise that, if he 
 expected to conform to the Stuttgart require- 
 ments, he would be compelled to unlearn all that 
 he had already acquired — would have virtually, 
 so far as his technique was concerned, to begin 
 de novo. Rubinstein himself, MacDowell was 
 told by one of the students, would have had to 
 reform his pianistic manners if he had placed 
 himself under the guidance of the Stuttgart peda- 
 gogues. Nor does the system of instruction then 
 in effect at the Conservatory appear to have been 
 thorough even within its own sphere. Mac- 
 Dowell used to tell of a student who could play 
 an ascending scale superlatively well, but who 
 
8 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 was helpless before the problem of playing the 
 same scale in its descending form. 
 
 His mother, disheartened over the failure of 
 Stuttgart to justify her expectations, was at a loss 
 how best to solve the problem of her son's imme- 
 diate future. Having heard much of the ability 
 of Carl Heymann, the pianist, as an instructor, 
 Mrs. MacDowell thought of the Frankfort Con- 
 servatory, of which Joachim Raff was the head, 
 and where Heymann would be available as a 
 teacher. 
 
 She learned from a friend, to whom she had 
 written for advice, that the pianist had promised 
 soon to visit her at her home in Wiesbaden, and 
 it was suggested that the MacDowells pay her a 
 visit at the same time, and thus benefit by the 
 opportunity of becoming acquainted with Hey- 
 mann. Mrs. MacDowell and her son were not 
 slow to avail themselves of this proposal, and the 
 end of the year 1878 found them in Wiesbaden. 
 Here they met Heymann, who had just concluded 
 a triumphantly successful tourn&e of the European 
 capitals. They heard him play, and were im- 
 pressed by his mastery and poetic feehng. Hey- 
 mann was not, however, to begin teaching at the 
 Frankfort Conservatory until the following au- 
 tumn, so MacDowell remained in Wiesbaden, 
 studying composition and theory with the distin- 
 

 y. 
 
 
 o 
 
 t: 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 h' 
 
 a; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 :^ 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 9 
 
 guished critic and teacher, Louis Ehlert, while 
 his mother returned to America. 
 
 "Ehlert," MacDowell has written, "was very 
 kind to me, and when I asked him for 'lessons' he 
 refused flatly, but said he would be glad for us 
 to 'study together,' as he put it. This rather 
 staggered me, as my idea in leaving Paris was to 
 get a severe and regenerating overhauling. I 
 worked hard all winter, however, and heard lots 
 of new music at the Cur Haus, which was like 
 manna in the desert after my long French famine. 
 Ehlert, who thought that Heymann was not the 
 man for me, spoke, and wrote to Von Biilow about 
 me; but the latter, without even having seen me, 
 wrote Ehlert a most insulting letter, asking how 
 Ehlert dared 'to propose such a silly thing' to 
 him; that he was not a music teacher, and could 
 not waste his time on an American boy, anyway. 
 So, after all, I went to Frankfort and entered the 
 conservatory." MacDowell's first interview with 
 Raff, in the autumn of 1879, was, as he relates, 
 "not promising." "Heymann took me to him 
 and told him, among other things, that, having 
 studied for several years the 'French School' of 
 composition, I wished to study in Germany. 
 Raff immediately flared up and declared that 
 there was no such thing nowadays as 'schools' 
 — that music was eclectic nowadays; that if some 
 
lo EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 French writers wrote flimsy music it arose simply 
 from flimsy attainments, and such stuff could 
 never form a 'school.' German and other writers 
 were to be criticised from the same standpoint 
 — their music was bad, middling, or good; but 
 there was no such thing as cramping it into 
 'schools' nowadays, when all national musical 
 traits were common property." 
 
 MacDowell remained in the Conservatory for 
 two years, studying composition with Raff and 
 piano with Heymann. His stay there was emi- 
 nently satisfactory and profitable to himself. 
 He found both Raff and Heymann artistic men- 
 tors of an inspiring kind; in Raff, particularly, 
 he encountered a most sympathetic and encour- 
 aging preceptor, and an influence at once potent 
 and engrossing — a force which was to direct the 
 currents of his own temperament into definite 
 artistic channels. 
 
 For Heymann as a pianist MacDowell had a 
 fervent admiration. He spoke of him as "a 
 marvel," whose technique "seemed mysteriously 
 capable of anything." "When I went to him," 
 MacDowell has said, " I had already transposed 
 most of the fugues and preludes of Bach (Paris 
 ideas of 'thoroughness'!) and had gone through 
 much rough technical work. Heymann let me 
 do what I wanted; but in hearing him practise 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS ii 
 
 and play I learned more in a week than I ever 
 had before." When Heymann, who had already 
 begun to show symptoms of the mental disorder 
 which ultimately overcame him, left the Con- 
 servatory in 1881, he recommended MacDowell 
 as his successor — a proposal which was cordially 
 seconded by Rafif. But there were antagonistic 
 influences at work within the Conservatory. 
 MacDowell's candidacy was opposed by certain 
 of the professors, on account, it was said, of his 
 "youth"; but also, doubtless, because of the 
 advocacy of Heymann, who was not popular 
 with his colleagues; for he dared, MacDowell 
 has said, "to play the classics as if they had 
 been written by men with blood in their veins." 
 So MacDowell failed to get the appointment. 
 He continued, unofficially, as a pupil of Hey- 
 mann, and went to him constantly for criticism 
 and advice. 
 
 MacDowell began at this time to take private 
 pupils, and one of these pupils, an American, Miss 
 Marian Nevins, was later to become his wife. 
 He was then living in lodgings kept by a venerable 
 German spinster who was the daughter of one of 
 Napoleon's officers. She was very fond of her 
 young lodger, and through her he became ac- 
 quainted with the work of Erckmann-Chatrian, 
 whose tales deeply engrossed him at this time. 
 
12 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Later he moved to the Caf€ Milani, on the 
 Zeil, at that time an institution of considerable 
 celebrity. As a teacher he made a ra,ther prom- 
 inent place for himself; the recommendation of 
 Raff — who had said to one of MacDowell's 
 pupils that he expected "great things" of him 
 — had helped at the start, and his personality 
 counted for not a little. His appearance at this 
 time (he was then nineteen years old) is de- 
 scribed as having been strikingly unhke that of 
 the typical American as known in Germany. 
 "His keen and very blue eyes, his pink and 
 white skin, reddish mustache and imperial and 
 jet black hair, brushed straight up in the prev- 
 alent German fashion, caused him to be known 
 as 'the handsome American.'" Teaching at that 
 time must have been a sore trial to him. He 
 was, as he continued to be throughout his life, 
 painfully shy; yet he seems, strangely enough, 
 to have had, even then, the knack for impart- 
 ing instruction, for quickening the interest and 
 stimulating the enthusiasm of those who came 
 under his guidance, which in later years made 
 him so remarkable a teacher. 
 
 In 1881 MacDowell applied for the vacant 
 position of head piano teacher at the Conserva- 
 tory in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt, and 
 was engaged. He found it an arduous and not 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 13 
 
 too profitable post. He has described it as "a 
 dreary town, where the pupils studied music with 
 true German placidity." They procured all 
 their music from a circulating library, where the 
 choice of novelties was limited to late editions 
 of the classics and a good deal of sheer trash, 
 poor dance music and the like. His work, which 
 was unmitigated drudgery, consumed forty hours 
 a week. For a time he took up his quarters in 
 Darmstadt; but he missed the attractions of 
 Frankfort; so throughout his term he travelled on 
 the railroad twice daily between the two towns. 
 In addition to his regular work at the Conserv- 
 atory, he undertook private lessons, going by 
 train once a week to the Erbach-Fiirstenau castle 
 at Erbach-Fiirstenau, a wearisome three-hour 
 journey. The castle was a medieval Schloss, 
 with a drawbridge and moat. There his pupils 
 were little counts and countesses, discouragingly 
 dull and sleepy children who spoke only German 
 and Latin, and who had the smallest interest in 
 music. MacDowell gave them lessons in har- 
 mony as well as piano-playing, and one day, in 
 the middle of an elaborately simplified exposition 
 of some rudimentary point, he heard a gentle 
 noise, looked around from the piano, and dis- 
 covered his noble young pupils with their heads 
 on their arms, fast asleep. MacDowell could 
 
14 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 never remember their different titles, and ended 
 by addressing them simply as "mademoiselle" 
 and "monsieur," to the annoyance of the stern 
 and ceremonious old chMelaine, the Baroness of 
 Rodenberg. 
 
 The twelve hours a week which he spent in 
 railway travelling were not, though, whoUy un- 
 profitable, for he was able to compose on the 
 train the greater part of his second "Modern 
 Suite" for piano (op. 14). This was the 
 second of his compositions which he considered 
 worthy of preservation, its predecessor being the 
 "First Modern Suite," written the year before in 
 Frankfort. Much other music had already found 
 its way upon paper, had been tried in the unspar- 
 ing fire of his criticism, which was even then 
 vigorous and searching, and had been marked for 
 destruction — a symphony, among other efiforts. 
 His reading at this time was of engrossing interest 
 to him. He was absorbed in the German poets; 
 Goethe and Heine, whom he was now able to 
 read with ease in the original German, he knew 
 by heart — a devotion which was to find expres- 
 sion a few years later in his "Idyls" and "Poems" 
 (op. 28 and 31). He had begun also to read the 
 English poets. He devoured Byron and Shelley; 
 and in Tennyson's "Idyls of the King" he found 
 the spark which kindled his especial love for 
 
u-^^/ ^<^ ^-- /^-^ '<^ '' 
 
 A SKETCH OF Liszt by MacDowell drawn in 1883 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 15 
 
 mediaeval lore and poetry. Yet while he was 
 enamored of the imaginative records of the 
 Middle Ages, he had httle interest, oddly enough, 
 in their tangible remains. He liked, for example, 
 to summon a vision of the valley of the Rhone, 
 with its slow-moving human streams flowing be- 
 tween Italy and the North, and with Sion still 
 looking down from its heights, where the bishops 
 had been lords rather than priests. But this was 
 for him a purely imaginative enchantment. He 
 cared little about exploring the actual and visible 
 memorials of the past: to confront them as 
 crumbling ruins gave him no pleasure, and, as 
 he used to say, he "hated the smells." It was 
 this instinct which, in his visits to the cathedrals, 
 prompted him to stand as far back as possible 
 while the Mass was tieing said. To see in the 
 dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving 
 gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, 
 enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from 
 entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests 
 describing perfunctorily the relics: that was a 
 disillusionment not to be borne with. 
 
 Having found that his labours at Darmstadt 
 were telling upon his health, MacDowell resigned 
 his position there and returned to Frankfort. 
 Here he divided his time between his private 
 teaching and his composition. He was ambitious 
 
i6 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 also to secure some profitable concert engage- 
 ments as a pianist. He had made occasional 
 appearances at orchestral concerts in Wiesbaden, 
 Frankfort, Darmstadt, but these had yielded him 
 no return save an increase of reputation. 
 
 At Raff's instigation he visited Liszt at Weimar 
 in the spring of 1882, armed with his first piano 
 concerto (op. 15). This work he had just com- 
 posed under amusing circumstances. One day 
 while he was sitting aimlessly before his piano 
 there came a knock at his door, and in walked, 
 to his startled confusion, his master, Raff, of 
 whom MacDowell stood in unmitigated awe. 
 "The honor," he relates, "simply overwhelmed 
 me. He looked rather quizzically around at my 
 untidy room, and said something about the Eng- 
 lish translation of his Welt-Ende oratorio (I found 
 out after, alas, that he had wanted me to copy 
 it in his score for him; but with his inexplicable 
 shyness he only hinted at it, and I on my side 
 was too utterly and idiotically overpowered to 
 catch his meaning); then he abruptly asked me 
 what I had been writing. I, scarcely realising 
 what I was saying, stammered out that I had a 
 concerto. He walked out on the landing and 
 turned back, telling me to bring it to him the 
 next Sunday. In desperation, not having the 
 remotest idea how I was to accomplish such a 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 17 
 
 task, I worked like a beaver, evolving the music 
 from some ideas upon which I had planned at 
 some time to base a concerto. Sunday came, 
 and I had only the first movement composed. 
 I wrote him a note making some wretched excuse, 
 and he put it off until the Sunday after. Some- 
 thing happened then, and he put it off two days 
 more; by that time I had the concerto ready." 
 Except for three lines of passage work in the first 
 part, the concerto remains to-day precisely as 
 MacDowell finished it then. 
 
 In the event, tlie visit to Liszt, which he had 
 dreaded, was a gratifying surprise. That be- 
 neficent but formidable personage received him 
 with kindly courtesy, and had Eugen D'Albert,' 
 who was present, play the orchestral part of the 
 concerto which MacDowell had brought with 
 him in manuscript, arranged for two pianos. 
 Liszt listened attentively as the two young musi- 
 cians played it through, — not too effectively, — 
 and when they had finished he commended it in 
 warm terms. "You must bestir yourself," he 
 warned D'Albert, "if you do not wish to be out- 
 done by our young American "; and he praised the 
 boldness and originality of certain passages in 
 the music, especially their harmonic treatment. 
 
 What was at that time even more cheering to 
 MacDowell, who had not yet come to regard him- 
 
i8 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 self as paramountly a composer, was Liszt's praise 
 of his piano playing. He returned to Frankfort 
 greatly encouraged, and he was still further 
 elated to receive soon after a letter from Liszt in 
 which, referring to the first "Modern Suite," 
 which MacDowell had sent to him, the Abbe 
 wrote: 
 
 "... Since the foundation of the General Society of 
 German Musicians, the definitive making up of the pro- 
 grams is entrusted to me, and I shall be very glad to 
 recommend the execution of your work. 
 
 "Will you be good enough to give to your master, my 
 old friend, J. Raff, the assurance of my highest esteem 
 and admiration. 
 
 "F. Liszt. 
 "Budapest. April 13, 1882." 
 
 The nineteenth annual convention of the All- 
 gemeiner Deutscher Musik-Verein was held that 
 year at Zurich, from the gth to the 12th of July; 
 and at the fifth concert of the series, on July 11, 
 MacDowell played his first piano suite. Both 
 the music and his performance of it were 
 praised. A contemporaneous account speaks of 
 the composer as " an earnest and modest musician, 
 free from all mannerisms," who "carried his 
 modesty so far that he played with his notes 
 before him, though he cannot have felt any par- 
 ticular necessity for having them there." He 
 
Facsimile of a letter from Liszt to MacDowell 
 (See page i8) 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 19 
 
 "was recalled enthusiastically, and with many 
 bravos, and may be proud of the success he has 
 achieved." Until then, as MacDowell confessed, 
 with engaging candour, to Mr. Henry T. Finck,he 
 "had never waked up to the idea" that his music 
 could be worth actual study or memorising. "I 
 would not have changed a note in one of them 
 for untold gold, and ifiside I had the greatest love 
 for them; but the idea that any one else might 
 take them seriously had never occurred to me." 
 A year later, upon Liszt's recommendation, the 
 suite and its successor, the "Second Modem 
 Suite," op. 14, were published at Leipzig by the 
 famous house of Breitkopf and Hartel. "Your 
 two pianoforte suites," wrote Liszt from Buda- 
 pest, in February of that year, "are admirable. 
 I accept the dedication of yom: concerto with sin- 
 cere pleasure and thanks." The suites were the 
 first of MacDowell's works to appear in print.* 
 The death of Raff on June 25, 1882, brought 
 to MacDowell his first profound sorrow. There 
 was a deep attachment between pupil and master, 
 and MacDowell felt in Raff's death the loss of a 
 sincere friend, and, as he later came to appreciate, 
 a powerful ally. The influential part which Raff 
 
 * The "Two Old Songs," which bear an earlier opus num- 
 ber, — 9, — were composed at a much later period — a fact 
 which is betrayed by their style. 
 
20 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 bore in turning MacDowell's aims definitely and 
 permanently toward creative rather than pianistic 
 activity could scarcely be overestimated. When 
 he first vs^ent to Paris, and during the later years 
 in Germany, there had been little serious thought 
 on his part, or on the part of his family, con- 
 cerning his composition; his evident talent for 
 piano-playing had persistently overshadowed his 
 creative gifts, and had made it seem that his 
 inevitable career was that of a virtuoso. As he 
 wrote in after years: "I had acquired from early 
 boyhood the idea that it was expected of me to 
 become a pianist, and every moment spent in 
 'scribbling' seemed to be stolen from the more 
 legitimate work of piano practice." It was Raff 
 — Rafif, who said to him once: "Your music will 
 be played when mine is forgotten" — who opened 
 his eyes. 
 
 The two following years, — from the summer of 
 1882 till the summer of 1884 — were increasingly 
 given over to composition, though MacDowell 
 continued his private teaching and made a few 
 appearances in concert. He continued to try his 
 hand at orchestral writing, and in this pursuit he 
 was greatly favoured by the willingness of the 
 conductors of the Cur-Orchesters at Baden- 
 Baden, Wiesbaden, and elsewhere, to "try 
 over" in the' rehearsal hour his experiments. 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 21 
 
 His requests for such a trial reading of his 
 scores were seldom refused, and the practical 
 training in instrumentation which was afforded 
 by the experience he always regarded as invalu- 
 able. Much that he tested in this manner was 
 condemned as a result of the illuminating, if 
 chastening, revelations thus brought about; and 
 almost all of his orchestral writing which he after- 
 ward thought fit to pubHsh received the benefit 
 of such practical tests. 
 
 The music which dates from this period com- 
 prises the three songs of opus 11 ("Mein Lieb- 
 chen," * "Du liebst mich nicht," "Oben, wo die 
 Sterne gliihen") ; the two songs of op. 12 (" Nacht- 
 lied" and "Das Rosenband") ; the Prelude and 
 Fugue (op. 13); the second piano suite (op. 14) 
 — begun in the days of his Darmstadt professor- 
 ship; the "Serenade" (op. 16); the two "Fan- 
 tasiestucke" of op. 17: "Erzahiung" and the 
 much-played " Hexentanz" ; the "Barcarolle" 
 and " Humoreske" of op. 18; and the "Wald- 
 Idyllen" (op. 19): "Waldesstille," "Spiel der 
 Nymphen," "Traumerei," " Dryadenfanz." 
 
 In June, 1884, MacDowell returned to America, 
 and on July 21, at Waterford, Connecticut, he 
 was married to his former pupil, Miss Marian 
 
 * I give the German titles under which these compositions 
 were originally published. 
 
22 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Nevins — a union, which, for perfection of sym- 
 pathy and closeness of comradeship, was, during 
 the quarter of a century for which it was to en- 
 dure, nothing less than ideal. A few days later 
 MacDowell and his bride sailed from New York 
 for Europe, innocent of any very definite plans 
 for the immediate future. They visited Exeter 
 and Bath, and then went to London, where they 
 foimd lodgings at No. 5, Woburn Place. There 
 MacDowell's interest in the outer world was 
 divided between the British Museum, where he 
 foimd a particular fascination in the Egyptian 
 and Syrian antiquities, and the Shakespearian 
 performances of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. 
 He was captivated by their performance of 
 "Much Ado About Nothing," and made a sketch 
 for a symphonic poem which was to be called 
 "Beatrice and Benedick" — a plan which he 
 finally abandoned. Most of the material which 
 was to form the symphonic poem went ultimately 
 to the making of the scherzo of the second piano 
 concerto, composed during the following year. 
 
 Returning to Frankfort, MacDowell and his 
 wife lived for a short time in a pension in the 
 Praunheimer Strasse, keeping very much to them- 
 selves in two smaU rooms. Upon their return 
 from a brief excursion to Paris, they found less 
 restricted quarters in the Hotel du Nord. In 
 
A LETTER FROM LiSZT TO MacDoWELL ACCEPTING THE DEDICA- 
 TION OF THE FIRST PIANO CONCERTO (sEE PAGE 19) 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 23 
 
 September of this year MacDowell learned of an 
 advantageous position that had been vacated at 
 the Wiirzburg Conservatory, and, assisted by 
 letters from Frau Raff, Marmontel (his former 
 instructor at the Paris Conservatory), and the 
 violinist Sauret, he sought the place. But again, 
 as at Frankfort three years before, his youth was 
 in his disfavour, and he was courteously rejected. 
 
 The following winter was given over largely 
 to composition. The two-part symphonic poem, 
 "Hamlet and Ophelia," his first production of im- 
 portant significance, was composed at this time. 
 The "Drei Poesien" (op. 20) and " Mondbilder" 
 (op. 21), both written for four-hand performance, 
 also date from the winter of 1884-85, and the. 
 second piano concerto was begun. The "Moon 
 Pictures" of op. 21 ("The Hindoo Maiden," 
 "Stork's Story," "In Tyrol," "The Swan," 
 "Visit of the Bear"), after Hans Christian Ander- 
 sen, were at first intended to form a miniature 
 orchestral suite; but an opportunity arose to 
 have them printed as piano duets, and the orches- 
 tral sketches were destroyed — a regrettable out- 
 come, as it seems. 
 
 His pupils, he found, were scattered, and he 
 gave himself up without restraint to the pleasures 
 of creative writing. These were days of quiet 
 and deep happiness. He read much, often aloud 
 
24 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 in the evening — fairy-tales, of which he was 
 devotedly fond, legendary lore of different coun- 
 tries, mediaeval romances, Keats, Shelley, Ten- 
 nyson, Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs, Victor Hugo, 
 Heine; and also Mark Twain. Later, in the 
 spring, the days were devoted partly to com- 
 position and partly to long walks with his wife 
 in the beautiful Frankfort woods, where was 
 suggested to MacDowell the particular mood 
 that found embodiment, many years later, in 
 one of the last things that he wrote: "From a 
 German Forest," in the collection of "Fireside 
 Tales." 
 
 The following summer (1885), the death of a 
 friend of his earlier Frankfort days, Lindsay 
 Deas, a Scotchman, left vacant in Edinburgh the 
 post of examiner for the Royal Academy of 
 Music, and Deas's family presented MacDowell's 
 name as a candidate. A trip to London was 
 undertaken for the purpose of securing the place, 
 if possible — since composition alone could not 
 be depended upon for a livelihood; but again his 
 youth, as well as his nationality and his "modern 
 tendencies," militated against him. He was 
 obliged to admit that he had been a prot^gd of 
 "that dreadful man Liszt," as the potentate of 
 Weimar was characterised by I^ady Macfarren, 
 an all-powerful factor in the control of the insti- 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 25 
 
 tution; and that proving finally his abandonment 
 to a nefarious modernity, he was again re- 
 jected. 
 
 Upon their return to Germany the MacDowells 
 moved from Frankfort to Wiesbaden, where they 
 spent the winter of 1885-86, living in a small 
 pension. The first concerto (op. 15) had recently 
 been published by Breitkopf and Hartel. The 
 same year (1885) was marked by the comple- 
 tion of the second concerto in D-minor, begun at 
 Frankfort in the previous winter, and the publi- 
 cation by Breitkopf and Hartel of the full score 
 of "Hamlet and Ophelia,"* with a dedication to 
 Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, from whose per- 
 formances in London MacDowell had caught the 
 suggestion for the music. In the summer of 
 1886 MacDowell and his wife again yielded to 
 their passion for travelling and went to London 
 to buy fiurniture, for they had wearied of living 
 in pensions and hotels and had determined to set 
 
 * The published score of this opus bears the title (in 
 German): "Hamlet; Ophelia: Two Poeins for Grand Orches- 
 tra." But MacDowell afterward changed his mind concern- 
 ing this designation, and preferred to entitle the work: " First 
 Symphonic Poem (a. 'Hamlet'; b. 'Ophelia')." This alter- 
 ation is written in MacDowell's handwriting in his copy of 
 the printed score. When "Lancelot and Elaine" was pub- 
 lished three years later it bore the sub- title: "Second Sym- 
 phonic Poem." 
 
26 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 up housekeeping. AVhen they returned they hired 
 a little flat in the Jahnstrasse and installed them- 
 selves therewith just enough furniture to give them 
 countenance. Here Mrs. MacDowell suffered an 
 illness which threatened for a time to bring a 
 tragic termination to their happiness, and through 
 which the hope of a child was lost to them. 
 
 One afternoon in the spring of 1887 Mac- 
 Dowell and his friend Templeton Strong, a bril- 
 liant American composer who had recently moved 
 from his home in Leipzig to Wiesbaden, were 
 tramping through the country when they came 
 upon a dilapidated cottage on the edge of the 
 woods, in the Grubweg. It had been built by a 
 rich German, not as a habitation, but as a 
 kind of elaborate summer house. The situa- 
 tion was enticing. The little building stood on 
 the side of the Neroberg, overlooking the town 
 on one side, with the Rhine and the Main beyond, 
 and on the other side the woods. The two 
 Americans were captivated by it, and nothing 
 would do but that MacDowell should purchase 
 it for a home. There was some question of 
 its practicability by his cooler-headed wife; 
 but eventually the cottage was bought, with 
 half an acre of ground, and the MacDowells 
 ensconced themselves. There was a small 
 garden, in which MacDowell delighted to dig; 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 27 
 
 the woods were within a stone's throw; and he 
 and Strong, who were inseparable friends, walked 
 together and disputed amicably concerning prin- 
 ciples and methods of music-making, and the 
 need for patriotism, in which Strong was con- 
 ceived to be deficient. 
 
 This was a time of rich productiveness for 
 MacDowell; and the life that he and his wife 
 were able to live was of an ideal serenity and 
 detachment. He was now devoting his entire 
 energy to composition. He put forth during 
 these years at Wiesbaden the four pieces of op. 
 24 ("Humoresque," "March," "Cradle Song," 
 "Czardas"); the symphonic poem "Lancelot and 
 Elaine" (op. 25); the six songs, "From An Old 
 Garden," to words by Margaret Deland (op. 26) ; 
 the three songs for male chorus of op. 27 ("In the 
 Starry Sky Above Us," "Springtime," "The 
 Fisherboy"); the "Idyls" and "Poems" for 
 piano (op. 28 and op. 31), after Goethe and 
 Heine; the symphonic poem "Lamia" (op. 
 29); the two "Fragments" for orchestra after 
 the "Song of Roland": "The Saracens" and 
 "The Lovely Mdk" (op. 30); the "Four Little 
 Poems" for piano — "The Eagle," "The Brook," 
 "Moonshine," "Winter" (op. 32); the three songs 
 of op. 33 ("Prayer," "Cradle Hymn," "Idyl") 
 and the two of op. 34 ("Menie," "My Jean"); 
 
28 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 and the "Romance" for 'cello and orchestra. 
 He had, moreover, the satisfaction of knowing 
 that his work was being received, both in Europe 
 and in his own country, with interest and respect. 
 His reputation had begun unmistakably to spread. 
 "Hamlet and Ophelia" had been performed at 
 Darmstadt, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Sonders- 
 hausen, Frankfort. On March 8, 1884, his former 
 teacher, Teresa Carreno, had played his second 
 piano suite at a recital in New York; in March 
 of the following year two movements from the 
 first suite were played at an "American Concert" 
 given at Princes' Hall, London; on March 30, 
 1885, at one of Mr. Frank Van der Stucken's 
 "Novelty Concerts" in New York, Miss Adele 
 Margulies played the second and third move- 
 ments from the first piano concerto. In the 
 same year Mme. Carreno played on tour in 
 America three movements from the second, suite, 
 and in the following September she played at 
 the Worcester Festival of that year the "Hex- 
 entanz" of op. 17. On November 4, 1886, the 
 "Opheha" section of op. 22 was performed at 
 the first of Mr. Van der Stucken's "Sym- 
 phonic Concerts" at Chickering Hall, New 
 York. Mr. H. E. Krehbiel, reviewing the work 
 in the Tribune, praised the orchestration as 
 "brilliant" ("though the models studied are 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 29 
 
 rather more obvious than we like"), the melodic 
 invention as "beautiful" and as having a poetical 
 mood and characteristic outline. He considered 
 that the music deserved repetition during the 
 course of the season, and pronounced it " a finer 
 work in every respect than the majority of the 
 novelties which have come to us this season with 
 French and English labels." Mr. Henry T. 
 Finck, writing in the Evening Post, characterised 
 the work as "an exquisitely conceived tone- 
 poem, charmingly orchestrated and full of striking 
 harmonic progressions." A year after the per- 
 formance of the "Ophelia" in New York Mr. 
 Van der Stucken produced its companion piece, 
 "Hamlet." In April, 1888, at the first of a 
 course of "pianoforte-concerto concerts" given by 
 Mr. B. J. Lang at Chickering Hall, Boston, Mac- 
 Dowell's first concerto was played by Mr. B. L. 
 Whelpley. "The effect upon all present," wrote 
 Mr. W. F. Apthorp in the Transcript, "was 
 simply electric." The concerto "was a surprise, 
 if ever there was one. We can hardly," he de- 
 clared, " recall a composition so full of astonishing 
 and unprecedented effects [it will be recalled that 
 this concerto was composed in 1882, when Mac- 
 Dowell was nineteen years old]. The work was 
 evidently written at white heat; its brilliancy and 
 vigour are astounding. The impression it made 
 
30 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 upon us, in other respects, is as yet rather un- 
 digested . . . But its fire and forcibleness are 
 unmistakable." These opinions are of interest, 
 for they testify to the prompt and ungrudging 
 recognition which was accorded to MacDowell's 
 work, from the first, by responsible critics in his 
 own country. 
 
