Chapter 3

The house at Peterboro, New Hampshire, where MacDowell spent his summers

As a pianist, as in all other matters touching his own capacities, he was often tortured by doubts concerning the effect of his performances. "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 naïvely 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 violin 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 the orchestral commentary; the action was to be carried on by a combination of pantomime and tableaux, and the scenic element was to be conspicuous—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 abandoned 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 felicity cannot be bettered: "A man of blameless life, he was never pharasaical; he was compassionate 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 unspotted."

"O that so many pitchers of rough clayShould prosper and the porcelain break in two!"

"O that so many pitchers of rough clay

Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!"

The Music-Maker

CHAPTER III

HIS ART 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 definition: 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.Thatis a romance in no wise divorced from reality—is, in fact, but reality diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanticistic properties, it uses them not because of any 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 aërial.

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 accomplishment 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 times under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, 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 world of the imagination are ceaselessly revealing to the simple of heart, the dream-filled, 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 æsthetic 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 decorative 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 frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as he is to the academic ideal. Though he conceives the prime mission of music to be interpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, in its function as an expressional instrument, it shall concern itself with essences and impressions, 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 supplementary gift of musical speech has been extravagantly vouchsafed.

He is a realist, as I have said—applying the term in that larger sense which denotes the transmutation 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 transmutation 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 sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so frequently declined. It is impossible to conceive him attempting the musical exposition of such themes as kindled the imagination of Strauss when he wrought out his "Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," and "Till Eulenspiegel"; nor has he any appreciable affinity 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 seriously espoused the sophistical compromise which concedes the legitimacy of programme-music provided 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 Wagner's "Faust" overture, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet," or Debussy's "L'Après-midi d'un Faune." Its appeal is conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional crisis upon which the musician has built; and in much of his music he has frankly recognized 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 England Idyls," the fragment of verse or legend or 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," "Will 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 extremely 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, "that 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."

But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual inconsistency of the modern tone-poet in his attitude toward the whole subject of programme-music,[8]the tendency was neither a persistent nor 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 symbolism as he employs in those elastically wrought tone-poems, brief or vigorously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with memorable 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," "Villain," "Sweetheart"); in the Raff-like orchestral suite, op. 42 ("In a Haunted Forest," "Summer Idyll," "The Shepherdess' Song," "Forest Spirits"), and in the later and far more important "Indian" suite for orchestra ("Legend," "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 visible 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 sudden intimation of spring in the scent of lilacs.

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 preferences 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 little 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 withdrawals. One thinks, as a discerning commentator 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 directness, 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 experimentation, his days of discipleship. In his earlier writing there is not a little that is unworthy 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 performances as the "Woodland Sketches," certain of the "Marionettes,"[9]and the exquisite song group, "From an Old Garden," in which he attains an order of delicate eloquence difficult to associate with the mind which shaped the heroic ardours of the "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas. His capacity 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 expression. 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,"[10]for example, is but thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a tone-picture which for breadth of conception 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 "Marionettes." The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation: 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.

The piazza and garden walk at Peterboro

This scope and amplitude of expression are realised through a method at once plastic and unlaboured; his art has spontaneity—the deceptive spontaneity of the expert craftsman. It is not, in its elements, a strikingly novel style. His harmony,per 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 individuality 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—eloquent enough in themselves—has been charged against it, and the accusation is not without foundation. MacDowell is exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the diminished seventh. There is scarcely a page throughout 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 addition 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 counterpoint—poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality 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 climax 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 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 significance; for his melodic gift is, probably, the most notable possession of his art. His insistence upon the value and importance of themeloswas, 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 anything 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 passion for the esoteric and its horror of direct communication, to the music of such a writer as MacDowell. For he has accomplished the difficult and perilous feat of writing frankly without obviousness, simply without triteness. His melodic 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 lift it securely above mediocrity.