 He might well have felt some pride in the sum 
 of his achievements at this time. He had not 
 completed his twenty-seventh year; yet he had 
 published a concerto and two orchestral works of 
 important dimensions — "Hamlet and Ophelia" 
 and "Lancelot and Elaine"; most of the music 
 that he had so far written had been publicly 
 performed, and almost invariably praised with 
 warmth ; and he was becoming known in Europe 
 and at home. His material afifairs, however, 
 were far from being in a satisfactory or promis- 
 ing condition; for there was little more than a 
 precarious income to be counted upon from his 
 compositions; and he had given up teaching. 
 Musicians from America began coming to the 
 little Wiesbaden retreat to visit the composer 
 and his wife, and he was repeatedly urged to 
 return to America and assume his share in the 
 development of the musical art of his country. 
 It was finally decided that, all things considered, 
 conditions would be more favorable in the United 
 
MacDowell and Templeton Strong 
 From a photograph taken at Wiesbaden in iS88 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 31 
 
 States; and in September, 1888, the MacDow- 
 ells sold their Wiesbaden cottage, not without 
 many pangs, and sailed for their own shores. 
 
 They settled in Boston, as being less huge and 
 tumultuous than New York, and took lodgings 
 in Mount Vernon Street. In later years they 
 lived successively at 13 West Cedar Street and 
 at 38 Chestnut Street. Though all of his more 
 important music was as yet unwritten, Mac- 
 Dowell found himself already established in the 
 view of the musical public as a composer abun- 
 dantly worthy of honour at the hands of his coun- 
 trymen. He made his first public appearance in 
 America, in the double capacity of pianist and 
 composer, at a Kneisel Quartet concert in Chick- 
 ering Hall, Boston, on November 19, 1888, playing 
 the Prelude, Intermezzo, and Presto from his 
 first piano suite, and, with Kneisel and his asso- 
 ciates, the piano part in Goldmark's B-flat Quin- 
 tet. He was cordially received, and Mr. Apthorp, 
 writing in the Transcript of his piano playing, 
 praised his technique as "ample and brilliant," 
 and as being especially admirable "in the higher 
 phases of playing"; "he plays," wrote this critic, 
 "with admirable truth of sentiment and musical 
 tmderstanding." Of the early and immature 
 suite he could not well write with much enthusi- 
 asm, though he found in it "life and brightness." 
 
32 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 In the following spring MacDowell made a 
 more auspicious appearance, and one which more 
 justly disclosed his abilities as a composer, when, 
 on March 5, he played his second concerto, for 
 the first time in public, at an orchestral concert in 
 Chickering Hall, New York, under the direction 
 of Mr. Theodore Thomas. His success was then 
 immediate and emphatic. Mr. Krehbiel, in the 
 Tribune, praised the concerto as "a splendid 
 composition, so full of poetry, so fuU of vigor, as 
 to tempt the assertion that it must be placed at 
 the head of all works of its kind produced by 
 either a native or adopted citizen of America"; 
 and he confessed to having "derived keener 
 pleasure from the work of the young American 
 than from the experienced and famous Russian" 
 — Tchaikovsky, whose Fifth Symphony was per- 
 formed then for the first time in New York. 
 "Several enthusiastic and unquestionably sincere 
 recalls," concluded the writer, "were the tokens 
 of gratitude and delight with which his towns- 
 people rewarded him." A month later Mac- 
 Dowell played the same concerto in Boston, at a 
 Symphony concert, under Mr. Gericke; his per- 
 formance of it evoked "rapt attention," and "the 
 very heartiest of plaudits, in which both orchestra 
 and audience joined." 
 
 In the summer of that year (1889) MacDowell 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 33 
 
 and his wife went abroad. He had been invited 
 to take part in an "American Concert" at the 
 Paris Exposition, and on July 12, under Mr. 
 Van der Stucken's direction, he played his second 
 concerto.* After a short stay on the continent, 
 he returned with his wife to America. 
 
 MacDowell found in Boston a considerable 
 field for his activity as pianist and teacher. He 
 took many private pupils, and he made, during 
 the eight years that he remained there, many 
 public appearances in concert. In composition, 
 these years were the most fruitful of his life. He 
 wrote during this period the Concert Study for 
 piano (op. 36); the set of pieces after Victor 
 Hugo's "Les Orientates^' (op. 37) — "Clair de 
 lune," "Dans le Hamac," "Danse Andalouse"; 
 the "Marionettes" (op. 38); the "Twelve Stud- 
 ies" of op. 39; the "Six Love Songs" (op. 40); 
 the two songs for male chorus (op. 41) — " Cradle 
 Song" and "Dance of the Gnomes"; the orches- 
 
 * The rest of the programme, it may be interesting to note, 
 contained Arthur Foote's overture, "In the Mountains," 
 Van der Stucken's suite, "The Tempest," Chadwick's "Mel- 
 pomene" overture, Paine's "CEdipus Tyrannus" prelude, a 
 romance and polonaise for violin and orchestra by Henry 
 Holden Huss, and songs by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Dudley 
 Buck, Chadwick, Foote, Van der Stucken. The concert ended 
 with an " ouverture fesHvale sur VHymne Americaine, 'The 
 Star Spangled Banner,' " by Dudley Buck. 
 
34 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 tral suite in A-minor (op. 42) and its supplement, 
 "In October" (op. 42-A);* the "Two Northern 
 Songs" and "Barcarolle" (op. 43 and op. 44) 
 for mixed voices; the "Sonata Tragica" (op. 45); 
 the 12 "Virtuoso Studies" of op. 46; the "Eight 
 Songs" (op. 47); the second ("Indian") suite for 
 orchestra; the "Air" and "Rigaudon" (op. 49) 
 for piano; the "Sonata Eroica" (op. 50); and the 
 "Woodland Sketches" (op. 51). This output 
 did not contain his most mature and character- 
 istic works — those were to come later, during 
 the last six years of his creative activity; yet 
 the product was in many ways a notable one, 
 and some of it — the two sonatas, the "Indian" 
 suite, the songs of op. 47, the "Woodland 
 Sketches" — was, if not consistently of his very 
 best, markedly fine and characteristic in quality. 
 This decade (from 1887 to 1897) saw also the 
 publication of all his work contained between 
 his op. 22 ("Hamlet and Ophelia") and op, 51 
 (the "Woodland Sketches") With the exception 
 of the symphonic poem "Lamia," which was 
 not published until after his death. 
 
 * This episode formed part of the suite in its original form, 
 but was not printed until several years after the publication 
 of the rest of the music. The earlier portion, comprising 
 four parts ("In a Haunted Forest," "Summer Idyll," "The 
 Shepherdess' Song," "Forest Spirits"), was published in 
 1891, the supplement in 1893. 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 35 
 
 Meanwhile his prestige grew steadily. Each 
 new work that he put forth met with a remark- 
 able measure of success, both among the general 
 public and at the hands of many not over-com- 
 placent critical appraisers. On January 10, 
 1890, his "Lancelot and Eilaine" was played at a 
 Boston Symphony concert under Mr. Nikisch. 
 In September, 1891, his orchestral suite in A- 
 minor (op. 42) was performed for the first time 
 at the Worcester Festival, and a month later it 
 was played in Boston at a Symphony concert 
 under Mr. Nikisch. In November of the same 
 year the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, under 
 Bemhard Listemarin, performed for the first 
 time, at the Tremont Theatre, his "Roland" 
 pieces, "The Saracens" and "The Lovely Aldi." 
 On the following day — November 6, 1891 — he 
 gave his first piano recital, playing, in addition to 
 pieces by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Templeton 
 Strong, P. Geisler, Alabiefif, and Liszt, his own 
 "Witches' Dance," "Shadow Dance" (op. 39), 
 "The Eagle," the Etude in F-sharp (op. 36), the 
 Prelude from the first suite, and the fourth of the 
 "Idyls" after Goethe. He followed this with a 
 second recital in January, 1892, at which he 
 played, among other things, the "Winter," 
 "Moonshine," and "The Brook," frOm the 
 "Four Little Poems" (op. 32). Discussing the 
 
36 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 first of these recitals, Mr. Philip Hale (in the 
 Boston Post) wrote these words, which have a 
 larger application than their reference to Mac- 
 Dowell: "No doubt, as a composer, he has 
 studied and mastered form and knows its value; 
 but he prefers suggestions and hints and dream 
 pictures and sleep-chasings to all attempts to be 
 original in an approved and conventional fashion. 
 . . . They [his compositions] are interesting, and 
 more than that: they are extremely characteristic 
 in harmonic colouring. Their size has nothing to 
 do with their merits. A few lines by Gautier 
 stufiFed with prismatic words and yet as vague as 
 mist-wreaths may in artistic worth surpass whole 
 cantos of more famous poets; and Mr. Mac- 
 Dowell has Gautier 's sense of colour and knowledge 
 of the power of suggestion." His performance 
 "was worthy of the warmest praise . . . seeing 
 gorgeous or delicate colours and hearing the voices 
 of orchestral instruments, it is no wonder that 
 Mr. MacDowell is a pianist of rare fascina- 
 tion." On January 28, 1893, ^^^ "Hamlet and 
 Ophelia" was played, for the first time in 
 Boston, by the Symphony Orchestra imder Mr. 
 Nikisch; but a more important event was the 
 first performance* two months later of the 
 
 * A single movement of the "Sonata Tragica," the third, 
 was played by MacDowell in Boston on March i8, 1892, at 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 37 
 
 " Sonata Tragica," which MacDowell played at 
 a Kneisel Quartet concert in Chickering Hall. 
 Concerning the sonata Mr. Apthorp wrote: "One 
 feels genius in it throughout — and we are per- 
 fectly aware that genius is not a term to be used 
 lightly. The composer," he added, "played it 
 superbly, magnificently." MacDowell achieved 
 one of the conspicuous triumphs of his career on 
 December 14, 1894, when he played his second 
 concerto with the Philharmonic Society of New 
 York, under the direction of Anton Seidl. He 
 won on this occasion, recorded Mr. Finck in the 
 Evening Post, "a success, both as pianist and 
 composer, such as no American musician has 
 ever won before a metropolitan concert audience. 
 A Philharmonic audience can be cold when it does 
 not like a piece or a player; but Mr. MacDowell 
 . . . had an ovation such as is accorded only to a 
 popular prima donna at the opera. Again and 
 again he had to get up and bow after every move- 
 ment of his concerto; again and again was he 
 recalled at the close. . . . For once a prophet has 
 had great honour in his own country. . . . He 
 played with that splendid kind of virtuosity which 
 makes one forget the technique." Concerning 
 the concerto, Mr, W. J. Henderson wrote (in the 
 
 the last of the three recitals which he gave in that season at 
 Chickering Hall. 
 
38 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Times) that it was difficult to speak of it "in 
 terms of judicial calmness, for it is made of the 
 stuff that calls for enthusiasm. There need be 
 no hesitation," he continued, " in saying that Mr. 
 MacDowell in this work fairly claims the position 
 of an American master. We may have no dis- 
 tinctive school of music, but here is one young 
 man who has placed himself on a level with the 
 men owned by the world. This D-minor con- 
 certo is a strong, wholesome, beautiful work of 
 art, vital with imagination, and made with mas- 
 terly skill." And Mr. James Huneker observed 
 that "it easily ranks with any modern work in 
 this form. Dramatic in feeling, moulded largely, 
 and its themes musically eloquent, it sounds a 
 model of its kind — the kind which Johannes 
 Brahms gave the world over thirty years ago in 
 his D-minor concerto." In March of the fol- 
 lowing year MacDowell gave two piano recitals 
 in the Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, 
 New York, playing, beside a number of his smaller 
 pieces, his "Tragica" sonata, which made, if any- 
 thing, an even profounder impression than it had 
 made in Boston two years before. Probably the 
 most signal of the honours that came to him at this 
 time was paid him when the Boston Symphony 
 Orchestra placed both his "Indian" suite and his 
 first concerto on the programme of its New York 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 39 
 
 concert on January 23, 1896, at the Metropolitan 
 Opera House. 
 
 In the spring of 1896 it was determined to 
 found a department of music at Columbia Uni- 
 versity, New York. This was made possible 
 by a fund of $150,000 given to the trustees 
 by Mrs. Elizabeth Mary Ludow, with the pro- 
 viso that the income was to be applied in such 
 ways as should "tend more effectually to elevate 
 the staiidard of musical instruction in the United 
 States, and to afford the most favourable oppor- 
 tunity for acquiring musical instruction of the 
 highest order." In May of that year the pro- 
 fessorship was offered to MacDowell, the com- 
 mittee who had the appointment in charge 
 annoimcing the consensus of their opinion to 
 be that he was "the greatest musical genius 
 America has produced." MacDowell, though 
 he valued greatly the honour of his selection, 
 considered anxiously the advisability of accepting 
 the post. He now had more pupils than he could 
 take, and his pecuniary circumstances would not 
 be improved by the change, save that a settled 
 income would be assured to him. This was of 
 course a tempting prospect; on the other hand, 
 the task of organizing a wholly new department 
 in a large university, and the curtailed freedom 
 which the position would necessitate, , made him 
 
40 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 hesitate. But the assurance of an income free 
 from precariousness finally decided him in favour 
 of acceptance; and in the following autumn he 
 moved from Boston to New York, and began his 
 duties at Cohimbia. 
 
 That he undertook his labours there, from the 
 start, in no casual or perfunctory spirit, is made 
 clear by the bare record of his activity. For the 
 first two years of his incumbency he had no 
 assistant, carrying all the work of his department 
 on his own shoulders. He devoted from eight 
 to ten hours a week to lectures and class- work; 
 and this represented but a small proportion of the 
 time and laboxir expended in establishing the new 
 department. The aim of the instruction was to 
 be twofold. "First, to teach music scientifically 
 and technically, with a view to training musi- 
 cians who shall be competent to teach and to 
 compose. Second, to treat music historically and 
 aesthetically as an element of liberal culture." 
 This plan involved five courses of study, and a 
 brief description of them will indicate the scope 
 of the task undertaken by MacDowell. 
 
 There was to be, first, a "general musical 
 course," consisting of lectures and private read- 
 ing, with illustrations. This course, while "out- 
 lining the purely technical side of music," aimed 
 at giving "a general idea of music from its his- 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 41 
 
 torical and aesthetic side," and it treated xjf "the 
 beginnings of music, the Greek modes and their 
 evolution, systems of notation, the Troubadours 
 and Minnesingers, counterpoint and fugue, be- 
 ginnings of opera, the clavecinists, beginnings of 
 programme music, harmony, beginnings of the 
 modem orchestra, evolution of forms, the sym- 
 phony and opera up to Beethoven." A second 
 coiurse (this was not begun until the following 
 year) treated "of the development of forms, the 
 song, romanticism, instrumental development, 
 and the composers for pianoforte, revolutionary 
 influences, the virtuoso, modern orchestration and 
 symphonic forms, the music-drama, impressionism 
 versus absolute music, color versus form, the rela- 
 tionship of music to the other arts, musical criti- 
 cism." A third course treated of " general theory, 
 dictation, harmony, comprising chords and their 
 mutual significance, altered chords, suspensions, 
 modulation, imitation, analysis, and the com- 
 mejicement of composition in the smaller forms." 
 A fourth course comprised, in the first term, 
 covinterpoint, canon, choral figuration, and 
 fugue; in the second term, "free counterpoint, 
 canon and fugue, analysis, commencement of 
 composition in the larger forms." The fifth 
 course treated of "free composition, analysis, 
 instrumentation, symphonic forms," and the 
 
42 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 study of "all the orchestral and other instru- 
 ments, considered collectively and individually," 
 together with demonstrations of their " technique, 
 possibilities, and limitations." 
 
 At the end of the second year an assistant was 
 appointed — a gentleman who had been a student 
 in the department. To him were entrusted the 
 classes in rudimentary harmony, dictation, and 
 chord-analysis: and to this extent he relieved 
 MacDowell until the latter had his sabbatical 
 vacation in 1902-03; he then took over the 
 classes in strict counterpoint; but all the more 
 advanced courses were discontinued until Mac- 
 Dowell's return. Even with an assistant, how- 
 ever, MacDowell found his labours very far 
 from being light. In his third year (1898-99) 
 he still gave five courses of two hours a week 
 each, with the exception of a single one-hour 
 course. For these no less than eighty-six students 
 were registered; and in the following year, fifty- 
 two students were registered in one of the courses. 
 In 1901-02 he gave six courses: a general course in 
 musical culture, for which he had thirty-seven 
 students; an advanced course in musical culture, 
 for which he had fourteen students; a course in 
 counterpoint, twelve students; in orchestration, 
 twelve students; in practical composition, thir- 
 teen students; in free compositions, two students. 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 43 
 
 This continued to be, in general, his work until 
 he resigned in 1904. To these laboiu-s he added 
 the appalling drudgery of correcting examination 
 books and exercises — a task which he performed 
 with imflagging patience and invariable thor- 
 oughness. Some of his friends remember seeing 
 him at this particular labour, and they recall 
 "the weary, tired, though interested face; the 
 patient trying-over and annotating." In addi- 
 tion to his regular duties, he devoted every Sunday 
 morning to receiving students in the more ad- 
 vanced courses who were invited to come to him 
 for help in their composition and piano work. 
 He was, as his friend Hamlin Garland has said, 
 " temperate in all things but work — in that he 
 was hopelessly prodigal." 
 
 These facts are worth stating in detail; for it 
 has been said that MacDowell had no drudgery 
 to perform at Columbia; that he had few students, 
 and that the burden of the teaching work was 
 borne by his assistant. The impression has 
 gone abroad that he had little didactic capacity, 
 that he was disinclined toward and disqualified for 
 methodical work. It cannot, of course, be said 
 that his inclinations tended irresistibly toward 
 pedagogy, or that he loved routine. Yet that he 
 had uncommon gifts as a teacher, that he was 
 singularly methodical in his manner of work, are 
 
44 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 facts that are beyond question. His students 
 have testified to the strikingly suggestive and 
 illuminating manner in which his instruction was 
 imparted. His lectures, which he wrote out in 
 fuU, are remarkable for the amount of sheer 
 "brain-stuff" that was expended upon them. 
 They are erudite, accurate, and scholarly; they 
 are original in thought, they are lucid and stimu- 
 lating in their presentation and interpretation of 
 fact, and they are often admirable in expression. 
 They would reflect uncommon credit upon a 
 writer who had given his life to the critical, his- 
 torical, and philosophical study of music; as 
 the work of a man who had been primarily ab- 
 sorbed in making music, rather than in discussing 
 it, they are extraordinary. 
 
 As conveying an idea of MacDowell's methods 
 in the class-room I cannot do better than quote 
 from a vivid account of him in this aspect 
 written by one of his pupils, Miss J. S. Wat- 
 son: 
 
 "A crowd of noisy, expectant students sat in 
 the lecture room nervously eyeing the door and 
 the clock by turns. The final examination in 
 course I of the Department of Music was in prog- 
 ress in the back room, the door of which opened 
 at intervals as one pupil came out and another 
 went in. The examination was oral and private. 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 45 
 
 and when the door closed behind me Professor 
 MacDowell, who was standing at the open win- 
 dow, turned with a smile and motioned me toward 
 a chair. In a pedagogic sense it was not a regular 
 examination. There was something beautifully 
 human in the way the professor turned the tradi- 
 tional stifiF and starched catechism into a delight- 
 fully informal chat, in which the faburden, the 
 Netherland School, early notation, the great 
 clavichord players, suites and sonatas, formed 
 the main topics. The questions were put in such 
 an easy, charming way that I forgot to be fright- 
 ened; forgot everything but the man who walked 
 rapidly about the room with his hands in his 
 pockets and his head tipped slightly to one side; 
 who talked animatedly and looked intently at the 
 floor; but the explanations and suggestions were 
 meant for me. When I tripped upon the begin- 
 ning of notation for instruments, he looked up 
 quickly and said, 'Better look that up again; 
 that's important.' 
 
 "At the lectures Professor MacDowell's aim 
 had been to emphasise those things that had served 
 to mark the bright spots in the growth and ad- 
 vancement of music as an intelligible language. 
 How well I recall my impression on the occasion 
 of my first visit to the lectures, and afterwards! 
 There was no evidence of an aesthetic side to the 
 
46 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 equipment of the lecture room. At the end it 
 was vast and glaringly white, and except for an 
 upright piano and a few chairs placed near the 
 lecturer's table the room was empty. Ten or 
 twelve imdergraduates, youths of eighteen or 
 twenty, and twenty or more special students and 
 auditors, chiefly women, were gathered here. 
 The first lectures, treating of the archaic begin- 
 nings of music, might have easily fallen into a 
 business-Hke recital of dates, but Professor Mac- 
 Dowell never sank into the passionless routine 
 of lecture giving. His were not the pedantic 
 discourses students link most often to university 
 chairs. They were beautifully illuminating talks, 
 delivered with so much freedom and such a rush 
 of enthusiasm that one felt that the hour never 
 held all that wanted to be said, and the abundant 
 knowledge, in its longing to get out, kept spilling 
 over into the to-morrows. 
 
 "His ideas were not tied up in a manuscript, 
 nor doled out from notes. They came untram- 
 melled from a wonderfully versatile mind, and 
 were illustrated with countless musical quotations 
 and interlined with a wealth of literary and his- 
 torical references. There was no regular text- 
 book; some students carried a Rockstro or a 
 Hunt, but the majority depended upon the refer- 
 ences made during the lectures. These were 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 47 
 
 numerous, and gave a broad view of this specu- 
 lative period in musical history. 
 
 "Music was brought from behind the centuries 
 and spread before us like a huge map. What- 
 ever meaning lay hidden under the musical theories 
 of the ancients was explained in a clear and con- 
 scientious way. Short decisive sentences swept 
 into every obscure corner, and from all sides we 
 saw reflected Professor MacDowell's resolute 
 spirit and sincerity of purpose. . . . 
 
 "To illustrate [a point in connection with a 
 discussion of popular music], Professor Mac- 
 Dowell went to the piano to play 'A Hot Time 
 in the Old Town To-night.' After playing a 
 few measures, he turned abruptly toward the 
 class, saying: 'Why, that isn't it! What is it I am 
 playing?' Someone answered 'Annie Rooney.' 
 Facing us with a droll smile, he asked if there 
 was anyone present who could play 'A Hot 
 Time.' A dozen boys rushed forward and the 
 one who gained the chair dashed it off with the 
 abandon of a four weeks' old freshman . . . 
 
 "The lectures on musical form were distin- 
 guished by many brilliant demonstrations of 
 MacDowell's genius. The ease and rapidity 
 with which he flashed his thoughts upon the 
 blackboard were both inspiring and bewildering 
 to the student who must grope his way through 
 
48 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 notes before he can reach an idea. If any were 
 unwise enough to stop even for a moment to 
 catch these spontaneous thoughts as they flew 
 along the staff, they were very apt upon looking 
 up to see them vanishing like phantoms in a 
 cloud of white chalk. At the same time he made 
 sarabandes, gavottes, minuets, chaconnes, passe- 
 pieds, gigues, "polonaises and rondos dance across 
 the piano in quick succession; and his comments 
 were as spirited as his playing. 
 
 "Professor MacDowell's criticisms were clear 
 and forceful, and filled with many surprising and 
 humorous touches. Of Bach he said, 'Bach 
 spoke in close, scientific, contrapuntal language. 
 He was as emotional and romantic as Chopin, 
 Wagner or Tchaikovsky; his emotion was ex- 
 pressed in the language of his time. Young 
 women who say they adore Bach play him like a 
 sum in mathematics. They find a grim pleasure 
 in it, like biting on a sore tooth.' 
 
 "He never approached the piano like a con- 
 queror. He had a nervous way of saying that he 
 didn't know whether things would go, because 
 he had had no time to practise. After an apolo- 
 getic little preamble, he would sit down and 
 play these rococo bits of trailing sound with 
 fingers dipped in lightning, fingers that flashed 
 over the keys in perfect evenness and with per- 
 fect sureness. 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 49 
 
 "The closing lectures were in reality delight- 
 fully informal concerts for which the class began 
 to assemble as early as 8.30 in the morning. By 
 9.30 every student would be in his chair, which 
 he had dragged as, near to the piano as the early 
 suburbanite would let him. Someone at the 
 window would say, 'Here he comes!' and, enter- 
 ing the room with a huge bundle of music under 
 one arm and his hat in his hand, MacDowell 
 would deposit them on the piano and turn to us 
 with his gracious smile. Then, instead of sitting 
 down, he would continue to walk up and down 
 the room, his thoughts following, apparently, the 
 pace set by his energetic steps. He had an 
 abundant word supply and his short, terse sen- 
 tences were easy to follow." 
 
 This is not the picture of a man who was 
 unqualified for his task, or indifferent, rebellious, 
 or inept in its performance; it is the picture of a 
 man of vital and electric temperament, with 
 almost a genius — certainly with an extraordi- 
 nary gift — for teaching. His ideals were lofty; 
 he dreamed of a relationship between university 
 instruction and a liberal public culture which 
 was not to be realised in his time. He was any- 
 thing but complacent; had he been less intolerant 
 in his hatred of unintelligent and indolent thought 
 on the subjects that were near his heart, his way 
 would have been made far easier. 
 
so EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 The results of his labours at the university, he 
 finally came to feel, did not warrant the expendi- 
 ture of the vitality and time that he was devoting 
 to them. He was, in a sense, an anachronism in 
 the position in which he found himself. Both in 
 his ideals and in his plans for bringing about their 
 fulfilment he had reached beyond his day. The 
 field was not yet ripe for his best efforts. It 
 became clear to him that he could not make his 
 point of view operative in what he conceived as 
 the need for a reformation of conditions affecting 
 his work; and on January i8, 1904, after long and 
 anxious deliberation and discussion with his 
 wife, he tendered his resignation as head of the 
 department. His attitude in the matter was 
 grievously misunderstood and misrepresented at 
 the time, to his poignant distress and harassment. 
 The iron entered deeply into his soul: it was the 
 forerunner of tragedy. 
 
 When he took up his work at Columbia his 
 activity as a concert pianist had, of course, to be 
 virtually suspended. With the exception of two 
 short tours of a few weeks' each, he gave up his 
 public appearances altogether until the year of 
 his sabbatical vacation (1902-03). In Decem- 
 ber, 1902, he went on an extensive concert 
 tour, which took him as far west as San Francisco 
 and occupied all of that winter. The following 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 51 
 
 spring and siimmer were spent abroad, in Eng- 
 land and on the Continent. In London he ap- 
 peared in concert, playing his second concerto 
 with the Philharmonic Society on May 14. He 
 returned to America in October, and resumed 
 his work at Columbia. 
 
 Meanwhile his composition had continued un- 
 interruptedly. Indeed, the eight years during 
 which he held his Columbia professorship were, 
 in a creative sense, the most important of his life; 
 for to this period belong the "Sea Pieces" (op. 
 55), the two superb sonatas, the "Norse" (op. 
 57) and the "Keltic" (op. 59), and the best of 
 his songs — the four of op. 56 (" Long Ago," 
 "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid 
 Sings Light," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep"), 
 and the three of op. 58 (" Constancy," " Sunrise," 
 "Merry Maiden Spring"): a product which con- 
 tains the finest flower of his inspiration, the 
 quintessence of his art.* He wrote also during 
 these years the three songs of op. 60 ("Tyrant 
 Love," "Fair Springtide," "To the Golden 
 Rod"); the "Fireside Tales" (op. 61); the "New 
 England Idyls" (op. 62); numerous part-songs, 
 
 * The only one of his works of equal calibre which does 
 not, strictly speaking, belong to this period is the set of " Wood- 
 land Sketches"; these were composed during the last part of 
 his stay in Boston, and were published in the year (1896) of 
 his removal to New York. 
 
52 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 transcriptions, arrangements; and, finally, the 
 greater part of a suite for string orchestra which 
 he never finished to his satisfaction : in fact, 
 nearly one quarter of the bulk of his entire work 
 was composed during these eight years. During 
 this period, moreover, was published all of the 
 music hitherto unprinted which he cared to 
 preserve. 
 
 He had bought in 1896 a piece of property 
 near the town of Peterboro, in southern New 
 Hampshire, consisting of a small farmhouse, 
 some out-buildings, fifteen acres of arable land, 
 and about fifty acres of forest. The buildings 
 he consolidated and made over into a rambling 
 and comfortable dwelling-house; and in this 
 rural "asyl" (as Wagner would have called it), 
 surrounded by the woods and hiUs that he loved, 
 he spent his summers from then until the end of 
 his life. There most of his later music was 
 written, in a small log cabin which he built, in the 
 heart of the woods, for use as a workshop. Thus 
 his summers were devoted to composition, and 
 his winters to the arduous though absorbing 
 labours of his professorship; in addition, he 
 taught in private a few classes for which he made 
 time in that portion of the day which was not 
 taken up by his sessions at the university. Dur- 
 ing his first two winters in New York he also 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 53 
 
 served as conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee 
 Club, and he was for a time president of the 
 Manuscript Society, an association of American 
 composers. Altogether, it was a scheme of 
 living which permitted him virtually no opportu- 
 nity for the rest and idleness which he impera- 
 tively needed. 
 
 In New York the MacDowells' home was, dur- 
 ing the first year, a house in 88th Street, near 
 Riverside Drive. Later they lived at the Majestic 
 Hotel; but during most of the Columbia years — 
 from 1898 till igo2 — they occupied an apartment 
 at 96th Street and Central Park West. After 
 their return from the sabbatical vacation abroad 
 they lived for a year at the Westminster Hotel in 
 Irving Place, and for a year in an apartment house 
 on upper Seventh Avenue, near Central Park. 
 When that was sold and torn down they returned 
 to the Westminster; and there MacDowell's last 
 days were spent. 
 
 After he left Columbia in 1904, he continued 
 his private piano classes (at some of which he 
 gave free tuition to poor students in whose talent 
 he had confidence). He should have rested — ■ 
 should have ceased both his teaching and his 
 composing; for he was in a threatening condition. 
 Had he spent a year in a sanitarium, or had he 
 stopped all work completely and taken even a 
 
54 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 brief vacation, he might have averted the collapse 
 which was to come. In the spring of 1905 he 
 began to manifest alarming signs of nervous 
 exhaustion, A summer in Peterboro brought no 
 improvement. That autumn his ailment was 
 seen to be far more deeply seated than had been 
 supposed. There were indications of an obscure 
 brain lesion, baffling but sinister. Then began a 
 very gradual, progressive, and infinitely pathetic 
 decline — the slow beginning of the end. He 
 sufifered little pain, and until the last months he 
 preserved in an astonishing degree his physical 
 well-being. It was clear almost from the start 
 that he was beyond the aid of medical science, 
 even the boldest and most expert. A disinte- 
 gration of the brain-tissues had begun — an 
 affection to which specialists hesitated to give a 
 precise name, but which they recognized as 
 incurable. His mind became as that of a little 
 child. He sat quietly, day after day, in a chair 
 by a window, smiling patiently from time to 
 time at those about him, turning the pages of a 
 book of fairy tales that seemed to give him a 
 definite pleasure, and greeting with a fugitive 
 gleam of recognition certain of his more intimate 
 friends. Toward the last his physical condition 
 became burdensome, and he sank rapidly. At 
 nine o'clock on the evening of January 23, 1908, 
 
RECORDS AND EVENTS 55 
 
 in the beginning of his forty-seventh year, he died 
 at the Westminster Hotel, New York, in the 
 presence of the heroic woman who for almost 
 a quarter of a century had been his devoted 
 companion, counsellor, helpmate, and friend. 
 After such simple services as would have pleased 
 him, held at St. George's Episcopal Church, on 
 January 25, his body was taken to Peterboro; and 
 on the following day, a Sunday, he was buried in 
 the sight of many of his neighbours, who had 
 followed in procession, on foot, the passage of the 
 body through the snow-covered lane from the 
 village. His grave is on an open hill-top, com- 
 manding one of the spacious and beautiful views 
 that he had loved. On a bronze tablet are these 
 lines of his own, which he had devised as a motto 
 for his "From a Log Cabin," the last music that 
 he wrote: 
 
 "A house of dreams untold, 
 It looks out over the whispering tree-tops 
 And faces the setting sun." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 
 
 In his personal intercourse with the world, 
 MacDowell, like so many sensitive and gifted 
 men, had the misfortune to give very often a 
 wholly false account of himself. In reality a 
 man of singularly lovable personality, and to his 
 intimates a winning and delightful companion, 
 he lacked utterly the social gift, that capacity for 
 ready and tactful address which, even for men 
 of gifts, is not without its uses. It was a defi- 
 ciency (if a deficiency it is) which undoubtedly 
 cost him much in a material sense. Had he 
 possessed this serviceable and lubricant quality 
 it would often have helpfully smoothed his path. 
 For those who could penetrate behind the em- 
 barrassed and painful reticence that was for him 
 both an impediment and an unconscious shield, 
 he gave lavishly of the gifts of temperament and 
 spirit which were his; even that lack of ready 
 address, of social adaptability and adjustment, 
 which it is possible to deplore in him, was, for 
 those who knew him and valued him, a not 
 S6 
 
MacDowell in 1S92 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 57 
 
 uncertain element of charm: for it was akin to 
 the shyness, the absence of assertiveness, the 
 entirely genuine modesty, which were of his 
 dominant traits. Yet in his contact with the 
 outer world this incurable shyness sometimes, as 
 I have said, led him into giving a grotesquely 
 untrue impression of himself: he was at times 
 gauche, blunt, awkwardly infelicitous in speech 
 or silence, when he would have wished, as he 
 knew perfectly how, to be considerate, gentle, 
 sympathetic, responsive. On the other hand, 
 his shyness and reticence were seemingly contra- 
 dicted by a downright bluntness, a deliberate 
 frankness in matters of opinion in which his 
 convictions were involved; for his views were 
 most positively held and his convictions were 
 often passionate in intensity, and he declared 
 them, upon occasion, with an utter absence of 
 diplomacy, compromise, or equivocation; with a 
 superb but sometimes calamitous disregard of 
 his own interests. 
 
 Confident and positive to a fault in his ad- 
 herence to and expression of his principles, he 
 was as morbidly dubious concerning his own 
 performances as he was uneasy under praise. He 
 was tortured by doubts of the value of each new 
 work that he completed, after the flush and 
 ardour generated in its actual expression had 
 
S8 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 passed; and he listened to open praise of it in 
 evident discomfort. I have a memory of him 
 on a certain occasion in a private house following 
 a recital at which he had played, almost for the 
 first time, his then newly finished "Keltic" 
 Sonata. Standing in the center of a crowded 
 room, surrounded by enthusiastically effusive 
 strangers who were voluble — and not over- 
 penetrating — in their expressions of apprecia- 
 tion, he presented a picture of unhappiness, of 
 mingled helplessness and discomfort, which v/as 
 almost pathetic in its genuineness of woe. I was 
 standing near him, and during a momentary 
 lull in the amiable siege of which he was the 
 distressed object, he whispered tragically to me: 
 " Can't we get out of this ? — Do you know the 
 way to the back door?" I said I did, and led 
 him through an inconspicuous doorway into a 
 comparatively deserted corridor behind the stair- 
 case. I procured for him, through the strategic 
 employment of a passing servant, something to 
 eat, and we staid in concealment there until 
 the function had come to an end, and his wife 
 had begun to search for him. He was quite 
 happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the 
 stairs and telling me in detail his conception of 
 certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which 
 he had had in mind while composing his sonata. 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 59 
 
 To visitors at his house in Peterboro, he said 
 one morning, on leaving them, "I am going to 
 the cabin to write some of my rotten melodies!" 
 He was sincerely distrustful concerning the worth 
 of any composition which he had finished; espe- 
 cially so, of course, concerning his more youthful 
 performances. He once sent a frantic telegram 
 to Teresa Carreno, upon learning from an an- 
 nouncement that she was to play his early Con- 
 cert Etude (op. 36) for the first time: "Don't put 
 that dreadful thing on your programme"; and 
 for certain of his more popxilar and hackneyed 
 pieces, as the "Hexentanz" and the much-mauled 
 and over-sentimental song, "Thy Beaming Eyes," 
 he had a detestation that was amusing in its 
 virulence. He regretted at times that his earlier 
 orchestral works — "Hamlet and Ophelia" and 
 "Lancelot and Elaine" — had been published; 
 and he was invariably tormented by questionings 
 and misgivings after he had committed even his 
 ripest work to his publisher. Only the assur- 
 ances of his wise and devoted wife at times pre- 
 vented him from recalling a completed work. Yet 
 he was always touched, delighted, and genuinely 
 cheered by what he felt to be sincere and thought- 
 ful praise. To a writer who had published an 
 admiring article concerning some of his later 
 music he wrote: 
 
6o EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 "My DEAR Mr. 
 
 Your article was forwarded to me after all. I wish to 
 thank you for the warm-hearted and sympathetic enthu- 
 siasm which prompted your writing it. While my out- 
 givings have always been sincere, I feel only too often 
 their inadequacy to express my ideals; thus what you 
 speak of as accomplishment I fear is often but attempt. 
 Certainly your sympathy for my aims is most welcome 
 and precious to me, and I thank you again most heartily." 
 
 Those who knew the man only through his 
 music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer 
 and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, 
 and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely 
 things of the world. Nothing could be further 
 from the truth. He was overflowingly human, 
 notably full-blooded. On his "farm" (as he 
 called it) at Peterboro he lived, when he was not 
 composing, a robust and vigorous outdoor life. 
 He was an ardent sportsman, and he spent much 
 of his time in the woods and fields, fishing, riding, 
 walking, hunting. He had a special relish for 
 gardening and for photography, and he liked to 
 undertake laborious jobs in carpentry, at which 
 he was quite deft. That his feeling for the 
 things of the natural world was acutely sensitive 
 and coloured by imagination and emotion is 
 abundantly evidenced in his music. He was 
 fond of taking long, leisurely drives and rides 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 6i 
 
 through the rich and vaxied hill country about 
 Peterboro, and many of the impressions that were 
 then garnered and stored have found issue in 
 some of his most intimate and affecting music — 
 as in the "Woodland Sketches" and "New Eng- 
 land Idyls." He had an odd, naive tenderness 
 for growing things and for the creatures of the 
 woods: it distressed him to have his wife water 
 some of the flowers in the garden without water- 
 ing them all; and though an excellent shot, he 
 never brought down game without a pang — it 
 used to be said at Peterboro that for this reason 
 he only "pretended to hunt," despite his expert- 
 ness as a marksman. 
 
 In his intellectual interests and equipment he 
 presented a striking contrast to the brainless- 
 ness of the average musician. His tastes were 
 singularly varied and catholic. An omnivorous 
 reader of poetry, an inquisitive delver in the 
 byways of mediaeval literature, an authority in 
 mythological detail, he was at the same time 
 keenly interested in contemporary affairs. He 
 read, and discussed with eagerness and acumen, 
 scientific, economic, and historical deliverances; 
 and he enjoyed books of travel, biographies, 
 dramatic literature. Mark Twain he adored, 
 and delighted to quote, and almost to the end of 
 his life he read with inexhaustible pleasure Joel 
 
62 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus." In the later 
 years of his activity he fell captive to the new 
 and unaccusomted music of Fiona Macleod's 
 exquisite prose and verse; he wanted to dedicate 
 his "New England Idyls" to the author of 
 "Pharais" and "From the Hills of Dream," 
 and wrote for her permission; but the identity 
 of the mysterious author was then jealously 
 guarded, and his letter must have gone astray; 
 for it was never answered. 
 
 His erudition was extraordinary. He exem- 
 plified in a marked degree the truth that the 
 typical modern music-maker touches hands with 
 the whole body of culture and the humanities 
 in a sense which would have been simply incred- 
 ible to Mozart or Schubert. He was, intellec- 
 tually, one of the most fully and brilliantly 
 equipped composers in the history of musical art. 
 He had read widely and curiously in many lit- 
 eratures, and the knowledge which he had ac- 
 quired he applied to the elucidation of aesthetic 
 and philosophical problems touching the theory 
 and practice of music. He had meditated deeply 
 concerning the art of which he was always a 
 tireless student — had come to conclusions con- 
 cerning its actual and assumed records, its 
 tendencies, its potentialities. He was a vigor- 
 ous and original critic, and he had shrewd. 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 63 
 
 cogent, and cleax-cut reasons for the particular 
 views at which he had arrived; whether one 
 could always agree with them or not, they inva- 
 riably commanded respect. Yet his erudition 
 was seldom displayed. One came upon it un- 
 expectedly in conversation with him, through the 
 accident of some reference or the discussion of 
 some disputed point of fact. 
 
 In his appearance MacDowell suggested a 
 fusion of Scandinavian and American types. 
 His eyes, of a light and brilliant blue, were per- 
 haps his most salient feature. They betrayed his 
 inextinguishable humour. When he was amused 
 — and he was seldom, in conversation, grave for 
 long — they lit up with an extraordinary anima- 
 tion; he had an unconscious trick of blinking 
 them rapidly once or twice, with the efifect of a 
 fugitive twinkle, which was oddly infectious. 
 His laugh, too, was communicative; he did not 
 often laugh aloud; his enjoyment found vent in a 
 low, rich chuckle, which, with the lighting up of 
 his eyes, was wholly and immediately irresistible. 
 The large head, the strong, rather boyish face, 
 with its singular mobility and often sweetness of 
 expression, the bright, vital eyes, set wide apart, 
 the abundant (though not long), dark hair 
 tinged with grey, the white skin, the sensitive 
 mouth, rather large and full-lipped, the strong 
 
64 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 jaws, the sturdy and athletic build, — he was 
 somewhat above medium height, with broad 
 shoulders, powerful arms, and large, muscular, 
 finely shaped hands, — his general air of physical 
 soundness and vigour: all these combined to form 
 an outer personality that was strongly attractive. 
 His movements were quick and decisive. To 
 strangers, even when he felt at ease, his manner 
 was diffident, yet of an indescribable, almost 
 childlike, simplicity and charm. His voice in 
 speaking was low-pitched and subdued, like his 
 laugh; in conversation, when he was entirely 
 himself, he could be brilliantly effective and witty, 
 and his mirth-loving propensities were irrepress- 
 ible. 
 
 His sense of humour, which was of true Celtic 
 richness, was fluent and inexhaustible. To an 
 admirer who had affirmed in print that certain 
 imaginative felicities in some of the verse which 
 he wrote for his songs recalled at moments the 
 phrasing of Whitman and Shakespeare, he wrote : 
 
 "I will confide in you that if, in the next world, I 
 should happen upon the wraiths of Shakespeare, Whit- 
 man, and Co., I would light out without delay. Good 
 heavens! I blush at the thought of it! A header through 
 a cloud would be the only thing. — Seriously, I was deeply 
 touched by your praise and wish I were more worthy." 
 
 His pupil and friend, Mr. W. H. Humiston, 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 65 
 
 recalls that, in going over MacDoweU's sketch- 
 books and manuscripts after his death, he found 
 that many of the manuscripts had been rewritten 
 several times: "I would find a movement begun 
 and continued for half a page, then it would be 
 broken ofiE suddenly, and a remark like this 
 written at the end : — ' Hand organ to the rescue ! '" 
 
 I told him once that I had first heard his "To 
 a Wild Rose" played by a high-school girl, on a 
 high-school piano, at a high-school graduation 
 festivity. "Well," he remarked, with his sudden 
 illumination, "I suppose she pulled it up by the 
 roots!" Some one sent him at about this time, 
 relates Mr. Humiston, a programme of an organ 
 recital which contained this same "Wild Rose" 
 piece. "He was not pleased with the idea, 
 having in mind the expressionless organ of a 
 dozen years ago when only a smaU portion of 
 most organs was enclosed in a sweU-box. Doubt- 
 less thinking also of a style of organ performance 
 which plays Schumann's Traumerei on the great 
 organ diapasons, he said it made him think of 
 a hippopotamus wearing a clover leaf in his 
 mouth." 
 
 A member of one of his classes at Columbia, 
 finding some unoccupied space on the page of his 
 book after finishing his exercise, filled up the 
 space with rests, at the end of which he placed a 
 
66 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 double bar. When his book was returned the 
 page was covered with corrections — all except 
 these bars of rests, which were enclosed in a red 
 line and marked: "This is the only correct pas- 
 sage in the exercise." 
 
 He once observed in a lecture that "Bach 
 differed in almost everything from Handel, except 
 that he was born the same year and was killed 
 by the same doctor." 
 
 He was often sarcastic; but his was a sarcasm 
 without sting or rancour. Bitterness, indeed, was 
 one of the few normal attributes which he did not 
 possess. Mr. Humiston tells of lunching with 
 him unexpectedly at a restaurant one day, just 
 after his resignation from Columbia had been 
 accepted. "We sat over our coffee and cigars 
 until nearly four o'clock, and among other things 
 he talked of that [the Columbia matter]. There 
 was not a word of bitterness or reproach toward 
 anyone, but rather a deep feeling of disappoint- 
 ment that his plans and ideals for the training 
 and welfare of young artists should have been so 
 completely defeated." 
 
 In his methods of work he was, like most com- 
 posers of first-rate quality, at the mercy of his 
 inspiration. He never composed at the piano, in 
 the ordinary meaning of the phrase. That is to 
 say, he never sat down to the piano with the idea 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 67 
 
 that he wanted to compose a song or a piano piece. 
 But sometime, when he might be improvising, as 
 he was fond of doing when alone, a theme, an 
 idea, might come to him, and almost before he 
 knew it he had sketched something in a rudi- 
 mentary form. He had a fancy that the tech- 
 nique of composition suffered as much as that of 
 the piano if it was allowed to go for weeks and 
 months without exercise. The constant work and 
 excitement that his winters in Boston and New 
 York involved, made it necessary for him to let 
 days and weeks slip by with no creative work 
 accomplished. Yet he always tried to write each 
 day a few bars of music. Often in this way he 
 evolved a theme for which he afterward found a 
 use. In looking over a sketch-book in the sum- 
 mer he would run across something he liked, and 
 the idea would expand into a matured work. 
 
 His sketch-books are fuU of all kinds of random 
 and fugitive material — half-finished fugues, 
 canons, piano pieces, songs, single themes. Un- 
 doubtedly this habit of work had its value when 
 he came to the leisurely months of summer; 
 for he did not then have to go through a period 
 of technical "warming up." There were many 
 days when he did not write a note, but he always 
 intended to, and usually did. When he was ab- 
 sorbed in a particular composition he kept at it. 
 
68 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 almost night and day, save for the hours he al- 
 ways tried to spend in the open air, and two hours 
 in the evening when, no matter how late it might 
 be, he sat quietly with his wife, reading or talking, 
 smoking, and, in earlier days, enjoying a glass of 
 beer and some food. His love of reading was a 
 godsend to him when the waters were more than 
 usually troubled and his brain was in a whirl. 
 
 In the actual work of composition he was 
 elaborately meticulous — not often to the extent 
 of changing an original plan, but in minor details; 
 he never ceased working on a score until the 
 music was out of his hands, or entirely put aside. 
 Sometimes he tried over a few measures on the 
 piano as many as fifty times, changing the value 
 or significance of a note; as a result, his piano 
 writing is almost always "pianistic." In one 
 respect he was sometimes careless: in the noting 
 of the expression marks. By the time he arrived 
 at that duty he was usually tired out. For this 
 reason, much in his printed music is marked 
 differently from the way he actually played it in 
 concert. He never, in performance, changed a 
 note, save in a few of the earlier pieces; but in 
 details of expression he often departed widely 
 from the printed directions. 
 
 He was always profoundly absorbed when at 
 work, though not to the extent of being able to 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 69 
 
 compose amid noise or disturbance. He needed 
 to isolate himself as much as possible; although, 
 when it could not be avoided, he contrived to 
 work effectively imder obstructive conditions; 
 the Largo of the " Sonata Tragica," for example, 
 was written in Boston when he was harassed by 
 drudgery and care. During the earlier days at 
 Peterboro he composed in a music room which 
 was joined to the main body of the house by a 
 covered passage; in this way he could hear 
 nothing of the household workings, and was 
 imaware of the chance caller. No one was ever 
 allowed to intrude upon him, save his wife. Yet 
 certain outside noises were still apparent; so the 
 log cabin in the woods was built. There he used 
 to go nearly every morning, coming home when 
 he felt disposed, and usually going to the golf 
 grounds for a game before dinner, which he 
 always had at night. He kept a piano in the 
 music room as well as at the log cabin; so if he 
 felt like working in the evening he could do so; 
 and when he was especially engrossed he often 
 worked into the small hours. His unselfishness 
 made it easy for his wife, when she deemed a 
 change and rest essential, to make the excuse 
 that she needed it. After a preliminary protest 
 he would usually give in, and they would leave 
 Peterboro for a few days' excursion. 
 
70 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 He knew discouragement in an extreme form. 
 Many weeks, even months, had to pass before his 
 discontent over the last child of his imagination 
 would become normal. Particularly was this 
 so with the larger works; though each one was 
 started in a fever of inspiration, a longing to 
 reduce to actual form the impossible. He was 
 always disheartened when a work was finished, 
 but he was too sane in his judgment not to have 
 moments when he could estimate fairly the qual- 
 ity of what he had written. But those were rare 
 moments; as a rule, it was in his future music 
 that he was always going to do his "really good 
 work," and he longed ardently for leisure and 
 freedom from care, so that, as he once bitterly 
 said, he would not have to press into a small 
 piano piece material enough to make a movement 
 of a symphony. 
 
 His preferences in the matter of his own music 
 were not very definite. In 1903, when he had 
 finished all that he was to write, he expressed a 
 preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" 
 suite above anything that he had composed. 
 "Of aU my music," he confessed at this time, 
 "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me 
 most. It affects me deeply and did when I was 
 writing it. In it an Indian woman laments the 
 death of her son; but to me, as I wrote it, it 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 71 
 
 seemed to express a world-sorrow rather than a 
 particularised grief." His estimate of the value 
 of the music has, naturally, no extraordinary 
 importance; but my conviction is that, in this 
 instance, his judgment was correct. As to the 
 sonatas, he cared most for the "Keltic"; after 
 that, for the "Eroica," as a whole; though I 
 doubt whether there was anything in the two 
 that he cared for quite as he did for the Largo in 
 the "Tragica" and certain parts of the "Norse." 
 He felt concerning the "Keltic" that there was 
 hardly a bar in it that he wanted changed, that 
 he had scarcely ever written any thing so rounded, 
 so complete, in which the joining was so invisible. 
 He played it con amore, and it grew to be part of 
 himself as no other of his works ever did. Tech- 
 nically, it was never hard for him, whereas he 
 found the "Eroica" exhausting, physically and 
 mentally. 
 
 Of the smaller works he preferred the "Sea 
 Pieces," as a whole, above all the others; yet there 
 were single things in each of the other sets for 
 which he cared perhaps as much. Of the "Sea 
 Pieces" those he liked best were: "To the Sea," 
 "From the Depths," "In Mid-Ocean"; of the 
 "Fireside Tales": the "Haunted House," "Sala- 
 mander," "'Brer Rabbit"; and he had a tender 
 feeling for "In a German Forest," which always 
 
72 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 seemed to bring back the Frankfort days to his 
 memory. Of the "New England Idyls," his 
 favorites were: " In Deep Woods," "Mid-Winter," 
 "From a Log Cabin." 
 
 In his composition he was growing away from 
 piano worlc, — he felt that the future must mean 
 larger, probably orchestral, forms, for him, and 
 his dream of an ultimate leisure was a dream for 
 which his friends can be thankful. He did not 
 end with despair at his heart that the distracting 
 work, the yearly drudgery, were to go on forever. 
 
 His preferences in music were governed by the 
 independence which characterised his intellectual 
 judgments. Of the moderns, Wagner was his 
 god; for Liszt he had an unbounded admiration, 
 though he detected the showman, the mere jug- 
 gler, in him; Tchaikovsky stirred him mightily; 
 Brahms did not as a rule give him pleasure, 
 though certain of that master's more fertile 
 moments compelled his appreciation. Grieg he 
 delighted in. To him he dedicated both his 
 "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas. In response to 
 his request for permission to inscribe the first of 
 these to his eminent contemporary, he received 
 from Grieg the following delectable letter — one 
 of the Norwegian's very few attempts at English 
 composition (I quote it verbatim; the spelling is 
 Grieg's) : — 
 
7^ ^ -^^ ^ 
 
 Facsimile of a letter from Grieg to MacDowe 
 Sonata. One of Grieg's rare attempts 
 

 ACCEPTING THE DEDICATION OF THE "NoRSE" 
 
 r English composition (see page 73) 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 73 
 
 Copenhagen, 26/10/99. 
 Hotel King of Denmark. 
 My dear Sir! 
 
 Will you permit me in bad English to express my best 
 thanks for your kind letter and for the sympathi you 
 feel for my music. Of course it will be a great honor and 
 pleasure for me to accept your dedication. 
 
 Some years ago I thought it possible to shake hands 
 with you in your own country. But unfortunately my 
 delicat health does not seem to agree. At all events, if 
 we are not to meet, I am glad to read in the papers of 
 your artistical success in Amerika. 
 