It must have already become evident to anyone 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 "modern suites" for piano are his only important 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 elastic and emancipated in form as it is unconfined in spirit. He preferred to shape his inspiration upon the mould of a definite poetic concept, rather than upon a constructive formula 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 expression was not slow in declaring itself. The first "modern suite" (op. 10), the earliest of his listed works, which at first glance seems to be merely a group of contrasted movements of innocently traditional aspect, with the expected Præludium, Presto, Intermezzo, Fugue, etc., contains, 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 amica silentia lunæ," and the Rhapsodic is introduced with the

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate"

of Dante. The Præludium of the second piano suite, op. 14, is also annotated, having been suggested by lines from Byron's "Manfred." In the "Zwei Fantasiestücke", op. 17—"Erzählung" and "Hexentanz"—but more particularly in the "Wald-Idyllen" of op. 19—"Waldesstille," "Spiel der Nymphen," "Träumerei," and "Driadentanz,"—a definite poetic concept is implied. Here the formative influence of Raff is evident. The works which follow—"Drei Poesien" ("Nachts am Meere," "Erzählung aus der Ritterzeit," "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 somewhat vicariously—one can imagine the favourite pupil of Raff producing a group of "Wald-Idyllen" 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 concerto (thea piacerepassage toward the close of the first movement is particularly characteristic), in theErzählung, and in No. 3 (Träumerei) of theWald-Idyllen; but the prevailing note of his style at this time was, quite naturally, strongly Teutonic: one encounters in it the trail of Liszt, of Schumann, of Raff, of Wagner.

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 accomplishment. 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 Nothing," which were to form a "Beatrice and Benedick" 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 conventionalmorceauxas 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 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 exhibits in this concerto. In substance the work is not extraordinary. The manner derives something from Grieg, more from Liszt, and there is comparatively little disclosure of personality. But the manipulation is, throughout, 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 formula.

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 inconsiderable 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 "Hamlet and Ophelia" music. MacDowell had a peculiar affinity for the spirit of the Arthurian tales, and he was happy in whatever musical 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 incident 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 has, for instance, in accord with his expressed feeling, reduced the prominence of the horns, allotting their parts, in certain important instances, 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 paraphrases, 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-Idyllen." He presents himself here as one who has yielded his imagination to an intimate contemplation of the natural world, and who already has, in some degree, the faculty of uttering whatever revelation of its loveliness 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 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 perceived; I say "in a measure," for his power of acute and sympathetic observation and of eloquent 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," adumbrates faintly MacDowell's riper manner. The "Silver Clouds," "Flute Idyl,"[11]and "Blue Bell" are decidedly less characteristic.

His third orchestral work, the symphonic poem "Lamia," is based upon the fantastic (and what Mr. Howells would call unconscionably "romanticistic") 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, 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 Apollonius appears; he reveals the magic. Lamia again assumes the form of a serpent, the enchanted palace vanishes, and Lycius is found lifeless."

Now this 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 thepianissimopassage for flutes, clarinets, and divided strings, following the first outburst of the full orchestra—does his own individuality emerge with any positiveness. MacDowell withheld the score from publication, at the time of its composition, because of his uncertainty as to its effect. He had not had an opportunity to secure a reading of it by one of theCur-Orchesterwhich had accommodatingly tried over his preceding scores at their rehearsals; and such a thing was of course out of the question in America. Not only was he reluctant to put it forth without such a test, but he lacked the funds 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 impression 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 allegiances. He intended ultimately to revise and publish the score, and he allowed it to remain on the list 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, secondly, 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 artistic evolution. It was, therefore, published in October, 1908, twenty years after its composition, with a dedication to Mr. Henry T. Finck.

In "Die Sarazenen" and "Die Schöne Aldâ," two "fragments" for orchestra after the "Song of Roland," numbered op. 30, a graver note is sounded. These "fragments," originally intended 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 Schöne Aldâ," is, however, a more memorable work, depicting the loveliness and the grieving of Aldâ, Roland's betrothed. In spite of its strong Wagnerian leanings, 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 Poems" after Heine (op. 31), for piano, are devoted 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 suggestion. 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

" ...schöne, kranke Frau,Zartdurchsichtig und marmorblass,"

" ...schöne, kranke Frau,

Zartdurchsichtig und marmorblass,"

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 characteristic, is "The Shepherd Boy" (No. 5). This is almost, at moments, MacDowell in the happiest phase of his lighter vein. The transition from F minor to major, after thefermataon the second page, is as typical as it is delectable; and the fifteen bars that follow are of a markedly personal tinge. "From Long Ago" and "From a Fisherman's Hut" are less good, and "The Post Wagon" and "Monologue" are disappointing—the latter especially so, because the exquisite poem which he has chosen to enforce, the matchless lyric beginning "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht," should, it seems, have offered an inspiring incentive.

In the "Four Little Poems" of op. 32 one encounters a piece which it is possible to admire 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 "Winter," one can praise only in measured terms—although "Winter," which attempts a representation 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 Tennyson's lines—an object which it accomplishes 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 undisclosed in MacDowell's writing. Here are precisely the severe and lonely mood of the opening lines of the poem, the sense of inaccessible and wind-swept spaces, which Tennyson has so 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),—threemorceauxfor 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.