 With my best wishes, 
 
 I am, dear Sir, 
 
 Yours very truly, 
 Edvard Grieg. 
 
 I may quote also, in this place, because of its 
 unusual interest, a letter written (in German) 
 by Grieg to Mrs. MacDowell when he learned 
 of her husband's collapse: — 
 
 Christiania, 
 
 December 14, 1905. 
 Dear Madam: 
 
 The news of MacDowell's serious illness has deeply 
 affected me. Permit me therefore to express to you my 
 own and my wife's sincerest sympathy for you. I am a 
 great admirer of MacDowell's Muse, and would regard 
 it as a severe blow if his best creative period should be 
 so hastily broken oflf. From all that I hear of your hus- 
 band, his qualities as a man are as remarkable as his 
 
74 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 qualities as an artist. He is a complete Personality, with 
 an unusually sympathetic and sensitive nervous system. 
 Such a temperament gives one the capacity not only for 
 moods of the highest transport, but for an unspeakable 
 sorrow tenfold more profound. This is the unsolvable 
 riddle. An artist so ideally endowed [dn so ideal ange- 
 legter Kiinstler] as MacDowell must ask himself: Why 
 have I received from nature this delicately strung lyre, if 
 I were better ofiF without it? So unmerciful is Life that 
 every artist must ask himself this question. The only 
 consolation is: Work — yes, even the severest labours. 
 . . . But: the artist is an optimist. Otherwise he woxild 
 be no artist. He believes and hopes in the trixmiph of 
 the good and the beautiful. He trusts in his lucky star 
 till his last breath. And you, the wife of a highly gifted 
 artist, will not and must not lose hope! In similar cases, 
 happily, one often witnesses a seemingly inexplicable 
 recovery. If it can give MacDowell a moment's cheer, 
 say to him that he has in distant Norway a warm and 
 understanding friend who feels for him, and wishes from 
 his heart that for him, as for you, better times may soon 
 come. 
 
 With best greeting to you both. 
 
 Your respectful 
 
 Edvard Grieg. 
 
 MacDowell's feeling in regard to Strauss, 
 whom he considered to have developed what he 
 called the "suggestive" (delineative) power of 
 music at the expense of its finer potentialities, is 
 indicated in a lecture which he prepared on the 
 subject of " Suggestion in Music." " 'Thus Spake 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 75 
 
 Zaxathustra,'" he wrote, "may be considered the 
 apotheosis of this power of suggestion in tonal 
 colour, and in it I believe we can see the tendency 
 I ailude to [the tendency "to elevate what should 
 be a means of adding power and intensity to 
 musical speech, to the importance of musical 
 speech itself"]. It stuns by its glorious magnifi- 
 cence of tonal texture. The suggestion, at the 
 beginning, of the rising sun, is a mighty example 
 of the overwhelming power of tone-colour. The 
 upward sweep of the music to the highest regions 
 of light has something splendrous about it; and 
 yet I remember once hearing in London a song 
 sung in the street at night that seemed to me to 
 contain a truer germ of music." — From which it 
 will be seen that there were limits to the aesthetic 
 sympathy of even so liberal and divining an 
 appreciator as MacDowell. 
 
 The modern Frenchmen he knew scarcely at 
 all. Some of d'Indy's earher music he had heard 
 and admired: but that he would have cared for 
 such a score as Debussy's "La Mer" I very much 
 doubt. I remember his amusement over what 
 he called the "queerness" of a sonata by the 
 Belgian Lekeu for violin and piano, which he 
 had read or heard. It is hkely that he would 
 have found little to attract him in the more 
 characteristic music of d'Indy, Debussy, and 
 
76 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Ravel; his instincts and temperament led him 
 into a wholly different region of expression. He 
 was a prophet of modernity; but it was a mod- 
 ernity that he alone exemplifies: it has no exact 
 parallel. 
 
 Concerning the classics he had his own views. 
 Of Bach he wrote that he believed him to have 
 accomplished his work as "one of the world's 
 mightiest tone-poets not by means of the contra- 
 pimtal methods of his day, but in spite of them. 
 The laws of canon knd fugue are based upon as 
 prosaic a foundation as those of the Rondb and 
 Sonata Form, and I find it impossible to imagine 
 their ever having been a spur, an incentive, to 
 poetic musical speech." 
 
 Of Mozart he wrote : " It is impossible to forget 
 the fact that in his piano works he was first and 
 foremost a piano virtuoso, a child prodigy: of 
 whom filigree work (we cannot call this Orien- 
 talism, for it was more or less of German pattern, 
 traced from the fioriture of the Italian opera 
 singer) was expected by the public for which his 
 sonatas were written. . . . We need freshness and 
 sincerity in forming our judgments of art. ... If 
 we read on one page of some history (every his- 
 tory of music has such a page) that Mozart's 
 sonatas are sublime; that they far transcend any- 
 thing written for the harpsichord or clavichord 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 77 
 
 by Haydn or his contemporaries, we are apt to 
 echo the saying . . . But let us look the thing 
 straight in the face: Mozart's sonatas are com- 
 positions entirely unworthy of the author of 'The 
 Magic Flute' and 'Don Giovanni,' or of any 
 composer with pretensions to more than mediocre 
 talent. They are written in a style of flashy 
 harpsichord virtuosity such as Liszt in his most 
 despised moments never descended to. Yet I 
 am well aware that this statement would be dis- 
 missed as either absurd or heretical, according 
 to the point of view of the particular objector." 
 Of Mendelssohn he said: "Mendelssohn pro- 
 fessed to be an 'absolutist' in music. As a 
 matter of fact, he stands on the same ground that 
 Liszt and Berlioz did; for almost everything he 
 Avrote, even to the smallest piano piece, he fur- 
 nished with an explanatory title. . . . Formalist 
 though he was, his work often exhibits eccen- 
 tricities of form — as, for instance, in the Scotch 
 Symphony, where, in the so-called 'exposition' 
 of the first movement, he throws in an extra 
 little theme that laps over his frame with a jaunty 
 disregard of the rules that is dehghtful. . . . His 
 technic of piano writing was perfect; compared 
 with Beethoven's it was a revelation. He never 
 committed the fault of mere virtuoso writing, 
 which is remarkable when we consider how strong 
 
78 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 a temptation there must have been to do so. In 
 his piano music can be found the germs of most 
 of the pianistic innovations that are usually iden- 
 tified with other composers — for instance, the 
 manner of enveloping the melody with runs, the 
 discovery of which has been ascribed to Thalberg, 
 but which we find in Mendelssohn's first Prelude, 
 written in 1833. The interlocking passages 
 which have become so prevalent in modern music 
 we find in his compositions dating from 1835." 
 
 Of Schumann he said happily: "His music is 
 not avowed programme-music; 'neither is it, as 
 was much of Schubert's, pure delight in beautiful 
 sound. It did not break through formalism by 
 sheer violence of emotion, as did Beethoven's: it 
 represents the rhapsodical revery of an inspired 
 poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems 
 strange or alien, and who has the faculty of rela- 
 ting his visions, never attempting to give them 
 coherence, and unaware of their character until 
 perhaps when, awakened from his dream, he 
 naively wonders what they may have meant — 
 you remember that he added titles to his music 
 after it was composed. He put his dreams in 
 music and guessed their meaning afterward." 
 
 Of Liszt and Chopin: "To all of this new, 
 strange music [the piano music of the Romantics] 
 Liszt and Chopin added the wonderful tracery of 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 79 
 
 Orientalism. The difference between these two 
 is, that with Chopin this tracery developed poetic 
 thought as with a thin gauze; whereas with Liszt 
 [in his piano music] the embellishment itself made 
 the starting-point for almost a new art in tonal 
 combination, the effects of which one sees on 
 every hand to-day. To realise its influence one 
 need only compare the easy mastery of the ara- 
 besque displayed in the simplest piano piece of 
 to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figura- 
 tion of Beethoven and his predecessors. We 
 may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to 
 Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are 
 but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John 
 Field." 
 
 Of Wagner: "His music-dramas, shorn of the 
 fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated 
 from the materialism of acting, painting, and 
 furniture, must be considered the greatest achieve- 
 ment in our art." 
 
 Concerning' Form in music, he observed: "If 
 by the word 'form' our purists meant the most 
 poignant expression of poetic thought in music, 
 if they meant by this term the art of arranging 
 musical sounds so that they constituted the most 
 telling presentation of a musical idea, I should have 
 nothing to say. But as it is, the word in almost 
 its invariable use by theorists stands for what are 
 
8o EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 called ' stoutly-built periods,' ' subsidiary themes ' 
 and the like, a happy combination of which in 
 certain prescribed keys is supposed to constitute 
 good form. Such a principle, inherited from the 
 necessities and fashions of the dance, and chan- 
 ging from time to time, is surely not worthy of the 
 strange worship it has received. In their eager- 
 ness to press this great revolutionist [Beethoven] 
 into their own ranks in the fight of narrow theory 
 against expansion and progress, the most amusing 
 mistakes are constantly occurring. For example, 
 the first movement of this sonata [the so-called 
 "Moonlight"] — which, as we know, is a poem 
 of profound sorrow and the most poignant resig- 
 nation alternating with despair — has, by some 
 strange torturing, been cited as being in strict 
 sonata-form by one theorist (Harding: Novello's 
 primer), is dubbed a free fantasy by another 
 (Matthews), and is described as being in song- 
 form by another: all of which is somewhat weak- 
 ened by the dictum of stiU another theorist that 
 the music is absolutely formless! A form of so 
 doubtful an identity can surely lay small claim to 
 any serious intellectual value. ... In our modem 
 days we too often, Procrustes-like, make our 
 ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest, the 
 poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing 
 bird from out of the mystery of the blue sky — 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 8i 
 
 we put this confiding stranger straightway into 
 that iron bed: the 'sonata-form' — or perhaps 
 even the ' third-rondo form,' for we have quite an 
 assortment; and should the idea survive, and 
 grow, and become too large for the bed, and if 
 we have grown to love it too much to cut off its 
 feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber 
 of Attica), why then we run the risk of having 
 some wiseacre say, as is said of Chopin : ' Yes — 
 but he is weak in sonata-form'! . . . Form should 
 be nothing more than a synonym for coherence. 
 No idea, whether great or small, can find utter- 
 ance without form; but that form will be inherent 
 in the idea, and there will be as many forms as 
 there are adequately expressed ideas in the 
 world." 
 
 Concerning programme-music he wrote at 
 length. "In my opinion," he says in one of his 
 lectures, " the battle over what music can express 
 and what it cannot express has been carried on 
 wrong lines. We are always referred back to 
 language as actually expressing an idea, when, 
 as a matter of fact, language expresses nothing 
 but that which its vital parallel means of expres- 
 sion, gesture and facial expression, permit it to 
 express. Words mean nothing whatsoever in 
 themselves; the same words in different languages 
 mean wholly different things; for written words 
 
82 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 are mere symbols, and no more express things or 
 ideas than any marks on paper would. Yet lan- 
 guage is forever striving to emulate music by 
 actually expressing something, besides merely 
 symbolising it, and thus we have in poetry the 
 coining of onomatopoetic words — words that 
 will bring the things they stand for more vividly 
 before our eyes and minds. Now music may 
 express all that words can express and much 
 more, for it is the natural means of expression 
 for all animals, mankind included. If musical 
 sounds were accepted as symbols for things we 
 would have another speech. It seems strange to 
 say that by means of music one could say the 
 most commonplace thing, as, for instance: 'I am 
 going to take a walk' ; yet this is precisely what the 
 Chinese have been doing for centuries. For such 
 things, however, our word-symbols do perfectly 
 well, and such a symbolising of musical sounds 
 must detract, I think, from the high mission of 
 music: which, as I conceive, is neither to be an 
 agent for expressing material things; nor to utter 
 pretty soimds to amuse the ear; nor a sensuous 
 excitant to fire the blood, or a sedative to luU the 
 senses: it is a language, but a language of the in- 
 tangible, a kind of soul-language. It appeals 
 directly to the Seelenzustdnde it springs from, for 
 it is the natural expression of it, rather than, like 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 83 
 
 words, a translation of it into set stereotyped 
 symbols which may or may not be accepted for 
 what they were intended to denote by the writer" 
 — a credo which sums up in fairly complete form 
 his theory of music-making, whatever validity it 
 may have as a philosophical generalisation. 
 
 In regard to the sadly vexed question of musical 
 nationalism, especially in its relation to America, 
 his position was definite and positive. His 
 views on this subject may well be quoted some- 
 what in detail, since they have not always been 
 justly represented or fully understood. In the 
 following excerpt, from a lecture on "Folk- 
 Music," he pays his respects to Dvorak's "New 
 World" symphony, and touches upon his own 
 attitude toward the case as exemplified in his 
 "Indian" suite: 
 
 "A man is generally something different from 
 the clothes he wears or the business he is occu- 
 pied with; but when we do see a man identified 
 with his clothes we think but little of him. And 
 so it is with music. So-called Russian, Bohemian, 
 or any other purely national music has no place 
 in art, for its characteristics may be duplicated 
 by anyone who takes the fancy to do so. On 
 the other hand, the vital element of music — 
 personality — stands alone. We have seen the 
 Viennese Strauss family adopting the cross 
 
84 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 rhythms of the Spanish — or, to be more accurate, 
 the Moorish or Arab — school of art. Moszkow- 
 ski the Pole writes Spanish dances. Cowen in 
 England writes a Scandinavian Symphony. Grieg 
 the Norwegian writes Arabian music; and, to 
 cap the climax, we have here in America been 
 offered a pattern for an 'American' national 
 musical costume by the Bohemian Dvoifdk — 
 though what the Negro melodies have to do with 
 Americanism in art still remains a mystery. 
 Music that can be made by 'recipe' is not music, 
 but 'tailoring.' To be sure, this tailoring may 
 serve to cover a beautiful thought; but — why 
 cover it ? and, worst of all, why cover it (if covered 
 it must be: if the trademark of nationality is 
 indispensable, which I deny) — why cover it 
 with the badge of whilom slavery rather than 
 with the stern but at least manly and free rude- 
 ness of the North American Indian ? If what is 
 called local tone colour is necessary to music 
 (which it most emphatically is not), why not adopt 
 some of the Hindoo Ragas and modes — each 
 one of which (and the modes alone number over 
 seventy-two) will give an individual tonal charac- 
 ter to the music written according to its rules? 
 But the means of 'creating' a national music to 
 which I have alluded are childish. No: before 
 a people can find a musical writer to echo its 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 85 
 
 genius it must first possess men who truly repre- 
 sent it — that is to say, men who, being part of 
 the people, love the country for itself: men who 
 put into their music what the nation has put into 
 its life; and in the case of America it needs above 
 all, both on the part of the public and on the 
 part of the writer, absolute freedom from the 
 restraint that an almost unlimited deference to 
 European thought and prejudice has imposed 
 upon us. Masquerading in the so-called national- 
 ism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help 
 us. What we must arrive at is the youthful 
 optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of 
 spirit that characterizes the American man. 
 This is what I hope to see echoed in American 
 music." 
 
 Of MacDowell as a pianist, Mr. Henry T. 
 Finck, who had known him in this capacity 
 almost from the beginning of his career in America, 
 has written for me his impressions, and I shall 
 quote them, rather than any of my own; since I 
 had comparatively few opportunities to hear him 
 display, at his best, the full measure of his ability: 
 
 "As he never felt quite sure," writes Mr. Finck, 
 " that what he was composing was worth while, so. 
 In the matter of playing in public, he was so self- 
 distrustful that when he came on the stage and 
 sat down on the piano stool he hung his head and 
 
86 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 looked a good deal like a school-boy detected in 
 the act of doing something he ought not to do. 
 
 " Often though I was with him — sometimes 
 a week at a time in Peterboro — I never could 
 persuade him to play for me. I once asked 
 Paderewski to play for me his new set of songs, 
 and he promptly did so. But MacDowell always 
 was 'out of practice,' or had some other excuse, 
 generally a witticism or bit of sarcasm at his own 
 expense. I am sorry now that I did not urge 
 him with more persistence, for he might have 
 yielded in the end, and I would have got a more 
 intime idea of his playing; for after all a musical 
 tfite-k-t^te like that is preferable to any public 
 hearing. I never heard Grieg play at a concert, 
 but I am sure that the hour I sat near him in his 
 Bergen home, while he played and his wife sang, 
 gave me a better appreciation of his skill as an 
 interpreter than I could have got in a public hall 
 with an audience to distract his attention. One 
 afternoon I called on Saint-Saens at his hotel 
 after one of his concerts in New York. Talking 
 about it, he sat down at the piano, ran over his 
 Valse Canariote, and said: 'That's the way I 
 ought to have played it!' 
 
 " MacDowell was quite right in saying that he 
 was out of practice; he generally was, his duties 
 as professor allowing him little time for technical 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 87 
 
 exercising; but once every few years he set to 
 work and got his fingers into a condition which 
 enabled them to follow his intentions; and those 
 intentions, it is needless to say, were always 
 honourable! He never played any of those show 
 pieces which help along a pianist, but confined 
 himself to the best he could find. 
 
 "Usually the first half of a recital was devoted 
 to the classical and romantic masters, the second 
 to his own compositions. Beethoven, Schubert, 
 Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, were likely to be repre- 
 sented, and he also did missionary work for 
 Templeton Strong and other Americans. His 
 interpretation of the music of other composers 
 was both objective and subjective; there was no 
 distortion or exaggeration, yet one could not 
 mistake the fact that it was MacDowell who was 
 playing it. 
 
 "The expression, 'he played like a composer,' 
 is often used to hint that the technic was not that 
 of a virtuoso. In this sense MacDowell did not 
 play like a composer; his technical skill was equal 
 to everything he played, though never obtrusive. 
 In another sense he did play 'like a composer,' 
 especially when interpreting his own pieces; that 
 is, he played with an insight, a subtlety of expres- 
 sion, which only a creative performer has at his 
 command. I doubt if Chopin himself could 
 
88 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 have rendered one of his pieces with more ravish- 
 ing delicacy than MacDowell showed in playing 
 his 'To a Wild Rose.' I doubt if Liszt could 
 have shown a more overwhelming dramatic 
 power than MacDowell did in playing his 'Kel- 
 tic' sonata. In this combination of feminine 
 tenderness with masculine strength he was, as in 
 his creative gift, a man of genius. After one of 
 his concerts I wrote in the glow of enthusiasm 
 that I would rather hear him than any pianist in 
 the field excepting Paderewski; that utterance I 
 never saw reason to modify." 
 
 For an interesting and closely observed descrip- 
 tion of MacDowell's technical peculiarities as a 
 piano player I am indebted to his friend and 
 pupil, Mr. T. P. Currier, who had followed Mac- 
 Dowell's career as a pianist from the time of his 
 first public appearance in Boston: 
 
 "[His finger velocity] was at that time [in 1888] 
 the most striking characteristic of his playing," 
 says Mr. Currier. "For him, too, it was a mere 
 bagatelle. He took to prestissimo like a duck to 
 water. He could, in fact, play fast more easily 
 than he could slowly. One of his ever-present 
 fears was that in performance his fingers would 
 rim away with him. And many hours were spent 
 in endeavours to control such an embarrassing 
 tendency. This extraordinary velocity, acquired 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 89 
 
 in the Paris Conservatory, and from his friend 
 and teacher, Carl Heymann, of Frankfort, in- 
 variably set his listeners agape, and was always 
 one of the chief sensations at his concerts. 
 
 " But for this finger speeding and for his other 
 technical acquirements as well, MacDowell cared 
 little, except as they furthered his one absorbing 
 aim. He was heart and soul a composer, and to 
 be able to play his own music as he heard it in 
 his inner ear was his single spur to practice. 
 From the time of his complete immersion in 
 composition, his ideas of pianistic efifects, of tone 
 colour, gradually led him farther and farther 
 away from conventional pianism. Scales and 
 arpeggios, as commonly rendered, had no longer 
 interest or charm for him. He cared for finger 
 passages only when they could be made to sug- 
 gest what he wanted them to suggest in his own 
 colour-scheme. With his peculiar touch and 
 facility at command, he rejoiced in turning such 
 passages into streams and swirls of tone, marked 
 with strong accents and coloured with vivid, 
 dynamic contrasts. 
 
 "That his passage playing rarely sounded clean 
 and pure — like that of a Rosenthal — was due 
 not only to his musical predilections, but to his 
 hand formation as well. His hand was broad 
 and rather thick-set, and tremendously muscular. 
 
90 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 It would not bend back at the knuckles; and the 
 fingers also had no well-defined knuckle move^ 
 ment. It appears, therefore, that he could not, 
 if he would, have succeeded on more conventional 
 technical lines. Gradually he developed great 
 strength and intense activity in the middle joints, 
 which enabled him to play with a very close, 
 often overlapping, touch, and to maintain ex- 
 tremely rapid tempi in legato or staccato with 
 perfect ease and little fatigue. With this com- 
 bination of velocity and close touch, it was a 
 slight matter to produce those pianistic effects 
 which were especially dear to him, 
 
 "MacDowell's finger development has been 
 thus dwelt upon, because it was, as has been said, 
 the feature of his technic which immediately 
 surprised and captivated his hearers. Less no- 
 ticeable was his wrist and octave work. But his 
 chord playing, though also relatively unattractive, 
 was even in those early days almost as uncommon 
 in its way as was his velocity. And in this field 
 of technic, during his later years, when in composi- 
 tion his mind turned almost wholly to this mode 
 of expression, he reached a plane of tonal effect 
 which, for variety, from vague, shadowy, mys- 
 terious ppp, to virile, orchestral ffff, has never 
 been surpassed by any pianist who has visited 
 these shores in recent years. His tone in chord 
 
o 
 B 
 w 
 
 H 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 91 
 
 playing, it is true, was often harsh, and this fault 
 also appeared in his melodic delivery. But in 
 both cases any unmusical effect was so greatly 
 overbalanced by many rare and beautiful quali- 
 ties of tone production, that it was easily forgiven 
 and forgotten. 
 
 "Wonderful tone blending in finger passages; 
 a peculiarly crisp, yet veiled staccato; chord 
 playing extraordinary in variety, — tender, mys- 
 terious, sinister, heroic; a curiously unconven- 
 tional yet effective melodic delivery; playing 
 replete with power, vitality, and dramatic signifi- 
 cance, always forcing upon the ear the phrase, 
 never the tickling of mere notes; a really marvel- 
 lous command and use of both pedals, — these 
 were the characteristics of MacDowell's pianistic 
 art as he displayed it in the exposition of his own 
 works. Unquestionably he was a born pianist. 
 If it had not been for his genius for composition, 
 he would, without doubt, have been known as a 
 brilliant and forceful interpreter of the greatest 
 piano literature. But his compositional bent 
 turned him completely away from mere piano 
 playing. He was a composer-pianist, and as such 
 he ever desired to be regarded." 
 
 As a pianist, as in aU other matters touching 
 his own capacities, he was often tortured by 
 doubts concerning the effect of his performances. 
 
92 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 "I shall never forget," recalls his wife, "the first 
 time he played it [the "Eroica" sonata] in Boston. 
 We all thought he did it wonderfully. But when 
 I went around to the green-room door to find 
 him, fearing something might be wrong, as he 
 had not come to me, he had gone. When I got 
 home, accompanied by two friends, there he was 
 almost in a corner, white, and as if he were guilty 
 of some crime, and he said as we came in : ' I can 
 play better than that. But I was so tired!' We 
 almost wept with the pity of the unnecessary 
 suffering, which was yet so real and intense. In 
 a short time he was more himself, and naively 
 admitted that he had played three movements 
 
 well, but had been a 'd fool in one.' I grew 
 
 to be very used to this as the years went on, for 
 he could not help emphasising to himself what he 
 did badly, and ignoring the good." 
 
 He left few uncompleted works. There are 
 among his manuscripts three movements of a 
 symphony, two movements of a suite for string 
 orchestra, a suite for vioHn and piano, some 
 songs and piano pieces, and a large number of 
 sketches. He had schemes for a music-drama 
 on an Arthurian subject, and sketched a single 
 act of it. He had planned this work upon 
 novel lines: there was to be comparatively little 
 singing, and much emphasis was to be laid upon 
 
PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS 93 
 
 the orchestral commentary; the action was to be 
 carried on by a combination of pantomime and 
 tableaux, and the scenic element was to be con- 
 spicuous — a suggestion which he got in part 
 from E. A. Abbey's Holy Grail frescoes in the 
 Boston Public Library. But he had determined 
 to write his own text: and the prospective labour 
 of this, made more formidable by his restricted 
 leisure, finally discouraged him, and he aban- 
 doned the project. Five years before his death 
 he destroyed the sketches that he had made; 
 only a few fragments remain. 
 
 A rare and admirable man! — a man who 
 would have been a remarkable personality if he 
 had not written a note of music. His faults — 
 and he was far from being a paragon — were 
 never petty or contemptible: they were truly the 
 defects of his qualities — of his honesty, his 
 courage, his passionate and often reckless zeal in 
 the promotion of what he believed to be sound 
 and fine in art and in life. Mr. Philip Hale, 
 whose long friendship with MacDowell gives him 
 the right to speak with peculiar authority, and 
 whose habit is that of sobriety in speech, has 
 written of him in words whose justice and felic- 
 ity cannot be bettered: "A man of blameless 
 life, he was never pharasaical; he was compas- 
 
94 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 sionate toward the slips and failings of poor 
 humanity. He was a true patriot, proud and 
 hopeful of his country and of its artistic future, 
 but he could not brook the thought of patriotism 
 used as a cloak to cover mediocrity in art. . . . 
 He was one who worked steadily and courageously 
 in the face of discouragement; who never courted 
 by trickery or device the favour of the public; 
 who never fawned upon those who might help 
 him; who in his art kept himself pure and un- 
 spotted." 
 
 "O that so many pitchers of rough clay 
 Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!" 
 
THE MUSIC-MAKER 
 
THE MUSIC-MAKER 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HIS AKT AND ITS METHODS 
 
 Among those music-makers of to-day who are 
 both pre-eminent and representative the note of 
 sincere romance is infrequently sounded. The 
 fact must be obvious to the most casual observer 
 of musical art in its contemporary development. 
 The significant work of the most considerable 
 musicians of our time — of Strauss, Debussy, 
 Loeffler, d'Indy — has few essentially romantic 
 characteristics. It is necessary to distinguish 
 between that fatuous Romanticism of which Mr. 
 Ernest Newman has given an unequalled defini- 
 tion: the Romanticism which expended itself in 
 the fabrication of a pasteboard world of " gloomy 
 forests, enchanted castles, impossible maidens, 
 and the obsolete profession of magic," and that 
 other and imperishable Spirit of Romance whose 
 infrequent embodiment in modern music I have 
 remarked. That is a romance in no wise di- 
 vorced from reality — is, in fact, but reality 
 diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanti- 
 cistic properties, it uses them not because of any 
 97 
 
98 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 inherent validity which they possess, but because 
 they may at times be made to serve as symbols. 
 It deals in a truth that is no less authentic because 
 it is conveyed in terms of a beauty that may 
 often be in the last degree incalculable and 
 aerial. 
 
 It is to its persistent embodiment of this valid 
 spirit of romance that MacDowell's work owes its 
 final and particular distinction. I know of no 
 composer who has displayed a like sensitiveness 
 to the finer stuff of romance. He has chosen 
 more than occasionally to employ, in the accom- 
 plishment of his purposes, what seems at first to 
 be precisely the magical apparatus so necessary 
 to the older Romanticism. Dryads and elves 
 are his intimate companions, and he dwells at 
 tiines under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; 
 but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradi- 
 tion, these things are but the manifest images of 
 an interior passion and delight. Seen in the 
 transfiguring mirror of his music, the moods and 
 events of the natural world, and of the drama 
 that plays incessantly in the hearts of men, are 
 vivified into shapes and designs of irresistible 
 beauty and appeal. He is of those quickened 
 ministers of beauty who attest for us the reality 
 of that changeless and timeless loveliness which 
 the visible world of the senses and the invisible 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 99 
 
 world of the imagination are ceaselessly revealing 
 to the simple of heart, the dream-fiUed, and the 
 unwise. 
 
 MacDowell presents throughout the entire 
 body of his work the noteworthy spectacle of a 
 radical without extravagance, a musician at once 
 in accord with, and detached from, the dominant 
 artistic movement of his day. The observation 
 is more a definition than an encomium. He is a 
 radical in that, to his sense, music is nothing if 
 not articulate. Wagner's luminous phrase, "the 
 fertilisation of music by poetry," would have 
 implied for him no mere assthetic abstraction, but 
 an intimate and ever-present ideal. He was a 
 musician, yet he looked out upon the visible 
 world and inward upon the world of the emotions 
 through the transforming eyes of the poet. He 
 would have none of a formal and merely decora- 
 tive beauty — a beauty serving no expressional 
 need of the heart or the imagination. In this 
 ultimate sense he is to be regarded as a realist — a 
 realist with the romantic's vision, the romantic's 
 preoccupation; and yet he is as alien to the fre- 
 quently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss 
 as he is to the academic ideal. Though he 
 conceives the prime mission of music to be in- 
 terpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, 
 in its function as an expressional instrument. 
 
loo EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 it shall concern itself with essences and impres- 
 sions, and not at all with transcriptions. His 
 standpoint is, in the last analysis, that of the 
 poet rather than of the typical musician: the 
 standpoint of the poet intent mainly upon a vivid 
 embodiment of the quintessence of personal 
 vision and emotion, who has elected to utter that 
 truth and that emotion in terms of musical 
 beauty. One is, indeed, almost tempted to say 
 that he is paramountly a poet, to whom the sup- 
 plementary gift of musical speech has been ex- 
 travagantly vouchsafed. 
 
 He is a realist, as I have said — applying the 
 term in that larger sense which denotes the trans- 
 mutation of life into visible or audible form, and 
 which implicates Beethoven as well as Wagner, 
 Schumann as well as Liszt, Tchaikovsky and 
 Debussy as well as Strauss: all those in whom 
 the desire for intelligible utterance coexists with, 
 or supersedes, the impulse toward perfected 
 design. But if MacDowell's method of trans- 
 mutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is 
 it the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He 
 occupies a middle ground between the undaunted 
 literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the senti- 
 mental posturings into which the romanticism of 
 Schumann so frequently declined. It is impos- 
 sible to conceive him attempting the musical 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS loi 
 
 exposition of such themes as kindled the imagina- 
 tion of Strauss when he wrought out his " Helden- 
 leben," "Zarathustra," and "Till Eulenspiegel"; 
 nor has he any appreciable afllnity with the 
 prismatic subtleties of the younger French school: 
 so that there is little in the accent of his musical 
 speech to remind one of the representative voices 
 of modernity. 
 
 Though he has avoided shackling his music to 
 a detailed programme, he has never very seri- 
 ously espoused the sophistical compromise which 
 concedes the legitimacy of programme-music pro- 
 vided it speaks as potently to one who does not 
 know the subject-matter as to one who does. 
 The bulk of his music no more discloses its full 
 measure of beauty and eloquence to one who is 
 in ignorance of its poetic basis than would Wag- 
 ner's "Faust" overture, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo 
 and Juliet," or Debussy's " L'Aprfes-midi d'lm 
 Faune." Its appeal is conditioned upon an 
 understanding of the basis of drama and emo- 
 tional crisis upon which the musician has built; 
 and in much of his music he has frankly recog- 
 nized this fact, and has printed at the beginning 
 of such works as the "Idyls" and "Poems" after 
 Goethe and Heine, the "Norse" and "Keltic" 
 sonatas, the "Sea Pieces," and the "New Eng- 
 land Idyls," the fragment of verse or legend or 
 
I02 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 meditation which has served as the particular 
 stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works 
 he has contented himself with the suggestion of 
 a mood or subject embodied in his title, as, for 
 example, in his "Woodland Sketches," — "To a 
 Wild Rose," "WiU o' the Wisp," "At an Old 
 Trysting Place," "In Autumn," "From an Indian 
 Lodge," "To a Water-Lily," "A Deserted 
 Farm." That he has been tempted, however, 
 in the direction of the compromise to which I 
 have alluded, is evident from the fact that 
 although his symphonic poem "Lancelot and 
 Elaine" is built upon the frame of an ex- 
 tremely definite sequence of events, — such as 
 Lancelot's downfall in the tournament, his return 
 to the court, Guinevere's casting away of the 
 trophies, the approach of the barge bearing 
 Elaine's body, and Lancelot's reverie by the river 
 bank, — he gives in the published score no hint 
 whatever of the particular phases of that moving 
 chronicle of passion and tragedy which he has 
 so faithfully striven to represent. "I would 
 never have insisted," he wrote in 1899, " ^^^.t this 
 symphonic poem need mean 'Lancelot and 
 Elaine' to everyone. It did to me, however, 
 and in the hope that my artistic enjoyment might 
 be shared by others, I added the title to my 
 music." 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 103 
 
 But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual 
 inconsistency of the modern tone-poet in his 
 attitude toward the whole subject of programme- 
 music,* the tendency was neither a persistent nor 
 
 * That MacDowell came later to realise the disadvantages, 
 no less than the inconsistency, of writing programme-music 
 based upon a detailed and definite programme and then with- 
 holding the programme, is indicated by this passage from a 
 lecture on Beethoven which he delivered at Columbia: "If 
 it [Beethoven's music] is absolute music, according to the ac- 
 cepted meaning of the term, either it must be beautiful music 
 in itself, — that is, composed of beautiful sounds, — or its 
 excuse for rtot being beautiful must rest upon its power of 
 expressing emotions and ideas that demand other than merely 
 beautiful tones for their utterance. Music, for instance, that 
 would give us the emotion — if I may call it that — of a 
 series of exploding bombshells could hardly be called 'abso- 
 lute music'; yet that is exactly what the opening of the last 
 movement of the so-called 'Moonlight' Sonata meant to 
 Miss Thackeray, who speaks of it in her story, 'Beauty and 
 the Beast.' ... If this is abstract music, it is bad. We 
 know, however, that Beethoven had some poetic idea in his 
 mind as he wrote this; but as he never gave the clew to 
 the world, the music has been swallowed as 'absolute music' 
 by the modem formalists" — a comment which would apply 
 almost word for word, with a change of names and titles, to 
 a certain tumultuous and "unbeautiful" passage in Mac- 
 Dowell's "Lancelot and Elaine.'' This passage is intended 
 to express the rage and jealousy of Guinevere; but Mac- 
 Dowell has given no indication of this fact in his score, and 
 only occasionally does the information find its way into the 
 programme-books. Yet in his own copy of the score he 
 wrpte a complete and detailed key to the significance of the 
 music at every point. Such are the ways of the musical 
 realist! 
 
I04 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 determined one; and he was, as I have noted, 
 even less disposed toward the frankly literal 
 methods of which Strauss and his followers are 
 such invincible exponents. His nearest approach 
 to such diverting expedients as the bleating sheep 
 and the exhilarating wind-machine of "Don 
 Quixote" is in the denotement of the line: 
 
 "And like a thunderbolt he falls " 
 
 in his graphic paraphrase of Tennyson's poem, 
 "The Eagle" — an indulgence which the most 
 exigent champion of programmatic reserve would 
 probably condone. In the main, MacDowell's 
 predilection for what he chose to call "suggestive" 
 music finds expression in such continent sym- 
 bolism as he employs in those elastically wrought 
 tone-poems, brief or vigorously sustained, in 
 which he sets forth a poetic concept with mem- 
 orable vividness — in such things as his terse 
 though astonishingly eloquent apostrophe "To 
 a Wandering Iceberg," and his "In Mid-Ocean," 
 from the "Sea Pieces"; in "To a Water- 
 lily," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in the 
 "Winter" and "In Deep Woods" from the 
 "New England Idyls"; in the "Marionettes" 
 ("Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," 
 "ViUain," "Sweetheart"); in the Raff-like or- 
 chestral suite, op. 42 ("In a Haunted Forest," 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 105 
 
 "Summer Idyll," "The Shepherdess' Song," 
 "Forest Spirits"), and in the later and far more 
 important "Indian" suite for orchestra ("Leg- 
 end," "Love Song," "In War-time," "Dirge," 
 "Village Festival"). 
 
 He was, in an extraordinarily complete sense, a 
 celebrant of the natural world. His imagination 
 was enslaved by the miraculous pageant of the 
 viable earth, and he sought tirelessly to transfix 
 some moment of its wonder or its splendour 
 or its terror in permanent images of tone. The 
 melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the 
 loveliness of quiet waters under fading skies, 
 the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous 
 chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious 
 majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a 
 meadow: these things urged him to musical 
 transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and 
 sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath 
 and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors 
 and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; 
 or it communicates the incommunicable in its 
 voicing of that indefinable and evanescent sense 
 of association which is evoked by certain aspects, 
 certain phases, of the outer world — that sudden 
 emotion of things past and irrecoverable which 
 may cling about a field at sunset, or a quiet 
 street at dusk, or a subtle intimation of spring 
 in the scent of lilacs. 
 
io6 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 But although such themes as he loved to dwell 
 upon in his celebration of the magic of the natural 
 world were very precious to his imagination, the 
 human spectacle held for him, from the first, 
 an emotion scarcely less swift and abundant. 
 His scope is comprehensive: he can voice the 
 archest gaiety, a naive and charming humour, as 
 in the "Marionettes" and in the songs "From an 
 Old Garden"; there is passion in the symphonic 
 poems and in many of the songs; while in the 
 sonatas and in the "Indian" suite the tragic 
 note is struck with impressive and indubitable 
 authority. 
 
 Of the specifically musical traits in which 
 MacDowell exhibits the tendencies and prefer- 
 ences which underlie his art, one must begin by 
 saying that his distinguishing quality — that 
 which puts so unmistakable a stamp upon his 
 work — eludes precise definition. His tone is 
 unmistakable. Its chief possession is a certain 
 clarity and directness which is apparent no less in 
 moments of great stress and complexity of emotion 
 than in passages of simpler and slighter content. 
 His style has httle of the torrential rhetoric, 
 the unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, 
 though it owns something of his forthright 
 quality; nor has it any of Debussy's with- 
 drawals. One thinks, as a discerning commen- 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 107 
 
 tator has observed, of the "broad Shakespearian 
 daylight" of Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not 
 inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's 
 writing. He has few reservations, and he shows 
 small liking for recondite effects of harmonic 
 colour, for the wavering melodic line — which is 
 far from implying that he is ever merely obvious 
 or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his direct- 
 ness, find issue in an order of expression at once 
 lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and 
 expressive. It is difficult to recall, in any example 
 of his maturer work, a single passage that is not 
 touched with a measure of beauty and character. 
 He had, of course, his period of crude experi- 
 mentation, his days of discipleship. In his earlier 
 writing there is not a little that is imworthy of 
 him: much in which one seeks vainly for that 
 note of distinction and personality which sounds 
 so constantly throughout the finer body of his 
 work. But in that considerable portion of his 
 output which is genuinely representative — say 
 from his opus 45 onward — he sustains his art 
 upon a noteworthy level of fineness and strength. 
 The range of his expressional gamut is striking. 
 One is at a loss to say whether he is happier in 
 emotional moments of weighty significance, — 
 as in many pages of the sonatas and some of the 
 " Sea Pieces," — or in such cameo-like perform- 
 
io8 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 ances as the "Woodland Sketches," certain of the 
 "Marionettes,"* and the exquisite song group, 
 "From an Old Garden," in which he attains an 
 order of delicate eloquence difl&cult to associate 
 with the mind which shaped the heroic ardours 
 of the " Norse" and " Keltic " sonatas. His capac- 
 ity for forceful utterance is remarkable. Only 
 in certain pages of Strauss is there anything in 
 contemporary music which compares, for superb 
 virility, dynamic power, and sweep of line, with 
 the opening of the "Keltic" sonata. He has, 
 moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expres- 
 sion. Time and again he astonishes by his 
 ability to charge a composition of the briefest 
 span with an emotional or dramatic content of 
 large and far-reaching significance. His "To 
 the Sea,"t for example, is but thirty-one bars 
 long; yet within this limited frame he has con- 
 fined a tone-picture which for breadth of con- 
 ception and concentrated splendour of effect is 
 paralleled in the contemporary literature of the 
 piano only by himself. Consider, also, the 
 "Epilogue" in the revised version of the "Mario- 
 nettes." The piece comprises only a score of 
 
 ♦The revised version, published in 1901, is referred to. 
 The original edition, which appeared in 1888, is decidedly 
 inferior. 
 
 t From the "Sea Pieces," for piano. 
 
The piazza axd garden walk at Peterboro 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 109 
 
 measures; yet within it the thought of the com- 
 poser traverses a world of philosophical medita- 
 tion: here is reflected the mood of one who looks 
 with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of 
 human life, in which, he would say to us, we are 
 no less the playthings of a controlling destiny 
 than are the figures of his puppet microcosm. 
 
 This scope and amplitude of expression are 
 realised through a method at once plastic and 
 unlaboured; his art has spontaneity — the de- 
 ceptive spontaneity of the expert craftsman. It 
 is not, in its elements, a strikingly novel style. 
 His harmony, fer se, is not unusual, if one sets 
 it beside the surprising combinations evolved by 
 such innovators as d'Indy, Debussy, and Strauss. 
 It is in the novel disposition of familiar material 
 — in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his 
 "free, instinctive application of the old in a new 
 way " ^ that MacDowell's emphatic individu- 
 ality consists. Whether it is a more signal 
 achievement to create a new speech through the 
 readjustment of established locutions than to 
 evolve it from fresh and unworked elements, is 
 open to debate. Be that as it may, however, 
 MacDowell's achievement is of the former order. 
 
 His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable. 
 An over-insistence upon certain formulas — elo- 
 quent enough in themselves — has been charged 
 
no EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 against it, and the accusation is not without 
 foundation. MacDowell is exceedingly fond, for 
 instance, of suspensions in the chord of the dimin- 
 ished seventh. There is scarcely a page through- 
 out his later work in which one does not encounter 
 this effect in but slightly varied form. Yet there 
 is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. 
 I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, 
 whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent 
 in colour. His tonal web is always densely 
 woven — he avoids "thinness" as he' avoids the 
 banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addi- 
 tion to the plangency of his chord combinations, 
 as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for 
 much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, 
 particularly in the more recent works, are studded 
 with examples of felicitous and dexterous coun- 
 terpoint — poetically significant, and of the most 
 elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in 
 passages of a merely episodic character, one is 
 struck with the vitaHty and importance of his 
 inner voices. Dissonance — in the sense in 
 which we understand dissonance to-day — plays 
 a comparatively unimportant part in his technical 
 method. The chmax of the second of the "Sea 
 Pieces" — "From a Wandering Iceberg" — 
 marks about as extreme a point of harmonic 
 conflict as he ever touches. Nor has he been 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS in 
 
 profoundly affected by the passion for unbridled 
 chromaticism engendered in modern music by 
 the procedures of Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. 
 Even in the earlier of the orchestral works, 
 "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and 
 Elaine" — both written in Germany in the days 
 when the genius of Wagner was an ambient and 
 inescapable flame — the writing is comparatively 
 free from chromatic effects. On the other hand, 
 he is far less audaciously diatonic than Richard 
 Strauss. His style is, in fact, a subtle blend of 
 opposing tendencies. 
 
 That his songs constitute almost a third of 
 the entire bulk of his work is not without sig- 
 nificance; for his melodic gift is, probably, the 
 most notable possession of his art. His insist- 
 ence upon the value and importance of the melos 
 was, indeed, one of his cardinal tenets; and he is, 
 in his practice, — whether writing for the voice, 
 for piano,' or for orchestra, — inveterately and 
 frankly melodic: melodic with a suppleness, a 
 breadth, a freshness and spontaneity which are 
 an3rthing but common in the typical music of our 
 day. It is a curious experience to turn from the 
 music of such typical moderns as Loeffler and 
 Debussy, with its elusive melodic contours, its 
 continual avoidance of definite patterns, its pas- 
 sion for the esoteric and its horror of direct com- 
 
112 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 munication, to the music of such a writer as 
 MacDowell. For he has accomplished the diffi- 
 cult and perilous feat of writing frankly without 
 obviousness, simply without triteness. His melo- 
 dic outlines are firm, clean-cut, apprehendable; 
 but they are seldom commonplace in design. 
 His thematic substance at its best — in, say, the 
 greater part of the sonatas, the " Sea Pieces," the 
 "Woodland Sketches," the "Four Songs" of 
 op. 56 — has saliency, character, and often great 
 beauty; and even when it is not at its best — as 
 in much of his writing up to his opus 45 — it has 
 a spirit and colour that Uft it securely above 
 mediocrity. 
 
 It must have already become evident to any- 
 one who has followed this essay at an exposition 
 of MacDowell's art that his view of the traditional 
 musical forms is a liberal one. Which is briefly 
 to say that, although his application to his art 
 of the fundamental principles of musical design 
 is deliberate and satisfying, he shares the typical 
 modern distaste for the classic forms. His four 
 sonatas, his two piano concertos, and his two 
 "modem suites" for piano are his only import- 
 ant adventures in the traditional instrumental 
 moulds. The catalogue of his works is innocent 
 of any symphony, overture, string quartet, or 
 cantata. The major portion of his work is as 
 
HIS ART AND ITS METHODS 113 
 
 elastic and emancipated in form as it is uncon- 
 fined in spirit. He preferred to shape his in- 
 spiration upon the mould of a definite poetic 
 concept, rather than upon a constructive form- 
 ula which was, for him, artificial and anomalous. 
 Even in his sonatas the classic prescription is 
 altered or abrogated at will in accordance with 
 the requirements of the underlying poetic idea. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EARLY EXPERIMENTS 
 
 MacDowell's impulse toward significant ex- 
 pression was not slow in declaring itself. The 
 first "modern suite" (op. lo), the earliest of his 
 listed works, which at first glance seems to be 
 merely a group of contrasted movements of inno- 
 cently traditional aspect, with the expected Prae- 
 ludium. Presto, Intermezzo, Fugue, etc., con- 
 tains, nevertheless, the germ of the programmatic 
 principle; for at the head of the third movement 
 (Andantino and Allegretto) one comes upon a 
 motto from Virgil — "Per arnica sUentia luncB," 
 and the Rhapsodie is introduced with the 
 
 " Lasciale ogni speranza, voi ch' enirate" 
 
 of Dante. The Praeludium of the second piano 
 suite, op. 14, is also annotated, having been sug- 
 gested by lines from Byron's " Manfred." In the 
 "Zwei Fantasiesiucke, op. 17 — "Erz&Mung" 
 and " Hexentanz" — but more particularly in 
 the "Wald-IdyUen" of op. ig—"Waldesstille," 
 "Spiel der Nymphen" " Trdumerei," and "Dria- 
 dentanz" — a definite poetic concept is implied. 
 114 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 115 
 
 Here the formative influence of Raff is evident. 
 The works which follow — "Drei Poesien" 
 ("Nachts am Meere," "Erzdhlung aus der Rit- 
 terzeit," "Ballade"), and the "Mondbilder," after 
 Hans Christian Andersen — are of a similar 
 kind. The romanticism which pervades them is 
 not of a very finely distilled quality: they are not, 
 that is to say, the product of a clarified and wholly 
 personal vision — of the vision which prompted 
 the issue of such things as the "Woodland 
 Sketches," the "Sea Pieces," and the "New 
 England Idyls." In these earlier works one feels 
 that the romantic view has been assumed some- 
 what vicariously — one can imagine the favourite 
 pupil of Raff producing a group of "Wald-Idyl- 
 len" quite as a matter of course, and without 
 interior conviction. Nor is the style marked by 
 individuality, except in occasional passages. 
 There are traces of his peculiar quality in the 
 first suite, — in the 6/8 passage of the Rhapsodie, 
 for example, — in portions of the first piano con- 
 certo (the a piacere passage toward the close of 
 the first movement is particularly characteristic), 
 in the ErzMung, and in No. 3 (Trdumeret) of the 
 Wald-IdyUen; but the prevailing note of his style 
 at this time was, quite naturally, strongly Teu- 
 tonic: one encounters in it the trail of Liszt, of 
 Schumann, of Raff, of Wagner. 
 
ii6 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Not until one reaches the "Hamlet and 
 Ophelia" is it apparent that he is beginning to 
 find himself. This work was written before he 
 had completed his twenty-fourth year; yet the 
 music is curiously ripe in feeling and accomplish- 
 ment. There is breadth and steadiness of view 
 in the conception, passion and sensitiveness in its 
 embodiment. It is mellower, of a deeper and 
 finer beauty, than anything he had previously 
 done, though nowhere has it the inspiration of 
 his later works. 
 
 The second piano concerto (op. 23), completed 
 a year later, is fairly within the class of that order 
 of music which it has been generally agreed to 
 describe as "absolute." It is innocent of any 
 programme, save for the fact that some of the 
 ideas prompted by "Much Ado About Noth- 
 ing," which were to form a " Beatrice and Bene- 
 dick" symphonic poem, were, as I have related 
 in a previous chapter, incorporated in the scherzo. 
 Together with its companion work, the first 
 piano concerto; the "Romanza" for 'cello and 
 orchestra; the concert study, op. 36, and such 
 conventional morceaux as the early "Serenata" 
 and "Barcarolle" (of which, it should be noted, 
 there are extremely few among his productions), 
 it represents the very limited body of his writing 
 which does not, in some degree, propose and 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 117 
 
 enforce a definite poetic concept. Not elsewhere 
 in his earlier work has MacDowell marshalled 
 the materials of his art with so confident an 
 artistry as he ejchibits in this concerto. In sub- 
 stance the work is not extraordinary. The man- 
 ner derives something from Grieg, more from 
 Liszt, and there is comparatively Kttle disclosure 
 of personality. But the manipulation is, through- 
 out, the work of a music-wright of brilliant 
 executive capacity. In fundamental logic, in 
 cohesion, flexibility, and symmetry of organism, 
 it is a brilliantly successful accomplishment. As 
 in all of MacDowell's writing, its allegiance is 
 to the basic principles of structure and design, 
 rather than to a traditional and arbitrary for- 
 mula. 
 
 The succeeding opus (24), comprising the 
 "Humoreske," "March," "Cradle Song," and 
 "Czardas," is unimportant. Of the four pieces 
 the gracious "Cradle Song" is of the most worth. 
 The group as a whole belongs to that inconsider- 
 able portion of his output which one cannot 
 accept as of serious artistic consequence. With 
 the "Lancelot and Elaine" (op. 25), however, 
 one comes upon a work of the grade of the " Ham- 
 let and Ophelia" music. MacDowell had a 
 peculiar afl&nity for the spirit of the Arthurian 
 tales, and he was happy in whatever musical 
 
ii8 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 transmutation of them he attempted. This tone- 
 poem is, as he avows, "after Tennyson." The 
 work follows consistently the larger action of the 
 poem, and musical equivalents are sought and 
 found for such crucial incidents as the meeting 
 with Elaine, the tournament, Lancelot's downfall, 
 his return to the court and the interview with 
 Guinevere, the apparition of the funeral barge, 
 and the soliloquy of Lancelot by the river bank. 
 The work is dramatically conceived. There are 
 passages of impressive tenderness, — as in the in- 
 cident of the approaching barge; of climactic 
 force, — as in the passage portraying the casting 
 away of the trophies; and there are admirable 
 details of workmanship. The scoring is full and 
 adroit, though not very elaborate. As always 
 with him, the instrumental texture is richly woven, 
 although his utilisation of the possibilities of the 
 orchestra is far from exhaustive. One misses, for 
 example, the colouring of available harp effects, 
 for which he appeared to have a distaste, since 
 the instrument is not required in any of his 
 orchestral works. That he was not satisfied with 
 the scoring of the work is known. He remarked 
 to Mr. Philip Hale that it was " too full of horns" ; 
 and in his own copy of the score, which I possess, 
 he has made in pencil numerous changes in the 
 instrumentation, much to its improvement; he 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 119 
 
 has, for instance, in accord with his expressed 
 feeling, reduced the prominence of the horns, 
 allotting their parts, in certain important in- 
 stances, to the wood-wind, trombones, or 
 trumpets. 
 
 The "Six Idyls after Goethe," for piano (op. 
 28), are noteworthy as foreshadowing the candid 
 impressionism which was to have its finest issue 
 in the "Woodland Sketches," "Sea Pieces," 
 and "New England Idyls." The Goethe para- 
 phrases, although they have only a tithe of the 
 graphic nearness and felicity of the later pieces, 
 are yet fairly successful in their attempt to find a 
 musical correspondence for certain definitely 
 stated concepts and ideas — a partial fulfilment 
 of the method implied in the earlier "Wald- 
 IdyUen." He presents himself here as one who 
 has yielded his imagination to an intimate con- 
 templation of the natural world, and who already 
 has, in some degree, the faculty of uttering what- 
 ever revelation of its loveHness or majesty has 
 been vouchsafed. At once, in studying these 
 pieces, one observes a wide departure in method 
 and accomplishment from the style of the " Wald- 
 Idyllen." In those, it seemed, the poet had 
 somehow failed to compose "with his eye on the 
 object": the vision lacked steadiness, lacked 
 penetration — or it may be that the vision was 
 
I20 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 present, but not the power of notation. In the 
 Goethe paraphrases, on the other hand, we are 
 given, in a measure, the sense of the thing per- 
 ceived; I say "in a measure," for his power of 
 acute and sympathetic observation and of elo- 
 quent transmutation had not yet come to its 
 highest pitch. Of the six "Idyls," three — "In 
 the Woods," "Siesta," and "To the Moonlight" 
 — are memorable, though uneven; and of these 
 the third, after Goethe's " An den Mond," adum- 
 brates faintly MacDowell's riper manner. The 
 "Silver Clouds," "Flute Idyl,"* and. "Blue 
 BeU" are decidedly less characteristic. 
 
 His third orchestral work, the symphonic poem 
 "Lamia," is based upon the fantastic (and what 
 Mr. Howells would call unconscionably " roman- 
 ticistic") poem of Keats. Begun during his 
 last year in Wiesbaden (1888), and completed 
 the following winter in Boston, it stands, in the 
 order of MacDowell's orchestral pieces, between 
 "Lancelot and Elaine" and the two "fragments" 
 after the "Song of Roland." On a fly-leaf of 
 the score MacDowell has written this glossary of 
 the story as told by Keats: 
 
 " Lamia, an enchantress in the form of a serpent, 
 
 * The poems which suggested this and the preceding piece 
 were used again by MacDowell in two of the most admirable 
 of the "Eight Songs," op. 47. 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS i2i 
 
 loves Lycius, a young Corinthian. In order to win 
 him she prays to Hermes, who answers her appeal by 
 transforming her into a lovely maiden. Lycius meets 
 her in the wood, is smitten with love for her, and goes 
 with her to her enchanted palace, where the wedding is 
 celebrated with great splendour. But suddenly Apol- 
 lonius appears; he reveals the magic. Lamia again 
 assumes the form of a serpent, the enchanted palace 
 vanishes, and Lycius is found lifeless." 
 
 Now tMs is obviously just the sort of thing to 
 stir the musical imagination of a young composer 
 nourished on Liszt, Raff, and Wagner; and 
 MacDowell (he was then in his twenty-seventh 
 year) composed his tone-poem with evident gusto. 
 Yet it is the weakest of his orchestral works — 
 the weakest and the least characteristic. There 
 is much Liszt in the score, and a good deal of 
 Wagner. Only occasionally — as in the pianis- 
 simo passage for flutes, clarinets, and divided 
 strings, following the first outburst of the full 
 orchestra — does his own individuality emerge 
 with any positiveness. MacDoweU withheld the 
 score from publication, at the time of its com- 
 position, because of his imcertainty as to its 
 effect. He had not had an opportunity to secure 
 a reading of it by one of the Cur-Orchester which 
 had accommodatingly tried over his preceding 
 scores at their rehearsals; and such a thing was 
 of course out of the question in America. Not 
 
122 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 only was he reluctant to put it forth without 
 such a test, but he lacked the fluids to pay for 
 its publication. He came to realise in later years, 
 of course, that the music was immature and far 
 from characteristic, though he still had a genuine 
 affection for it. In a talk which I had with him 
 a year before his collapse, he gave me the impres- 
 sion that he considered it at least as good a piece 
 of work as its predecessors, "Hamlet and 
 Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine," though he 
 made sport, in his characteristic way, of its 
 occasional juvenility and its Wagneristic alle- 
 giances. He intended ultimately to revise and 
 publish the score, and he allowed it to remain on 
 the Ust of his works. After his death it was 
 concluded that it would be wise to print the music, 
 for several reasons. These were, first, because 
 of the fear lest, if it were allowed to remain in 
 manuscript, it might at some future time suffer 
 from well-meant attempts at revision; and, sec- 
 ondly, because of the chance that it might be put 
 forward, after the death of those who knew its 
 history, in a way which would seem to make 
 unwarranted pretensions for it, or would give 
 rise to doubts as to its authenticity. In a word, 
 it was felt that its immediate publication would 
 obviate any possible misconception at some 
 future time as to its true relation to MacDowell's 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 123 
 
 artistic evolution. It was, therefore, published 
 in October, igo8, twenty years after its composi- 
 tion, with a dedication to Mr. Henry T. Finck. 
 
 In "Die Sarazenen" and "Die Schone Aldd" 
 two "fragments" for orchestra after the "Song 
 of Roland," numbered op. 30, a graver note is 
 sounded. These "fragments," originally in- 
 tended to form part of a "Roland" symphony, 
 were published in 1891 in their present form, the 
 plan for a symphony having been definitely 
 abandoned. "Die Sarazenen" is a transcription 
 of the scene in which Ganelon, the traitor in 
 Charlemagne's camp through whose perfidy 
 Roland met his death, swears to commit his 
 crime. It is a forceful conception, barbaric in 
 colour and rhythm, and picturesquely scored. 
 The second fragment, "Die Schone Aldd," is, 
 however, a more memorable work, depicting the 
 loveliness and the grieving of AldS,, Roland's 
 betrothed. In spite of its strong Wagnerian lean- 
 ings, the music bears the impress of MacDowell's 
 own style, and it has moments of rare loveliness. 
 Both pieces are programmatic in bent, and, with 
 excellent wisdom, MacDowell has quoted upon 
 the fly-leaf of the score those portions of the " Song 
 of Roland" from which the conception of the 
 music sprang. 
 
 Like the "Idyls" after Goethe, the "Six 
 
124 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Poems" after Heine (op. 31), for piano, are de- 
 voted to the embodiment of a poetic subject, — 
 with the difference that instead of the landscape 
 impressionism of the Goethe studies we have a 
 persistent impulse toward psychological sugges- 
 tion. Each of the poems which he has selected 
 for illustration has a burden of human emotion 
 which the music reflects with varying success. 
 The style is more individualised than in the 
 Goethe pieces, and the invention is, on the whole, 
 of a superior order. The " Scotch Poem" (No. 2) 
 is the most successful of the set; the 
 
 " schone, kranke Frau, 
 
 Zartdurchsichtig und martnorblass," 
 
 and her desolate lamenting, are sharply projected, 
 though scarcely with the power that he would 
 have brought to bear upon the endeavour a 
 decade later. Less effective, but more charac- 
 teristic, is "The Shepherd Boy" (No. 5). This is 
 almost, at moments, MacDowell in the happiest 
 phase of his lighter vein. Tiie transition from 
 F minor to major, after the fermata on the second 
 page, is as typical as it is delectable; and the 
 fifteen bars that follow are of a markedly per- 
 sonal tinge. "From Long Ago" and "From a 
 Fisherman's Hut" are less good, and "The Post 
 Wagon" and "Monologue" are disappointing 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 125 
 
 — the latter especially so, because the exquisite 
 poem which he has chosen to enforce, the match- 
 less lyric beginning "Der Tod, das ist die MMe 
 Nacht," should, it seems, have offered an inspir- 
 ing incentive. 
 
 In the "Four Little Poems" of op. 32 one 
 encounters a piece which it is possible to ad- 
 mire without qualification: I mean the music 
 conceived as an illustration to Tennyson's poem, 
 "The Eagle." The three other numbers' of this 
 opus, "The Brook," "Moonshine," and "Win- 
 ter," one can praise only in measured terms — 
 although "Winter," which attempts a representa- 
 tion of the "widow bird" and frozen landscape 
 of Shelley's lyric, has some measures that dwell 
 persistently in the memory: but "The Eagle" is 
 a superb achievement. Its deliberate purpose is 
 to realise in tone the imagery and atmosphere 
 of Teimyson's lines — an object which it accom- 
 plishes with triumphant completeness. As a feat 
 of sheer tone-painting one recalls few things, of a 
 similar scope and purpose, that surpass it in 
 fitness, concision, and felicity. It displays a 
 power of imaginative transmutation hitherto un- 
 disclosed in MacDowell's writing. Here are 
 precisely the severe and lonely mood of the open- 
 ing lines of the poem, the sense of inaccessible 
 and wind-swept spaces, which Tennyson has so 
 
126 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 magnificently and so succinctly conveyed. Here, 
 too, are the far-off, "wrinkled sea," and the final 
 cataclysmic and sudden descent: yet, despite the 
 literalism of the close, there is no yielding of 
 artistic sobriety in the result, for the music has 
 an unassailable dignity. It remains, even to-day, 
 one of MacDowell's most characteristic and 
 admirable performances. 
 
 Of the "Romance" for 'cello and orchestra 
 (op. 35), the Concert Study (op. 36), and "Les 
 Orientales" (op, 37), — three morceaux for piano, 
 after Victor Hugo, — there is no need to speak 
 in detail. "Perfunctory" is the word which one 
 must use to describe the creative impulse of which 
 they are the ungrateful legacy — an impulse less 
 spontaneous, there is reason to believe, than 
 utilitarian. Perhaps they may most justly be 
 characterised as almost the only instances in 
 which MacDowell gave heed to the possibility 
 of a reward not primarily and exclusively artistic. 
 They are sentimental and unleavened, and they 
 are far from worthy of his gifts, though they are 
 not without a certain rather inexpensive charm. 
 
 The "Marionettes" of op. 38 are in a wholly 
 different case. Published first in 1888, the year 
 of MacDowell's return to America, they were 
 afterward extensively revised, and now appear 
 under a radically different guise. In its present 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 127 
 
 form, the group comprises six genre studies — 
 "Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," "Vil- 
 lain," "Sweetheart" — besides two additions: a 
 "Prologue" and "Epilogue." Here MacDowell 
 is in one of his happiest moods. It was a for- 
 timate and charming conceit which prompted the 
 plan of the series, with its half-playful, half- 
 ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in 
 spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which 
 placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, 
 there is, throughout, an undertone of grave and 
 meditative tenderness which it is one of the 
 peculiar properties of MacDowell's art to 
 commvmicate and enforce. This is continually ap- 
 parent in "The Lover" and "Sweetheart," fugi- 
 tively so in the " Prologue," and, in an irresistible 
 degree, in the exceedingly poetic and deeply felt 
 "Epilogue" — one of the most typical and beau- 
 tiful of MacDowell's smaller works. The music 
 of these pieces is, as with other of his earlier works 
 that he has since revised, confusing to the 
 observer who attempts to place it among his pro- 
 ductions in the order suggested by its opus num- 
 ber. For although in the hst of his published 
 works the "Marionettes" follow immediately on 
 the heels of the Concert Study and "Les Orien- 
 tales," the form in which they are now most 
 generally known represents the much later period 
 
128 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 of the "Keltic" sonata — a fact which will, how- 
 ever, be sufficiently evident to anyone who 
 studies the two versions carefully enough to per- 
 ceive the difference between more or less experi- 
 mental craftsmanship and ripe and heedful 
 artistry. The observer will notice in these pieces, 
 incidentally, the abandonment of the traditional 
 Italian terms of expression and the substitution 
 of English words and phrases, which are used 
 freely and with adroitness to indicate every 
 shade of the composer's meaning. In place of 
 the stereotyped terms of the music-maker's 
 familiarly limited vocabulary, we have such a 
 system of direct and elastic expression as Schu- 
 mann adopted. Thus one finds, in the "Pro- 
 logue," such unmistakable and illuminating direc- 
 tions as: "with sturdy good humour," "plead- 
 ingly," "mockingly"; in the "Soubrette" — 
 "coquettishly," "poutingly"; in the "Lover" — 
 "questioningly"; in the "Villain" — "with sinister 
 emphasis," "sardonically." This method, which 
 MacDowell has followed consistently in all his 
 later works, has obvious advantages; and it be- 
 comes in his hands a picturesque and stimulating 
 means for the conveyance of his intentions. Its 
 defect, equally obvious, is that it is not, like the 
 conventional Italian terminology, universally in- 
 telligible. 
 
EARLY EXPERIMENTS 129 
 
 The "Twelve. Studies" of op. 39 are less 
 original in conception and of less artistic moment 
 than the "Marionettes." Their titles — among 
 which are a "Hunting Song," a "Romance," a 
 " Dance of the Gnomes," and others of like con- 
 notation — suggest, in a measure, that imper- 
 fectly realised romanticism which I have before 
 endeavoured to separate from the intimate spirit 
 of sincere romance which MacDowell has so 
 often succeeded in embodying. The same thing 
 is true, though in a less degree, of the suite for 
 orchestra (op. 42). It is more Raff-like — not in 
 effect but in conception — than an)rthing he has 
 done. There are four movements : " In a Haunted 
 Forest," "Summer Idyl," "The Shepherdess' 
 Song," and "Forest Spirits," together with a 
 supplement, "In October," forming part of the 
 original suite, but not published until several 
 years later. The work, as a whole, has atmos- 
 phere, freshness, buoyancy, and it is scored with 
 exquiate skill and charm; but somehow it does 
 not seem either as poetic or as distinguished as 
 one imagines it might have been made. It is 
 carried through with delightful high spirits, and 
 with an expert order of craftsmanship; but it 
 lacks persuasion — lacks, to put it baldly, in- 
 spiration. 
 
 Passing over a sheaf of piano pieces, the 
 
I30 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 "Twelve Virtuoso Studies" of op. 46 (of which 
 the "Novelette" and "Improvisation" are most 
 noteworthy), we come to a stage of MacDowell's 
 development in which, for the first time, he pre- 
 sents himself as an assured and confident master 
 of musical impressionism and the possessor of a 
 matured and fully individualised style. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 
 
 With the completion and production of his 
 "Indian" suite for orchestra (op. 48) MacDowell 
 came, in a measure, into his own. Mr. Philip 
 Hale, writing apropos of a performance of the 
 suite at a concert of the Boston Symphony Or- 
 chestra* in December, 1897, ^^^ ^^^ hesitate to 
 describe the work as "one of the noblest com- 
 positions of modern times." Elsewhere he wrote 
 concerning it: "The thoughts are the musical 
 thoughts of high imagination; the expression is 
 that of the sure and serene master. There are 
 here no echoes of Rafif, or Wagner, or Brahms, 
 men that have each influenced mightily the 
 musical thought of to-day. There is the voice of 
 one composer: a virile, tender voice that does not 
 stammer, does not break, does not wax hysterical: 
 the voice of a composer that not only must pour 
 out that which has accumulated within him, but 
 
 * The suite is dedicated to this Orchestra and its former 
 conductor, Mr. Emil Paur. 
 
 131 
 
132 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 knows all the resources of musical oratory — in a 
 word, the voice of MacDowell." 
 
 MacDowell has derived the greater part of the 
 thematic substance of the suite, as he acknowl- 
 edges in a prefatory note, from melodies of the 
 North American Indians, with the exception of a 
 few subsidiary themes of his own invention. "If 
 separate titles for the different movements are 
 desired," he says in his note, "they should be 
 arranged as follows: I. 'Legend'; II. 'Love 
 Song'; m. 'In War-time'; IV. 'Dirge'; V. 'Vil- 
 lage Festival'" — a concession in which again 
 one traces a hint of the inexplicable and amusing 
 reluctance of the musical impressionist to ac- 
 knowledge without reservation the programmatic 
 basis of his work. In the case of the "Indian" 
 suite, however, the intention is clear enough, even 
 without the proffered titles; for the several move- 
 ments are unmistakably based upon firmly held 
 concepts of a definite dramatic and emotional 
 significance. As supplemental aids to the dis- 
 covery of his poetic purposes, the phrases of 
 direction which he has placed at the beginning of 
 each movement are indicative, taken in connec- 
 tion with the titles which he sanctions. The first 
 movement, " Legend," is headed : Not fast. With 
 mtich dignity and character; the second movement, 
 "Love Song," is to be played Not fast. Ten- 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 133 
 
 derly; the third movement, "In War-time," is 
 marked: With rough vigour, almost savagely; the 
 fourth, "Dirge": Dirge-like, mournfully; the fifth, 
 "Village Festival": Swift and light. 
 
 Here, certainly, is food for the imagination, the 
 frankest of invitations to the impressionable 
 listener. There is no reason to believe that the 
 music is built throughout upon such a detailed 
 and specific plan as underhes, for example, the 
 "Lancelot and Elaine"; the notable fact is that 
 MacDowell has attained in this work to a power 
 and weight of utterance, an eloquence of com- 
 mimication, a ripeness of style, and a security 
 and strength of workmanship, which he had not 
 hitherto brought to the fulfilment of an avowedly 
 impressionistic scheme.* He has exposed the 
 particular emotions and the essential character 
 of his subject with deep sympathy and extraor- 
 dinary imaginative force — at times with pro- 
 foundly impressive eflfect, as in the first movement, 
 "Legend," and the third, "In War-Time"; and 
 in the overwhelmingly poignant "Dirge" he has 
 achieved the most profoundly affecting thren- 
 ody in music since the "Gotterdammerung" 
 Trauermarsch. I am inclined to rank this 
 
 * The "Tragica" sonata, op. 45, which antedates the suite 
 by several years, and of which I shall write in another chap- 
 ter, has a considerably less definite content. 
 
134 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 movement, with the sonatas and one or two 
 of the "Woodland Sketches" and "Sea Pieces," 
 as the choicest emanation of MacDowell's genius; 
 and of these it is, I think, the most inspired and 
 the most deeply felt. The extreme pathos of the 
 opening section, with the wailing phrase in 
 the muted strings under the reiterated G of the 
 flutes (an inverted organ-point of sixteen adagio 
 measures); the indescribable effect of the muted 
 horn heard from behind the scenes, over an 
 accompaniment of divided violas and 'cellos con 
 sordini; the heart-shaking sadness and beauty of 
 the succeeding passage for all the muted strings; 
 the mysterious and solemn close: these are out- 
 standing moments in a masterpiece of the first 
 rank: a page which would honour any music- 
 maker, living or dead. 
 
 In the suite as a whole he has caught and em- 
 bodied the fxmdamental spirit of his theme : these 
 are the sorrows and laments and rejoicings, not 
 of our own day and people, but of the vanished 
 life of an elemental and dying race; here is the 
 solitude of dark forests, of illimitable and lonely 
 prairies, and the sombreness and wildness of one 
 knows not what grim tragedies and romances and 
 festivities enacted in the shadow of a fading past. 
 
 Into the discussion of the relation between such 
 works as the "Indian" suite and the establish- 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 135 
 
 ment of a possible "American" school of music I 
 shall not intrude. To those of us who believe 
 that such a "school," whether desirable or not, 
 can never be created through conscious effort, 
 and who are entirely willing to permit time and 
 circumstance to bring about its establishment, 
 the subject is as wearisome as it is unprofitable. 
 The logic of the belief that it is possible to achieve 
 a representative nationalism in music by the in- 
 genuous process of adopting the idiom of an alien 
 though neighbouring race is not immediately 
 apparent; and although MacDowell in this suite 
 has admittedly derived his basic material from 
 the North American aborigines, he never, so 
 far as I am aware, claimed that his impressive 
 and noble score constitutes, for that reason, a 
 representatively national utterance. He per- 
 ceived, doubtless, that territorial propinquity is 
 quite a different thing from racial affinity; and 
 that a musical art derived from either Indian 
 or Ethiopian sources can be "American" only in 
 a partial and quite unimportant sense. He rec- 
 ognised, and he affirmed the belief, that racial 
 elements are transitory and mutable, and that 
 provinciality in art, even when it is called patriot- 
 ism, makes for a probable oblivion. 
 
 I have already dwelt upon MacDowell's pre- 
 occupation with the pageant of the natural world. 
 
136 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 If one is tempted, at times, to praise in him the 
 celebrant of the "mystery and the majesty of 
 earth" somewhat at the expense of the musical 
 humanist, it is because he has in an uncommon 
 degree the intimate visualising faculty of the 
 essential Celt. "In all my work," he avowed a 
 few years before his death, "there is the Celtic 
 influence. I love its colour and meaning. The 
 development in music of that influence is, I be- 
 lieve, a new field." That it was a note which he 
 was pre-eminently qualified to strike and sustain 
 is beyond doubt: and, as he seems to have realised, 
 he had the field to himself. He is, strangely 
 enough, the first Celtic influence of genuine 
 vitality and importance which has been exerted 
 upon creative music — a singular but incontest- 
 able fact. As it is exerted by him it has an 
 exquisite authenticity. Again and again one is 
 aware that the "sheer, inimitable Celtic note," 
 which we have long known how to recognise in 
 another art, is being sounded in the music of this 
 composer who has in his heart and brain so much 
 of "the wisdom of old romance." With him one 
 realises that "natural magic" is, as Mr. Yeats 
 has somewhere said, "but the ancient worship of 
 Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that 
 certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, 
 which is brought into men's minds." We have 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 137 
 
 observed the operation of this impulse in such 
 comparatively immature productions as the 
 "Wald^IdyUen" and the "Idyls" after Goethe, 
 in the "Four Little Poems" of op. 32, and in 
 the first orchestral suite; but it is in the much 
 later "Woodland Sketches" and "Sea Pieces," 
 for piano, that the tendency comes to its finest 
 issue. 
 
 Music, of course — from Frohberger and 
 Haydn to Mendelssohn, Wagner, Raff, and De- 
 bussy — abounds in examples of natural im- 
 agery. In claiming a certain excellence for his 
 method one need scarcely imply that MacDoweU 
 has ever threatened the supremacy of such things 
 as the "Rheingold" prelude or the "Walkiire" 
 fire music. It is as much by reason of his choice 
 of subjects as because of the peculiar vividness 
 and felicity of his expression, that he occupies so 
 single a place among tone-poets of the external 
 world. He has never attempted such vast fres- 
 coes as Wagner delighted to paint. Of his de- 
 scriptive music by far the greater part is written 
 for the piano; so that, at the start, a very definite 
 limitation is imposed upon magnitude of plan. 
 You cannot suggest on the piano, with any ade- 
 quacy of effect, a mountain-side in flames, or the 
 prismatic arch of a rainbow, or the towering 
 architecture, of cloud forms; so MacDowell has 
 
138 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 confined himself within the bounds of such can- 
 vases as he paints upon in his "Four Little 
 Poems" ("The Eagle," "The Brook," "Moon- 
 shine," "Winter"), in his first orchestral suite, 
 and in the inimitable "Woodland Sketches" and 
 "Sea Pieces." Thus his themes are starlight, a 
 water-lily, will o' the wisps, a deserted farm, a 
 wild rose, the sea-spell, deep woods, an old gar- 
 den. As a fair exemphfication of his practice, 
 consider, let me say, his " To a Water-lily," from 
 the "Woodland Sketches." It is difficult to 
 recall anything in objective tone-painting, for 
 the piano or for the orchestra, conceived and 
 executed qmte in the manner of this remarkable 
 piece of lyrical impressionism. Of all the com- 
 posers who have essayed tonal transcriptions of 
 the phases of the outer world, I know of none 
 who has achieved such vividness and suggestive- 
 ness of effect with a similar condensation. The 
 form is small; but these pieces are no more justly 
 to be dismissed as mere "miniature work" than 
 is Wordsworth's " Daffodils," which they parallel 
 in deUcacy of perception, intensity of vision, and 
 perfection of accomplishment. The question of 
 bulk, length, size, has qviite as much pertinence 
 in one case as in the other. In his work in this 
 sort, MacDowell is often as one who, having 
 fallen, through the ignominies of daily life, 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 139 
 
 among the barren makeshifts of reality, " remem- 
 bers the enchanted valleys." It is touched at 
 times with the deep and wistful tenderness, the 
 primaeval nostalgia, which is never very distant 
 from the mood of his writing, and in which, 
 again, one is tempted to trace the essential Celt. 
 It is this close kinship with the secret presences 
 of the natural world, this intimate responsive- 
 ness to elemental moods, this quick sensitiveness 
 to the aroma and the magic of places, that sets 
 him recognisably apart. 
 
 If in the "Indian" suite MacDowell disclosed 
 the fuU matiu-ity of his powers of imaginative 
 and structural design, it is in the "Woodland 
 Sketches" (op. 51) that his speech, freed from 
 such incumbrances as were imposed upon it by 
 his deliberate adoption of an exotic idiom, assumes 
 for the first time some of its most engaging and 
 distinctive characteristics. Consider, for example, 
 number eight of the group, "A Deserted Farm." 
 Here is the quintessence of his style in one of 
 its most frequent aspects. The manner has a 
 curious simplicity, yet it would be diflScult to say 
 in what, precisely, the simplicity consists; it has 
 striking individuality, — yet the particular trait 
 in which it resides is not easily determined. The 
 simplicity is certainly not of the harmonic plan, 
 nor of the melodic outline, which are subtly yet 
 
I40 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 frankly conceived; and the individuality does not 
 lie in any eccentricity or determined novelty of 
 effect. Both the flavour of simplicity and of 
 personality are, one concludes, more a spiritual 
 than an anatomical possession of the music. Its 
 quality is as intangible and pervasive as that dim 
 magic of "unremembering remembrance" that 
 is awakened in some by the troubling tides of 
 spring; it is apparently as unsought for as are the 
 naive utterances of folk-song. It is his unfailing 
 charm, and it is everywhere manifest in his later 
 work: that spontaneity and insoiiciance, that 
 utter absence of self-consciousness, which is in 
 nothing so surprising as in its serene antithesis to 
 what one has come to accept — too readily, it 
 may be — as the dominant accent of musical 
 modernity. 
 
 These pieces have an inescapable fragrance, 
 tenderness, and zest. "To a Wild Rose," "Will 
 o' the Wisp," "In Autumn," "From Uncle 
 Remus," and "By a Meadow Brook" are slight 
 in poetic substance, though executed with charm 
 and humour; but the five other pieces — "At an 
 Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," 
 "To a Water-lily," "A Deserted Farm," and 
 "Told at Sunset" — are of a different calibre. 
 With the exception of "To a Water-lily," whose 
 quality is uncomplex and unconcealed, these tone- 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 141 
 
 poems in little are a curious blend of what, lack- 
 ing an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, 
 and psychological suggestion; and they are re- 
 markable for the manner in which they focus great 
 richness of emotion into limited space. "At an 
 Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," 
 "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset," 
 imply a consecutive dramatic purpose which is 
 emphasised by their connection through a hint 
 of thematic commimity. The element of drama, 
 though, is not insisted upon — indeed, a large 
 portion of the searching charm of these pieces 
 lies in their tactful reticence. 
 
 In the "Sea Pieces" of op, 55 a larger impulse 
 is at work. The set comprises eight short pieces, 
 few of them over two pages in length; yet they are 
 modelled upon ample lines, and they have, in a 
 conspicuous degree, that property to which I 
 have alluded — the property of suggesting within 
 a limited framework an emotional or dramatic 
 content of large and far-reaching significance. 
 I spoke in an earlier chapter, in this connection, 
 of the first of these pieces, "To the Sea." I 
 must repeat that this tone-poem seems to me one 
 of the most entirely admirable things in the liter- 
 ature of the piano; and it is typical, in the main, 
 of the volume. MacDowell is one of the com- 
 paratively few composers who have been thrall 
 
142 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 to the spell of the sea; none, I think, has felt 
 that spell more irresistibly or has communicated 
 it with more conquering an eloquence. This 
 music is full of the glamour, the awe, the mystery, 
 of the sea; of its sinister and terrible beauty, but 
 also of its tonic charm, its secret allurement. 
 Here is sea poetry to match with that of Whit- 
 man and Swinburne. The music is drenched in 
 salt-spray, wind-swept, exhilarating. There are 
 pages in it through which rings the thunderous 
 laughter of the sea in its mood of cosmic and 
 terrifying elation, and there are pages through 
 which drift sun-painted mists — mists that both 
 conceal and disclose enchanted vistas and appari- 
 tions. There is an exhilaration even in his 
 titles (which he has supplemented with mottos): 
 as "To the Sea," "From a Wandering Iceberg," 
 "Starhght," "From the Depths," "In Mid- 
 Ocean." I make no concealment of my unqual- 
 ified admiration for these pieces: with the sonatas, 
 the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite, and cer- 
 tain of the "Woodland Sketches," they record, I 
 think, his high-water mark. He has carried 
 them through with superb gusto, with unweary- 
 ing imaginative fervour. In "To the Sea," 
 "From the Depths," and "In Mid-Ocean," it is 
 the sea of Whitman's magnificent apostrophe 
 that he celebrates — the sea of 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 143 
 
 "brooding scowl and murk," 
 of 
 
 "unloosed hurricanes," 
 
 speaking, imperiously, 
 
 "with husky-haughty lips"; 
 
 while elsewhere, as in the "Wandering Iceberg" 
 and "Nautilus" studies, the pervading tone is of 
 Swinburne's 
 
 "deep divine dark dayshine of the sea." 
 
 "Starlight" is of a brooding and solemn tender- 
 ness. The "Song" and "A.D. MDCXX." (a 
 memoir of the notorious galleon of the Pilgrims) 
 are in a lighter vein. The tonal plangency, the 
 epic quality, of these studies is extraordinary, — 
 exposing a tendency toward an orchestral fulness 
 and breadth of style that will ofiFer a more per- 
 tinent theme for comment in a consideration of 
 the sonatas. Their littleness is wholly a quanti- 
 tative matter; their spiritual and imaginative 
 substance is not only of rare quality, but of strik- 
 ing amplitude. 
 
 We come now to the final volumes in the 
 series of what one may as well call pianistic 
 "nature-studies": the "Fireside Tales" (op. 61) 
 and "New England Idyls" (op. 62), which, to- 
 gether with the songs of op. 60, constitute the 
 
144 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 last of his published works (they were all issued 
 in 1902). In these last piano pieces there is 
 a new quality, an unaccustomed accent. One 
 notes it on the first page of the opening num- 
 ber of the "Fireside Tales," "An Old Love 
 Story," where the voice of the composer seems to 
 have taken on an unfamiliar timbre. There is 
 here a turn of phrase, a quality of sentiment, 
 which are notably fresh and strange. There is 
 in this, and in " By Smouldering Embers," a 
 graver tenderness, a more pervasive sobriety, 
 than he had revealed before. Read over the 
 D-flat major section of "An Old Love Story." 
 Throughout MacDowell's previous work one will 
 find no passage quite like it in contour and emo- 
 tion. It is quieter, more ripely poised, than 
 anything in his earlier manner that I can recall. 
 "Of Br'er Rabbit," "From a German Forest," 
 "Of Salamanders," and "A Haunted House," 
 are in his familiar vein; but again the new note 
 is sounded in the concluding nimiber of the book, 
 "By Smouldering Embers." 
 
 In the "New England Idyls," the point is still 
 more evident. One passes over "From an Old 
 Gatden" and "Midsummer" as belonging funda- 
 mentally to the period of the "Woodland 
 Skietches" and "Sea Pieces." But one halts at 
 " Mid- Winter," No. 3 of the collection; with those 
 
A MATURED IMPRESSIONIST 145 
 
 fifteen bars in E-flat major in the middle section, 
 one enters upon unfamiliar ground in the various 
 and delectable region of MacDowell's fantasy. 
 So in the succeeding piece, "With Sweet Laven- 
 der": he had not given us in any of his former 
 writing a theme similar in quality to the one with 
 which he begins the thirteenth bar. "In Deep 
 Woods" is less unusual — is, in fact, strongly 
 suggestive, in harmonic colour, of the shining 
 sonorities of the "Wandering Iceberg" study in 
 the "Sea Pieces." The "Indian Idyl," "To an 
 Old White Pine," and "From Puritan Days" 
 are also contrived in the familiar idiom of the 
 earlier volumes, though they are unfailingly re- 
 soiurceful in invention and imaginative vigour. 
 In "From a Log Cabin," though, we come upon 
 as surprising a thing as MacDowell's art had 
 yielded us since the appearance of the "Wood- 
 land Sketches." I doubt if, in the entire body 
 of his writing, one will find a lovelier, a more 
 intimate utterance. It bears as a motto the 
 words — strangely prophetic when he wrote 
 them — which are now inscribed on the memo- 
 rial tablet near his grave: — 
 
 "A house of dieams untold. 
 It looks out over the whispering tree-tops 
 And faces the setting sun." 
 
 The music of this piece is sufifused with a mood 
 
146 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 that is Schumann-like in its intense sincerity of 
 impulse, yet with a passionate fulness and ardour 
 not elsewhere to be paralleled. It is steeped 
 in an atmosphere which is felt in no other. of his 
 works, is the issue of an inspiration more pro- 
 foundly contemplative than any to which he had 
 hitherto responded. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE SONATAS 
 
 MacDoWell never hesitated, as I have else- 
 where said, to adapt — some would say "warp" 
 
 — the sonata form to the needs of his poetic 
 purposes. Moreover, he declared his convic- 
 tions as to the considerations which should govern 
 its employment. "If the composer's ideas do 
 not imperatively demand treatment in that [the 
 sonata] form," he has observed — "that is, if his 
 first theme is not actually dependent upon his 
 second and side themes for its poetic fulfilment 
 
 — he has not composed a sonata movement, but a 
 potpourri, which the form only aggravates." 
 There can be little question of the success which 
 has attended his application of this principle to 
 his own performances in this field, nor of the 
 skill and tact with which he has reshaped the 
 form in accordance with his chosen poetic or 
 dramatic scheme. 
 
 His four sonatas belong undeniably, though 
 with a variously strict allegiance, to the domain 
 of programme-music. Neither the "Tragica," 
 147 
 
148 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 the "Eroica," the "Norse," nor the "Keltic," 
 makes its appeal exclusively to the tonal sense. 
 If one looks to these works for the particular 
 kind of gratification which he is accustomed to 
 derive, for example, from a sonata by Brahms 
 (to name the most extreme of contrasts), he will 
 not find it. It is impossible fully to appreciate 
 and enjoy the last page of the "Keltic," for in- 
 stance, without some knowledge of the dramatic 
 crisis upon which the musician has built — al- 
 though its beauty and power, as sheer music, are 
 immediately perceptible. 
 
 With the exception of the "Tragica," the 
 poetic substratum of the sonatas has been avowed 
 with more or less particularity. In the " Tragica " 
 — his first essay in the form — he has vouch- 
 safed only the general indication of his purpose 
 which is declared in the title of the work, though 
 it is known that in composing the music Mac- 
 Dowell was moved by the memory of his grief 
 over the death of his master Raff (it might stand 
 even more appropriately as a commentary on 
 the tragedy of his own life). The tragic note is 
 sounded, with impressive authority and force, in 
 the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The 
 music, from the first, drives to the very heart of 
 the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in 
 the presentation of the thought; and this attitude 
 
THE SONATAS 149 
 
 is maintained throughout — in the ingratiating 
 loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce 
 striving of the middle section, in the noble and 
 sombre slow movement, — a largo of profound 
 pathos and dignity, — and in the dramatic and 
 impassioned close (the scherzo is, I think, less 
 good). Of this final allegro an exposition has 
 been vouchsafed. While in the preceding move- 
 ments, it is said, he aimed at expressing tragic 
 details, in the last he has tried to generalise. 
 He wished "to heighten the darkness of tragedy 
 by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph. 
 Therefore, he attempted to make the last move- 
 ment a steadily progressive triumph, which, at 
 its close, is utterly broken and shattered, thinking 
 that the most poignant tragedy is that of catas- 
 trophe in the hour of triumph. ... In doing this 
 he has tried to epitomise the whole work." The 
 meaning of the coda is thus made clear: a climax 
 approached with the utmost pomp and brilliancy, 
 and cut short by a precipitato descent in octaves, 
 fff, ending with a reminiscence of the portentous 
 subject of the introduction. It is a profoundly 
 moving conclusion to a noble work — a work 
 which Mr. James Huneker has not extravagantly 
 called "the most marked contribution to solo 
 sonata literature since Brahms' F-minor piano 
 sonata"; yet it is not so fine a work as any one 
 
I50 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 of the three sonatas which MacDowell afterward 
 wrote. The style evinces, for the first time in 
 his piano music, the striking orchestral character 
 of his thought — yet the writing is not, para- 
 doxical as it may seem, unpianistic. The sug- 
 gestion of orchestral relationships is contained 
 in the massiveness of the harmonic texture, 
 and in the cumulative effect of the climaxes 
 and crescendi. He conveys an impression of 
 extended tone-spaces, of a largeness, com- 
 plexity, and solidity of structure, which are 
 peculiar to his own music, and which presup- 
 pose a rather disdainful view of the limita- 
 tions of mere strings and hammers; yet it is all 
 playable: its demands are formidable, but not 
 prohibitive. 
 
 In 189s MacDowell published his "Sonata 
 Eroica" (op. 50), and those who had wondered 
 how he could better his performance in the 
 "Tragica" received a fresh demonstration of the 
 extent of his gifts. For these sonatas of his con- 
 stitute an ascending series, steadily progressive in 
 excellence of substance and workmanship. They 
 are, on the whole, I think it will be determined, 
 his most significant and important contribution 
 to musical art. The "Eroica" bears the motto, 
 "Flos regum Arihuris," and as a further index 
 to its content MacDowell has given this explanar 
 
THE SONATAS 151 
 
 tion: "While not exactly programme music,"* 
 he says, "I had in mind the Arthurian legend 
 when writing this work. The first movement 
 typifies the coming of Arthur. The scherzo was 
 suggested by a picture of Dor^ showing a knight 
 in the woods surrounded by elves. The third 
 movement was suggested by my idea of Guine- 
 vere. That following represents the passing of 
 Arthur." MacDowell had intended to inscribe 
 the scherzo: "After Dor€"; but he finally thought 
 better of this because, as he told Mr. N. J. 
 Corey, "the superscription seemed to single it 
 out too much from the other movements." Con- 
 cerning this movement Mr. Corey writes : " The 
 passage which it [the Dord picture] illustrates, 
 may be found in [Tennyson's] Guinevere, in the 
 story of the little novice, following a few lines 
 after the well known 'Late, late, so late!' poem. 
 I always had a little feeling," continues Mr. 
 Corey, "that the sonata would have been stronger, 
 from a programme standpoint, with this move- 
 ment omitted — that it had perhaps been in- 
 cluded largely as a concession to the traditions 
 
 * It must be confessed that this qualification is a little 
 diflBcult to grasp. Is not the sonata dependent for its com- 
 plete understanding upon a knowledge of its literary basis? 
 MacDowell exhibits here the half-heartedness which I have 
 elsewhere remarked in his attitude toward representative 
 music. 
 
152 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 of sonata form. The fact that no scherzos were 
 included in the two sonatas that followed, strength- 
 ened my opinion in regard to this. I questioned 
 him in regard to it later when I saw him in New 
 York, and he replied that it was a matter over 
 which he had pondered considerably, and one 
 which had influenced him in the composition of 
 the last two sonatas, as the insertion of a scherzo 
 in such a scheme did seem something like an 
 interruption, or 'aside.'" 
 
 In this sonata MacDowell has been not only 
 faithful to his text, he has illuminated it. In- 
 deed, I think it would not be extravagant to say 
 that he has given us here the noblest musical 
 incarnation of the Arthurian legend which we 
 have. It is singular, by the way, how frequently 
 one is impelled to use the epithet "noble" in 
 praising MacDowell's work; in reference to the 
 "Sonata Eroica" it has an emphatic aptness, for 
 nobility is the keynote of this music. If the work, 
 as a whole, has not the dynamic power of the 
 "Tragica," the weight and gravity of substance, 
 it is both a lovelier and a more lovable work, and 
 it is everywhere more significantly accented. He 
 has written few things more luxuriantly beautiful 
 than the "Guinevere" movement, nothing more 
 elevated and ecstatic than the apotheosis which 
 ends the work. The diction throughout is richer 
 
THE SONATAS 153 
 
 and more variously contrasted than in the earlier 
 work, and his manipulation of the form is more 
 elastic. 
 
 Apparent as is the advance of the "Eroica" 
 over its predecessor, the difference between these 
 and the two later sonatas — the "Norse" and 
 the "Keltic" — is even more marked. The first 
 of these, the "Norse" sonata (op. 57) appeared 
 five years after the publication of the "Eroica." 
 In the interval he had put forth the "Woodland 
 Sketches," the "Sea Pieces," and the songs of 
 op. 56 and op. 58; and he had, evidently, exam- 
 ined deeply into the resources and potentialities 
 of his art. He had hitherto done nothing quite 
 like these two later sonatas; they are based upon 
 larger and more intricate plans than their prede- 
 cessors, are more determined and confident in 
 their expression of personality, riper in style and 
 far freer in form: they are, in fact, MacDowell 
 at his most salient and distinguished. He has 
 placed these lines of his own on the first page 
 of the score of the "Norse" (which is dedicated 
 to Grieg) : 
 
 "Ni^t had fallen on a day of deeds. 
 The great rafters in the red-ribbed hall 
 Flashed crimson in the fitful flame 
 Of smouldering logs; 
 And from the stealthy shadows 
 
154 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 That crept 'round Harald's throne 
 
 Rang out a Skald's strong voice 
 
 With tales of battles won: 
 
 Of Gudrun's love 
 
 And Sigurd, Siegmund's son." 
 
 Here, evidently, is a subject after his own heart, 
 presenting such opportunities as he is at his hap- 
 piest in improving — and he has improved them 
 magnificently. The spaciousness of the plan, 
 the boldness of the drawing, the fulness and 
 intensity of the colour scheme, engage one's 
 attention at the start. He has indulged almost 
 to its extreme limits his predilection for extended 
 chord formations and for phrases of heroic span 
 — as in, for example, almost the whole of the 
 first movement. The pervading quality of the 
 musical thought is of a resistless and passionate 
 virility. It is steeped in the barbaric and splendid 
 atmosphere of the sagas. There are pages of 
 epical breadth and power, passages of elemental 
 vigour and ferocity — passages, again, of an 
 exquisite tenderness and poignancy. Of the 
 three movements which the work comprises, the 
 first makes the most lasting impression, although 
 the second (the slow movement) has a liaunting 
 subject, which is recalled episodically in the final 
 movement in a passage of unforgettable beauty 
 and character. 
 
THE SONATAS 155 
 
 With the publication, in 1961, of the "Keltic" 
 sonata (his fourth, op. 59),* MacDowell achieved 
 a conclusive demonstration of his capacity as a 
 creative musician of unquestionable importance. 
 Not before had he given so convincing an ear- 
 nest of the larger aspect of his genius: neither 
 in the three earlier sonatas, in the " Sea Pieces," 
 nor in the "Indian" suite, had he attained an 
 equal magnitude, an equal scope and significance. 
 Nowhere else in his work are the distinguishing 
 traits of his genius so strikingly disclosed — the 
 breadth and reach of imagination, the magnetic 
 vitality, the 'richness and fervour, the conquering 
 poetic charm. Here you will find a beauty 
 which is as "the beauty of the men that take up 
 spears and die for a name," no less than "the 
 beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow 
 and the wandering road" — a harp shaken with 
 a wUd and piercing music, a sorrow that is not of 
 to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual 
 and imperishable, and men lived the tales of 
 beauty and of wonder which now are but a dis- 
 credited and fading memory. 
 
 It was a fortunate, if not an inevitable, event, 
 
 in view of his temperamental affiliations with the 
 
 Celtic genius, that MacDowell should have been 
 
 made aware of the suitability for musical treat- 
 
 * Dedicated, like the "Norse," to Grieg. 
 
iS6 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 ment of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, 
 and that he should have gone for his inspiration, 
 in particular, to the legends comprised in the 
 famous Cycle of the Red Branch: that wonder- 
 ful group of epics which comprises, among other 
 tales, the story of the matchless Deirdrd, — whose 
 loveliness was such, so say the chroniclers, that 
 " not upon the ridge of earth was there a woman 
 so beautiful," — and the life and adventures and 
 glorious death of the incomparable Cuchullin. 
 These two kindred legends MacDowell has 
 welded into a coherent and satisfying whole; and 
 in a verse with which he prefixes the sonata, he 
 gives this index to its poetic content: 
 
 "Who minds now Keltic tales of yore, 
 Dark Druid rhjmies that thrall; 
 Deirdr^'s song, and wizard lore 
 Of great CuchuUin's fall." 
 
 At the time of the publication of the sonata he 
 wrote to me as follows concerning it: 
 
 "... Here is the sonata, which it is a pleasure to 
 me to offer you as a token of sympathy. I enclose also 
 some lines [of his own verse] anent Cuchullin, which, how- 
 ever, do not entirely fit the music, and which I hope to 
 use in another musical form. They may serve, however, 
 to aid the understanding of the sHmmung of the sonata. 
 CuchuUin's story is in touch with the Deirdr^-Naesi tale; 
 and, as with my 3rd Sonata, the music is more a com- 
 mentary on the subject than an actual depiction of it." 
 
I'^vdQ— 
 
 in 
 
 M 
 
 "Vf- o 
 
 m 
 
 s 
 
 g 
 o 
 S 
 o 
 
 w 
 m 
 
 H 
 
 a 
 
 o 
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THE SONATAS 157 
 
 The "lines anent Cuchullin" I quote below. 
 They do not, as he said, have a parallel in the 
 sonata as a whole; but in the coda of the last 
 movement (of which I shall speak later) he has 
 attempted a commentary on the scene which he 
 here describes: 
 
 "Cuchullin fought and fought in vain, 
 
 'Gainst faery folk and Druid thrall: 
 
 And as the queenly sun swept down. 
 
 In royal robes, red gold besown. 
 
 With one last lingering glance 
 
 He sate himself in lonely state 
 
 Against a giant monolith, 
 
 To wait Death's wooing call. 
 
 None dared approach the silent shape 
 
 That froze to iron majesty, 
 
 Save the wan, mad daughters of old Night, 
 
 Blind, wandering maidens of the mist, 
 
 Whose creeping fingers, cold and white, 
 
 Oft by the sluggard dead are kissed. 
 
 And yet the monstrous Thing held sway, 
 
 No living soul dared say it nay; 
 
 When lo! upon its shoulder still. 
 
 Unconscious of its potent will, 
 
 There perched a preening birdling gray, 
 
 A'weary of the dying day; 
 
 And all the watchers knew the lore: 
 
 Cuchullin was no more." 
 To Mr, Corey MacDowell wrote: 
 "... Even though you are not on intimate terms 
 with Deirdr^, Cuchullin, etc., you will easily perceive 
 
158 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 from the music that something extremely unpleasant is 
 happening. Joking aside, I will confess to a certain 
 fascination the subject has for me. So much so that my 
 'motto' [the original motto — the verses which I have 
 quoted above] spread beyond the music; therefore I am 
 going to make a difierent work of the former, and for the 
 sonata I adopted the modest quatrain that is printed in 
 it. . . . Like the third, this fourth sonata is more of a 
 'bardic' rhapsody on the subject than an attempt at 
 actual presentation of it, although I have made use of all 
 the suggestion of tone-painting in my power, — just as 
 the bard would have reinforced his speech with gesture 
 and facial expression." 
 
 He aimed to make his music, as he says, "more 
 a commentary on the subject than an actual depic- 
 tion of it"; but the case would be stated more 
 truly, I think, if one were to say that he has 
 penetrated to the heart of the entire body of 
 legends, has imbued himself with their ultimate 
 spirit and significance, and has bodied it forth 
 in his music with splendid veracity and eloquence. 
 He has attempted no mere musical recounting of 
 those romances of the ancient Gaelic world at 
 which he hints in his brief motto. It would be 
 juster to say, rather, that he has recalled in his 
 music the very life and presence of the Gaelic 
 prime — that he has " unbound the Island harp." 
 Above all, he has achieved that "heroic beauty" 
 which, believes Mr. Yeats, has been fading out 
 
THE SONATAS 159 
 
 of the arts since " that decadence we call progress 
 set voluptuous beauty in its place" — that heroic 
 beauty which is of the very essence of the imagi- 
 native life of the primitive Celts, and which the 
 Celtic "revival" in contemporary letters has so 
 signally failed to revive. For it is, I repeat, the 
 heroic Gaelic world that MacDowell has made 
 to Uve again in his music: that miraculous world 
 of stupendous passions and aspirations, of bards 
 and heroes and great adventure — the world of 
 Cuchullin the Unconquerable, and Laeg, and 
 Queen Meave; of Naesi, and Deirdr6 the Beauti- 
 ful, and Fergus, and Connla the Harper, and those 
 kindred figures, lovely or greatly tragical, that are 
 like no other figures in the world's mythologies. 
 This sonata marks the consummation of his 
 evolution toward the acme of powerful expres- 
 sion. It is cast in a mould essentially heroic; it 
 has its moods of tenderness, of insistent sweet- 
 ness, but these are incidental: the governing 
 mood is signified in the tremendous exordium 
 with which the work opens, and which is sus- 
 tained, with few deviations, throughout the work. 
 Deirdrd he has realised exquisitely in his middle 
 movement: that is her image, in all its fragrant 
 loveliness. MacDowell has limned her musically 
 in a manner worthy of comparison with the 
 sumptuous pen-portrait of her in Standish 
 
i6o EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 O'Grady's ".Cuculain": "a woman of wondrous 
 beauty, bright gold her hair, eyes piercing and 
 splendid, tongue full of sweet sounds, her coun- 
 tenance like the colour of snow blended with 
 crimson." 
 
 In the close of the last movement we are justi- 
 fied in seeing a translation of the sublime tradi- 
 tion of Cuchullin's death. This it is which 
 furnished MacDowell with the theme that he cele- 
 brates in the lines of verse which I have quoted 
 above, I believe that he was planning an orches- 
 tral setting of this scene; and that, had he lived, 
 we should have had from him a symphonic 
 poem, "Cuchullin." 
 
 The manner of the hero's death is thus described 
 by Standish O'Grady: "Cuculain sprang forth, 
 but as he sprang, Lewy MacConroi pierced him 
 through the bowels. Then fell the great hero of 
 the Gael. Thereat the sun darkened, and the 
 earth trembled . . . when, with a crash, fell that 
 pillar of heroism, and that flame of the warlike 
 valour of Erin was extinguished. . . . Then Cu- 
 culain, raising his eyes, saw thence northwards 
 from the lake a tall pillar-stone, the grave of a 
 warrior slain there in some ancient war. With 
 diflSculty he reached it and he leaned awhile 
 against the pillar, for his mind wandered, and he 
 knew nothing for a space. After that he took 
 
THE SONATAS i6i 
 
 oEE his brooch, and removing the torn bratta 
 [girdle], he passed it round the top of the pillar, 
 where there was an indentation in the stone, and 
 passed the ends under his arms and around his 
 breastj tying with languid hands a loose knot, 
 which soon was made fast by the weight of the 
 dying herb; thus they beheld him standing with 
 the drawn sword in his hand, and the rays of the 
 setting Sim bright on his panic-striking helmet. 
 So stood Cuculain, even in death-pangs, a terror 
 to his enemies, for a deep spring of stern valour 
 was opened in his soul, and the might of his 
 unfathomable spirit sustained him. Thus per- 
 ished Cuculain . . ." 
 
 Superb as this is, it is paralleled by Mac- 
 Dowell's tone-picture. That, for nobility of 
 conception, for majestic solemnity and pathos, is a 
 musical performance which measures up to the 
 level of superlative achievements. 
 
 If there is anything in the literature of the 
 piano since the death of Beethoven which, for 
 combined passion, dignity, breadth of style, 
 weight of momentum, and irresistible plangency of 
 emotion, is compar9,ble to the four sonatas which 
 have been considered here, I do not know of it. 
 And I write these words with a perfectly definite 
 consciousness of all that they may be held to imply. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE SONGS 
 
 Any one who should undertake casually to 
 examine MacDowell's songs seriatim, beginning 
 with his earliest listed work in this form — the 
 "Two Old Songs," op. 9 — would not improbably 
 be struck by an apparent lack of continuity and 
 logic in the initial stages of his artistic develop- 
 ment. At first glance, MacDowell seems to 
 have attained a phenomenal ripeness and indi- 
 viduality of expression in these songs, which 
 head the catalogue of his published works; 
 whereas the songs of the following opus (11-12) 
 are conventional and unimportant. The ex- 
 planation, which I have elsewhere intimated, is 
 simple. The songs of op. 11 and 12, issued in 
 1883, were the first of his Lieder to appear in 
 print; the songs numbered op, 9, which would 
 appear to antedate them in composition and 
 publication, were not written until a decade 
 later, when they were issued under an arbitrary 
 opus number as a matter of expediency. Their 
 proper place in MacDowell's musical history is, 
 162 
 
THE SONGS 163 
 
 therefore, about synchronous with the mature 
 and characteristic "Eight Songs" of op. 47. 
 From the five songs now pubhshed in one volume 
 as op. II and 12, the progress of MacDowell's 
 art as a song writer is both steady and intelligible. 
 
 He has not been especially prolific in this field, 
 when one thinks of Grieg's one hundred and 
 twenty songs, and of Brahms' one hundred and 
 ninety-sixj not to mention Schumann's two hun- 
 dred and forty-eight, or Schubert's amazing six 
 hundred and over. MacDowell has written 
 forty-two songs for single voice and piano, to- 
 gether with a number of ingenious and efifective 
 pieces for men's voices and for mixed chorus. 
 
 He has avowed his methods and principles as 
 a song writer. In an interview published a few 
 years before his death he declared his opinion to 
 be that "song writing should follow declamation" 
 — that the composer "should declaim the poems 
 in sounds: the attention of the hearer should be 
 fixed upon the central point of declamation. The 
 accompaniment should be merely a background 
 for the words. Harmony is a frightful den for 
 the small composer to get into — it leads him into 
 frightful nonsense. Too often the accompani- 
 ment of a song becomes a piano fantasie with no 
 resemblance to the melody. , Colour and har- 
 mony under such conditions mislead the com- 
 
i64 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 poser; he uses it instead of the line which he at the 
 moment is setting, and obscures the central point, 
 the words, by richness of tissue and overdressing; 
 and all modern music is labouring under that. 
 He does not seem to pause to think that music 
 was not made merely for pleasure, but to say 
 things. 
 
 "Language and music have nothing in com- 
 mon. In one way, that which is melodious in 
 verse becomes doggerel in music, and meter is 
 hardly of value. Sonnets in music become 
 abominable. I have made many experiments 
 for finding the affinity of language and music. 
 The two things are diametrically opposed, unless 
 music is free to distort syllables. A poem may 
 be of only four words, and yet those four words 
 may contain enough suggestion for four pages of 
 music; but to found a song on those four words 
 would be impossible. For this reason the para- 
 mount value of the poem is that of its suggestion 
 in the field of instrumental music, where a single 
 line may be elaborated upon. . . . To me, in this 
 respect, the poem holds its highest value of sug- 
 gestion. ... A short poem would take a life- 
 time to express; to do it in as many bars of music 
 is impossible. The words clash with the music, 
 . they fail to carry the full suggestion of the poem. . . 
 
 "Many poems contain syllables ending with 
 
THE SONGS i6s 
 
 e or other letters not good to sing. Some excep- 
 tionally beautifxil poems possess this shortcoming, 
 and, again, words that prove insurmountable 
 obstacles. I have in mind one by Aldrich in 
 which the word 'nostrils' occurs in the very first 
 verse, and one cannot do anything with. it. Much 
 of the finest poetry — for instance, the wonderful 
 writings of Whitman — proves unsuitable, yet it 
 has been undertaken. . . . 
 
 "A song, if at all dramatic, should have climax, 
 form, and plot, as does a play. Words to me 
 seem so paramount and, as it were, apart in 
 value from the musical setting, that, while I 
 cannot recall the melodies of many of the songs 
 that I have written, the words of them are so 
 indelibly impressed upon my mind that they are 
 very easy of recall. . . . Music and poetry cannot 
 be accurately stated unless one has written both." 
 
 It is clear that these are the views of a composer 
 who placed veracious declamation of the poetic 
 idea very much to the front in his conception of 
 the art of the song-writer. They explain in 
 part, also, the fact that MacDowell himself wrote 
 the words of many of his songs, though, quite 
 characteristically, he did not avow the fact in the 
 printed music. The verses of all the songs of 
 op. 56, save one, op. 58, and op. 60 (the last three 
 sets that he wrote), of the "Slumber Song" of 
 
i66 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 op. 9, of "The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree," 
 "Confidence," and "The West Wind Croons in 
 the Cedar Trees" (op. 47), and of some of the 
 choruses, were of his authorship. He enjoyed 
 what he called "stringing words together," and 
 most of his verses were written ofif-hand, with a 
 facility which betrayed the marked gift for verbal 
 expression which is apparent in his often admi- 
 rably stated lectures. But his especial reason for 
 writing the words for his songs was his difficulty 
 in finding texts which quite suited him. Many 
 poems which he would have liked to set were, as 
 he explained in the words I have quoted, full of 
 snags in the way of unsingable words. And 
 though it used to make him uncomfortable to do 
 so, he often felt compelled for this reason to refuse 
 much otherwise excellent poetry that was sent 
 to him with the request that he use it for music. 
 Some of the verse that he wrote for use in his 
 songs is of uncommon quality — imaginative, dis- 
 tinguished in diction, and, above all, perfectly 
 suited to musical utterance. Of uncommon 
 quality, too, are some of the brief verses which 
 he used as mottos for certain of his later piano 
 pieces — as for the "Sea Pieces" and "New 
 England Idyls." 
 
 That his songs, as a whole, are comparable in 
 inherent artistic consequence with his sonatas, 
 
THE SONGS 167 
 
 or with such things as the "Woodland Sketches," 
 the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England Idyls," 
 I do not believe, although I readily grant the 
 beauty and fascination of many passages, and of 
 certain pages in which he is incontestably at the 
 height of his powers. Here, as in his writing for 
 piano and for orchestra, one will find abundant 
 evidence of his distinguishing traits — sensitive- 
 ness and fervour of imagination, a lovely and 
 intimate sense of romance, whimsical and piquant 
 humour, virility, passion, an unerring instinct for 
 atmospheric suggestion. But there are times 
 when, despite his avowed principles in the matter, 
 he sacrifices truth of declamation to the presumed 
 requirements of melodic design — when he seems 
 to pay more heed to the unrelated effect of tonal 
 contours than to the dramatic or emotional needs 
 of his text. As an instance of his not infre- 
 quent indifference to justness of declamatory 
 utterance, examine his setting of " in those brown 
 eyes," at the bottom of the last page of "Confi- 
 dence" (op. 47), and of the word "without" in 
 the fourth bar of "Tyrant Love" (op. 60). I 
 dwell upon this point, not in any spirit of cap- 
 tiousness, I need scarcely say, but because it 
 exemplifies a fairly persistent characteristic of 
 MacDowell's style as a song writer. 
 Of that other trait to which I have referred — 
 
i68 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 his not exceptional preoccupation with a purely 
 musical plan at the expense of dramatic and 
 emotional congruity — the attentive observer will 
 not want for examples in almost any of Mac- 
 Dowell's song-groups. As a single instance, I 
 may allege the run in eighth-notes which encum- 
 bers the setting of the second syllable of the word 
 "again," in the fourth bar of "Springtide" (op. 
 60). Such infelicities are diflScult to account for 
 in the work of a musician so exceedingly sensitive 
 in matters of poetic fitness as he. It may be that 
 his acute sense of dramatic and emotional values 
 operated perfectly only when he was unhampered 
 by the thought of the voice. 
 
 I have dwelt upon this point because it should 
 be noted in any candid study of his traits as a 
 song writer. Yet it is not a defect which weighs 
 heavily against him when one considers the 
 musical quality of his songs as a whole. Not, 
 as a whole, equal to his piano music, they are 
 admirable and deeply individual; and the best 
 of them are not surpassed in any body of modem 
 song-writing. 
 
 In almost all of his songs the voice is predom- 
 inant over the piano part — although he is far, 
 indeed, from writing mere accompaniments: the 
 support which he gives the voice is consistently 
 important, for he brings to bear upon it all his 
 

THE SONGS 169 
 
 rich resources of harmonic expression. But 
 though he makes the voice the paramoimt ele- 
 ment, he uses it, in general, rather as a vehicle 
 for the unconscious exposition of a determined 
 lyricism than as an instrument of precise emo- 
 tional utterance. When one thinks of how Hugo 
 Wolf, for example, or Debussy, would have 
 treated the phrase, "to wake again the bitter 
 joy of love," in "Fair Springtide," it wiU be felt, 
 I think, that MacDowell's setting leaves some- 
 thing to be desired on the score of emotional 
 verity, although the song, as a whole, is one of 
 the loveliest and most spontaneous he has written. 
 I do not mean to say that he does not often achieve 
 an ideal correspondence between the significance 
 of his text and the effect of his music; but when 
 he does — as in, for instance, that superb tragedy 
 in little, "The Sea,"* or in the still finer " Sun- 
 rise "f — one's impression is that it is the for- 
 tunate result of chance, rather than the outcome 
 of deliberate artistic purpose. It is in songs of 
 an imtrammeUed lyricism that his art finds its 
 chief opportunity. In such he is both delightful 
 and satisfying — in, for instance, the six flower 
 songs, "From an Old Garden"; in "Confidence" 
 and "In the Woods" (op. 47); in "The Swan 
 
 * No VII. of the "Eight Songs," op. 47. 
 
 t Op. 58, No. n. 
 
I70 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid Sings Light," 
 and "Long Ago" (op. 56); and in the delectable 
 "To the Golden Rod," from his last song group 
 (op. 60). This is music of blithe and captivating 
 allurement, of grave or riant tenderness, of com- 
 pelling fascination; and in it, the word and the 
 tone are ideally mated. Yet even in others of 
 his songs in which they do not so invariably 
 correspond, one must acknowledge gladly the 
 beauty and freshness of the music itself: such 
 music as he has given us in "Constancy" (op. 
 58), in "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" 
 (op. 56), in "Fair Springtide" — which represent 
 his ripest utterances as a song writer. If he is 
 not, in this particular form, quite at his happiest, 
 he is among the foremost of those who have kept 
 alive in the modern tradition the conception of 
 the song as a medium of lyric utterance no less 
 than of precise dramatic signification. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in 
 American music it is necessary to remember that 
 twenty-five years ago, when he sent from Ger- 
 many, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, 
 the earliest outgivings of his talent, our native 
 musical art was still little more than a pallid 
 reproduction of European models. MacDowell 
 did not at that time, of course, give positive 
 evidence of the vitahty and the rarity of his gifts; 
 yet there was, even in his early music, — unde- 
 niably immature though it was, and modelled 
 after easily recognised Teutonic masters, — a 
 fresh and xmtrammelled impulse. A new jiote 
 vibrated through it, a new and buoyant person- 
 ality suffused it. Thenceforth music in America 
 possessed an artistic figure of constantly increas- 
 ing stature. MacDowell commanded, from the 
 start, an original idiom, a mannei: of speech 
 which has been recognised even by his detractors 
 as entirely his own. 
 
 His style is as pungent and unmistakable as 
 171 
 
172 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Grieg's, and far less limited in its variety. Hear- 
 ing certain melodic turns, certain harmonic 
 formations, you recognise them at once as belong- 
 ing to MacDowell, and to none other. This 
 marked individuality of speech, apparent from 
 the first, became constantly more salient and 
 more vivid, and in the music which he gave forth 
 at the height of his creative activity, — in, say, 
 the "Sea Pieces" and the last two sonatas, — it 
 is unmistakable and beyond dispute. This em- 
 phatically personal accent it was which, a score 
 of years ago, set MacDowell in a place apart 
 among native American music-makers. No one 
 else was saying such charming and memorable 
 things in so fresh and individual a way. We 
 had then, as we have had since, composers who 
 were entitled to respect by virtue of their expert 
 and effective mastery of a familiar order of 
 musical expression, — who spoke correctly a 
 language acquired in the schools of Munich, 
 Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing to 
 say that was both important and new. They 
 had grace, they had dexterity, they had, in a 
 measure, scholarship; but their art was obviously 
 derivative, without originality of substance or a 
 telling quality of style. It is not a needlessly 
 harsh asseveration to say that, until MacDowell 
 began to put forth his more individual works. 
 
SUMMARY 173 
 
 our music had been palpably, almost frankly, 
 dependent : an undisguised and naive transplanta- 
 tion, made rather feeble and anaemic in the process, 
 of European growths. The result was admirable, 
 in its way, praiseworthy, in its way — and wholly 
 negligible. 
 
 The music of MacDowell was, almost from the 
 first, in a wholly different case. In its early 
 phases it, too, was imitative, reflective. Mac- 
 Dowell returned to America, after a twelve 
 years* apprenticeship to European influences, in 
 1888, bringing with him his symphonic poems, 
 "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and 
 Elaine," his unfinished "Lamia," his two orches- 
 tral paraphrases of scenes from the Song of 
 Roland, two concertos, and numerous songs and 
 piano pieces. Not greatly important music, 
 this, measured beside that which he afterward 
 put forth; but possessing an individual profile, 
 a savour, a tang, which gave it an immediately 
 recognised distinction. A new voice spoke out 
 of it, a fresh and confident, an eloquent and 
 forceful, voice. It betrayed Germanic influences: 
 of that there was no question; yet it was strik- 
 ingly rich in personal accent. Gradually his 
 art came to find, through various forms, a con- 
 stantly finer and weightier expression. For or- 
 chestra he wrote the "Indian" suite — music of 
 
174 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 superb vigour, fantastically and deeply imagina- 
 tive, wholly personal in quality; for the piano he 
 wrote four sonatas of heroic and passionate con- 
 tent — indisputable masterworks — and various 
 shorter pieces, free in form and poetic in inspira- 
 tion; and he wrote many songs, some of them 
 quite flawless in their loveliness and their emo- 
 tional veracity. 
 
 It will thus be seen why the potent and aromatic 
 art of MacDowell impressed those who were able 
 to feel its charm and estimate its value. It is 
 mere justice to him, now that he has definitely 
 passed beyond the reach of our praise, to say that 
 he gave to the art of creative music in this country 
 (I am thinking now only of music-makers of 
 native birth) its single impressive and vital figure. 
 His is the one name in our music which, for 
 instance, one would venture to pair with' that of 
 Whitman in poetry. 
 
 An abundance of pregnant, beautiful, and 
 novel ideas was his chief possession, and he 
 fashioned them into musical designs with great 
 skill and imflagging art. That he did not under- 
 take adventures in all of the forms of music, has 
 been said. There is no symphony in the list of 
 his published works, no large choral composition. 
 Yet he was far from being a miniaturist, — he 
 was, in fact, anything but that. His four sonatas 
 
SUMMARY 17s 
 
 for the piano are planned upon truly heroic lines; 
 they are large in scope and of epical sweep and 
 breadth; and his "Indian" suite is the most 
 impressive orchestral work composed by an 
 American. He wrote two piano concertos, — 
 early works, not of his best inspiration, — a large 
 number of poetically descriptive smaller works, 
 and almost half a hundred songs of frequent 
 loveliness and character. The three symphonic 
 poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia," "Lancelot and 
 Elaine," and "Lamia"; the two "fragments," 
 "The Saracens," and "The Lovely Alda," and 
 the first orchestral suite, op. 42 — which he 
 might have entitled "Sylvan" — complete the 
 record of his output, save for some spirited and 
 effective but not very important or remarkable 
 part-songs. The Hst comprises sixty-two opus 
 numbers and one hvmdred and eighty-six sepa- 
 rate compositions, — not a remarkable accom- 
 plishment, in point of quantity, yet notable 
 and rare in quality. 
 
 He suggested, at his best, no one save himself. 
 He was one of the most individual writers who 
 ever made music — as individual as Chopin, or 
 Debussy, or Brahms, or Grieg. His manner of 
 speech was utterly untrammelled, and wholly his 
 own. Vitality — an aboimding freshness, a per- 
 petual youthfulness — was one of his prime 
 
176 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 traits; nobility — nobility of style and impulse — 
 was another. The morning freshness, the welling 
 spontaneity of his music, even in moments of 
 exalted or passionate utterance, was continually 
 surprising: it was music not unworthy of the 
 golden ages of the world. Yet MacDowell was a 
 Celt, and his music is deeply Celtic — mercurial, 
 by turns dolorous and sportive, darkly tragical 
 and exquisitely blithe, and overflowing with the 
 unpredictable and inexplicable magic of the 
 Celtic imagination. He is unfailingly noble — 
 it is, in the end, the trait which most surely 
 signalises him. " To every man," wrote Maeter- 
 linck, "there come noble thoughts, thoughts that 
 pass across his heart hke great white birds." 
 Such thoughts came often to MacDowell — they 
 seem always to be hovering not far from the par- 
 ticular territory to which his inspiration has led 
 him, even when he is most gayly inconsequent; 
 and in his finest and largest utterances, in the 
 sonatas, their majestic trend appears somehow to 
 have suggested the sweeping and splendid flight 
 of the musical idea. Not often subtle in impulse 
 or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the 
 impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of 
 Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable back- 
 grounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at 
 the dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not expli- , 
 
SUMMARY 177 
 
 cable is dearer than a beauty of which we can see 
 the end." He knew how to evoke a kind of 
 beauty that was both aerial and enchanted; but 
 it was a clarified and lucid beauty, even then: it 
 was never dim or wavering. He would never, as 
 I have said, have comprehended the art of such 
 a writer as Debussy — he viewed the universe 
 from a wholly different angle. Of the moderns, 
 Wagner he worshipped, Tchaikovsky deeply 
 moved him, Grieg he loved — Grieg, who was 
 his artistic inferior in almost every respect. Yet 
 none of these so seduced his imagination that 
 his independence was overcome — he was always, 
 throughout his maturity, himself j not arrogantly 
 or insistently, but of necessity; he could not be 
 otherwise. 
 
 What are the distinguishing traits, after all, of 
 MacDowell's music? The answer is not easily 
 given. His music is characterised by great 
 buoyancy and freshness, by an abounding vitality, 
 by a constantly juxtaposed tenderness and 
 strength, by a pervading nobility of tone and 
 feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not 
 brooding or hectic, and it is seldom intricate or 
 recondite in its psychology. It is music curiously 
 free from the fevers of sex. And here I do not 
 wish to be misunderstood. This music is anything 
 but androgynous. It is always virile, often pas- 
 
178 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 sionate, and, in its intensest moments, full of 
 force and vigour. But the sexual impulse which 
 underlies it is singularly fine, strong, and con- 
 trolled. The strange and burdened winds, the 
 subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir 
 at times in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, 
 Debussy, are not to be fovmd here. In Wag- 
 ner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, 
 as Pater felt in William Morris's " King Arthur's 
 Tomb," the tyranny of a moon which is "not 
 tender and f aj-off, but close down — the sor- 
 cerer's moon, large and feverish," and the pres- 
 ence of a colouring that is "as of scarlet lilies"; 
 and there is the suggestion of poison, with "a 
 sudden bewildered sickening of life and all 
 things." In the music of MacDowell there is no 
 hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely 
 touching emotion of those rare beings who are 
 in their interior lives both passionate and shy: 
 they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and 
 enamoured tenderness; but they do not know 
 either the languor pr the dementia of eroticism; 
 they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they 
 are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their 
 passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in 
 his music is full-blooded, but he is never febrile: 
 in this (though certainly in nothing else) he is like 
 Brahms. The passion by which he is swayed is 
 
SUMMARY 179 
 
 never, in its expression, ambiguous or exotic, 
 his sensuousness is never luscious. It is difficult 
 to think of a single passage from which that 
 accent upon which I have dwelt — the accent of 
 nobility, of a certain chivalry, a certain rare and 
 spontaneous dignity — is absent. Yet he can 
 be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply im- 
 passioned, with a sharpness of emotion that is 
 beyond denial. In such songs as "Deserted" 
 <op. 9); "Menie" (op. 34); "The Robin Sings in 
 the Apple Tree," "The West Wind Croons in the 
 Cedar Trees" (op. 47); "The Swan Bent Low to 
 the Lily," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" 
 (op. 5^; " Constancy" (op. 58); "Fair Spring- 
 tide" (op. 60); in "Lancelot and Elaine"; in 
 " Told at Sunset," from the " Woodland Sketches" ; 
 in "An Old Love Story," from "Fireside Tales": 
 in this music the emotion is the distinctive emo- 
 tion of sex; but it is the sexual emotion known to 
 Bums raiher than to Rossetti, to Schubert rather 
 than to Wagner. 
 
 He had the rapt and transfiguring imagina- 
 tion, in the presence of nature, which is the 
 spedal possession of the Celt. Yet he was more 
 than a mere landscape painter. The humai} 
 drama was for him a continually moving spec- 
 tacle; he was most sensitively attuned to its 
 tragedy and its comedy, — he was never more 
 
i8o EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 potent, more influential, indeed, than in cele- 
 brating its events. He is at the summit of his 
 powers, for example, in the superb pageant of 
 heroic grief and equally heroic love which is 
 comprised within the three movements of the 
 "Keltic" sonata, and in the piercing sadness and 
 the transporting tenderness of the "Dirge" in 
 the "Indian" suite. 
 
 In its general aspect his later music is not 
 German, or French, or Italian — its spiritual an- 
 tecedents are Northern, both Celtic and Scandi- 
 navian. MacDowell had not the Promethean 
 imagination, the magniloquent passion, that are 
 Strauss's; his art is far less elaborate and subtle 
 than that of such typical moderns as Debussy 
 and d'Indy. But it has an order of beauty that 
 is not theirs, an order of eloquence that is not 
 theirs, a kind of poetry whose secrets they do 
 not know; and there speaks through it and out 
 of it an individuality that is persuasive, lovable, 
 unique. 
 
 There is no need to attempt, at this juncture, 
 to speculate concerning his place among the 
 company of the greater dead; it is enough to 
 avow the conviction that he possessed genius of 
 a rare order, that he wrought nobly and valuably 
 for the art of the country which he loved. 
 
LIST OF WORKS 
 
COMPOSITIONS OF EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Op. 9. Two Old Songs, for voice and piano (1894)*: 
 
 1. Deserted 
 
 2. Slumber Song 
 
 Op. 10. First Modern Suite, for piano (1883): 
 
 Praeladium — Presto — Andantino and 
 Allegretto — Intermezzo — Rhapsody — Fugue 
 
 Op. II. \ An Album of Five Songs, for voice and piano 
 
 Op. 12. j (1883): 
 
 1. My Love and I 
 
 2. You Love me Not 
 
 3. In the Skies 
 
 4. Night-Song 
 
 5. Bands of Roses 
 
 Op. 13. Prdude and Fugue, for piano (1883) 
 Op. 14. Second Modern Suite, for piano (1883): 
 Praeludium — Fugato — Rhapsody — : 
 Scherzino — March — Fantastic Dance 
 Op. 15. First Concerto, in A-minor, for piano and or- 
 chestra (1885) 
 Op. 16. Serenata, for piano (1883) 
 Op. 17. Two Fantastic Pieces, for piano (1884): 
 I. Legend 
 ,.^ 2. Witches' Dance 
 
 *The publication dates given here are those of the original 
 editions. 
 
 183 
 
i84 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Op. 18. Two Compositions, for piano (1884): 
 
 1. Barcarolle 
 
 2. Humoresque 
 
 Op. 19. Forest Idyls, for piano (1884): 
 
 1. Forest Stillness 
 
 2. Play of the Nymphs 
 
 3. Revery 
 
 4. Dance of the Dryads 
 
 Op. 20. Three Poems, for piano, four hands (1886): 
 
 1. Night at Sea 
 
 2. A Tale of the Knights 
 
 3. Ballad 
 
 Op. 21. Moon Pictures, for piano, four hands (1886): 
 
 1. The Hindoo Maiden 
 
 2. Stork's Story 
 
 3. In Tyrol 
 
 4. The Swan 
 
 5. Visit of the Bear 
 
 Op. 22. Hamlet and Ophelia, symphonic poem for or- 
 chestra (1885) 
 
 Op 23. Second Concerto, in D-minor, for piano and 
 orchestra (1890) 
 
 Op. 24. Four Compositions, for piano (1887): 
 
 1. Humoresque 
 
 2. March 
 
 3. Cradle Song 
 
 4. Czardas 
 
 Op. 25. Lancelot and Elaine, symphonic poem for or- 
 chestra (1888) 
 Op. 26. From an Old Garden, for voice and piano (1887): 
 
 1. The Pansy 
 
 2. The Myrtle 
 
 3. The Clover 
 
EDWARD MACDOWELL 185 
 
 4. The Yellow Daisy 
 
 5. The Blue Bell 
 
 6. The Mignonette 
 
 Op. 27. Three Songs, for male chorus (1890): 
 
 1. In the Stany Sky Above Us 
 
 2. Springtune 
 
 3. The Fisherboy 
 
 Op. 28. Six Idyls after Goethe, for piano (1887): 
 
 1. In the Woods 
 
 2. Siesta 
 
 3. To the Moonlight 
 
 4. Silver Clouds 
 
 5. Flute Idyl 
 
 6. The Bluebell 
 
 Op. 29. Lamia, symphonic poem for orchestra (igo8)* 
 Op. 30. The Saracens; The Lovely Aldd, two fragments 
 
 (after the Song of Roland), for orchestra 
 
 (1891) 
 Op. 31. Six Poems after Heine, for piano (1887): 
 
 1. From a Fisherman's Hut 
 
 2. Scotch Poem 
 
 3. From Long Ago 
 
 4. The Post Wagon 
 
 5. The Shepherd Boy 
 
 6. Monologue 
 
 Op. 32. Four Little Poems, for piano (1888): 
 
 1. The Eagle 
 
 2. The Brook 
 
 3. Moonshine 
 
 4. Winter 
 
 Op. 33. Three Songs, for voice and piano (1894): 
 I. Prayer 
 
 ♦Posthumous. 
 
i86 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 2. Cradle Hymn 
 3- Idyl 
 Op. 34. Two SongSifioi voice and piano (1889): 
 
 1. Mehie 
 
 2. My Jean 
 
 Op. 35. 'Romance, for violoncello and orchestra (1888) 
 Op. 36. Etude de Concert, in F-sharp, for piano (1889) 
 Op. 37. Les Orientales, for piano (1889): 
 
 1. Clair de Lune 
 
 2. Dans le Hamac 
 
 3. Danse Andalouse 
 
 Op. 38. Marionettes, Eight Little Pieces, for piano 
 (1888)*: 
 
 1. Prologue 
 
 2. Soubrette 
 
 3. Lover 
 
 4. Witch 
 
 5. Clown 
 
 6. Villain 
 
 7. Sweetheart ■ ^ 
 
 8. Epilogue 
 
 Op. 39. Twelve Studies, for piano (1890): 
 Hunting Song 
 Alia Tarantella 
 Romance 
 Arabesque 
 In the Forest 
 Dance of the Gnomes 
 
 Book 
 
 * In their original form this set comprised only six pieces. 
 MacDowell afterward revised them extensively, rearranged 
 their order, and added the "Prologue" and "Epilogue."' 
 In this altered form they were published in 1901. 
 
Book 3. 
 
 EDWARD MACDOWELL 187 
 
 Idyl 
 
 Shadow Dance 
 Intennezzo 
 Melody 
 Scherzino 
 Hungarian 
 
 Op. 40. Sv^Love Songs, for voice and piano (i8go>: 
 I. Sweet, Blue-eyed Maid 
 a. Sweetheart, Tell Me 
 
 3. Thy Beaming Eyes 
 
 4. For Love's Sweet Sake 
 
 5. O Lovely Rose 
 
 6. I Ask but This 
 
 Op. 41. Two Songs, for male chorus (1890): 
 
 1. Cradle Song 
 
 2. Dance of the Gnomes 
 
 Op. 42. First Suite, for orchestra (1891-1893*): 
 
 1. In a Haunted Forest 
 
 2. Summer Idyl 
 
 3. In October 
 
 4. The Shepherdess' Song 
 
 5. Forest Spirits 
 
 Op. 43. Two Northern Songs, for mixed chorus (1891): 
 
 1. The Brook 
 
 2. Slumber Song 
 
 Op. 44. Barcarolle, for mixed chorus with four-hand 
 piano accompaniment (1892) 
 
 * As originally published, in 1891, this suite comprised 
 only the first, second, fourth, and fifth movements. The 
 third, "In October," though composed at the same time as 
 the others, and intended for inclusion in the suite, was not 
 published until 1893, when it was issued as a "supplement" 
 under the same opus number. 
 
i88 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Op. 45- Sonata Tragica, for piano (1893) 
 
 Op. 46. Twelve Virtuoso Studies, for piano (1894): 
 
 1. Novelette 
 
 2. Moto Peipetuo 
 
 3. Wild Chase 
 
 4. Improvisation 
 
 5. Elfin Dance 
 
 6. Valse triste 
 
 7. Burleske 
 
 8. Bluette 
 
 9. Traumerei 
 10. March Wind 
 'II. Impromptu 
 12. Polonaise 
 
 Op. 47. Eight Songs, for voice and piano (1893): 
 
 1. The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree 
 
 2. Midsummer Lullaby 
 
 3. Folk Song 
 
 4. Confidence 
 
 5. The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees 
 
 6. In the Woods 
 
 7. The Sea 
 
 8. Through the Meadow 
 
 Op. 48. Second (Indian) Suite, for orchestra (1897): 
 
 1. Legend 
 
 2. Love Song 
 
 3. In War-time 
 X4. Dirge 
 
 5. Village Festival 
 Op. 49. Air and Rigaudon, for piano (1894) 
 Op. 50. Second Sonata (Eroica), for piano (1895) 
 Op. 51. Woodland Sketches, for piano (1896): 
 
 1. To a Wild Rose 
 
 2. Will'-o-the-Wisp 
 
EDWARD MACDOWELL 189 
 
 3. At an Old Trysting Place 
 
 4. In Autumn 
 
 5. From an Indian Lodge 
 
 6. To a Water-lily 
 
 7. From Uncle Remus 
 
 8. A Deserted Farm 
 
 9. By a Meadow Brook 
 10. Told at Sunset 
 
 Op. 52. Three Choruses, for male voices (1897): 
 
 1. Hush, hush! 
 
 2. From the Sea 
 
 3. The Crusaders 
 
 Op. 53. Two Choruses, for male voices (1898): 
 
 1. Bonnie Ann 
 
 2. The Collier Lassie 
 
 Op. 54. Two Choruses, for male voices (1898): 
 
 1. A Ballad of Charles the Bold 
 
 2. Midsummer Clouds 
 Op. 55. Sea Pieces, for piano (1898): 
 
 1. To the Sea 
 
 2. From a Wandering Iceberg 
 . ; , — 3. A.D. 1620 
 
 4. Starlight 
 5- Song 
 
 6. From the Depths 
 
 7. Nautilus 
 
 8. In Mid-Ocean 
 
 Op. 56. Four Songs, for voice and piano (1898): 
 
 1. Long Ago 
 
 2. The Swan Bent Low to the Lily 
 
 3. A Maid Sings Light 
 
 4. As the Gloaming Shadows Creep 
 Op. 57. Third Sonata {Norse), for piano (1900) 
 
190 EDWARD MACDOWELL 
 
 Op. 58. Three Songs, for voice aad piano (1S99): 
 
 1. Constancy 
 
 2. Sunrise 
 
 3. Merry Maiden Spring 
 
 Op. 59. Fourth Sonata {KdHc), for piano (1901) 
 Op. 60. Three Songs, for voice and piano ^1902): 
 
 1. Tyrant liove 
 
 2. Fair Springtide 
 
 3. To the Golden Rod 
 
 Op. 61. Fireside Tales, for piano (igos): 
 
 1. An Old Love Story 
 
 2. Of Bre'r Rabbit 
 
 3. Fiiom a German Forest 
 
 4. Of Salamanders 
 
 5. A Haunted House 
 
 6. By Smouldering Embers 
 
 Op. 62. New England Idyls, for piaiio (1902): 
 
 1. An Old Garden 
 
 2. Midsunimer 
 
 3. Mid-winter 
 
 4. With Sweet Lavender 
 
 5. In Deep Woods 
 
 6. Indian Idyl 
 
 7. To an Old White Pine 
 
 8. From Puritan Days 
 
 9. From a Log Cabin 
 10. The Joy of Autumn 
 
 WITHOUT OPUS NUMBER 
 
 Two Songs from the Thirteenth Century, for 
 male chorus (1897): 
 
 1. Winter Wraps his Grimmest Spell 
 
 2. As the Gloaming Shadows Creep