A winter view of the Peterboro house

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 form, the group comprises sixgenrestudies—"Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," "Villain," "Sweetheart"—besides two additions: a "Prologue" and "Epilogue." Here MacDowell is in one of his happiest moods. It was a fortunate 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 communicate and enforce. This is continually apparent in "The Lover" and "Sweetheart," fugitively so in the "Prologue," and, in an irresistible degree, in the exceedingly poetic and deeply felt "Epilogue"—one of the most typical and beautiful 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 productions in the order suggested by its opus number. For although in the list of his published works the "Marionettes" follow immediately on the heels of the Concert Study and "Les Orientales" the form in which they are now most generally known represents the much later period of the "Keltic" sonata—a fact which will, however, be sufficiently evident to anyone who studies the two versions carefully enough to perceive the difference between more or less experimental 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 Schumann adopted. Thus one finds, in the "Prologue," such unmistakable and illuminating directions as: "with sturdy good humour," "pleadingly," "mockingly"; in the "Soubrette"—"poutingly"; in the "Lover"—in the "Villain"—"with sinister emphasis," "sardonically." This method, which MacDowell has followed consistently in all his later works, has obvious advantages; and it becomes 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 intelligible.

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 connotation—suggest, in a measure, that imperfectly 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 anything 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 atmosphere, freshness, buoyancy, and it is scored with exquisite 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, inspiration.

Passing over a sheaf of piano pieces, the "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 presents 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 Orchestra[12]in December, 1897, did not hesitate to describe the work as "one of the noblest compositions 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 Raff, 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 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 acknowledges 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'; III. 'In War-time'; IV. 'Dirge'; V. Village Festival'"—a concession in which again one traces a hint of the inexplicable and amusing reluctance of the musical impressionist to acknowledge 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 movements are unmistakably based upon firmly held concepts of a definite dramatic and emotional significance. As supplemental aids to the discovery of his poetic purposes, the phrases of direction which he has placed at the beginning of each movement are indicative, taken in connection with the titles which he sanctions. The first movement, "Legend," is headed:Not fast. With much dignity and character; the second movement, "Love Song," is to be playedNot fast. Tenderly; 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 underlies, 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 communication, 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.[13]He has exposed the particular emotions and the essential character of his subject with deep sympathy and extraordinary imaginative force—at times with profoundly impressive effect, 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 threnody in music since the "Götterdämmerung"Trauermarsch. I am inclined to rank this 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 sixteenadagiomeasures); the indescribable effect of the muted horn heard from behind the scenes, over an accompaniment of divided violas and 'celloscon sordini; the heart-shaking sadness and beauty of the succeeding passage for all the muted strings; the mysterious and solemn close: these are outstanding 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 embodied the fundamental 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 establishment 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 ingenuous 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 perceived, 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 recognised, and he affirmed the belief, that racial elements are transitory and mutable, and that provinciality in art, even when it is called patriotism, makes for a probable oblivion.

I have already dwelt upon MacDowell's preoccupation with the pageant of the natural world. 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 believe, 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 incontestable 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 observed the operation of this impulse in such comparatively immature productions as the "Wald-Idyllen" 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 Debussy—abounds in examples of natural imagery. In claiming a certain excellence for his method one need scarcely imply that MacDowell has ever threatened the supremacy of such things as the "Rheingold" prelude or the "Walküre" 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 frescoes as Wagner delighted to paint. Of his descriptive 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 adequacy of effect, a mountain-side in flames, or the prismatic arch of a rainbow, or the towering architecture of cloud forms; so MacDowell has confined himself within the bounds of such canvases as he paints upon in his "Four Little Poems" ("The Eagle," "The Brook," "Moonshine," "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 garden. As a fair exemplification 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 quite in the manner of this remarkable piece of lyrical impressionism. Of all the composers who have essayed tonal transcriptions of the phases of the outer world, I know of none who has achieved such vividness and suggestiveness 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 delicacy of perception, intensity of vision, and perfection of accomplishment. The question of bulk, length, size, has quite 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, among the barren makeshifts of reality, "remembers the enchanted valleys." It is touched at times with the deep and wistful tenderness, the primæval 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 responsiveness 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 full maturity 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 difficult 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 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 andinsouciance, 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-poems in little are a curious blend of what, lacking an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, and psychological suggestion; and they are remarkable 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 community. 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 literature of the piano; and it is typical, in the main, of the volume. MacDowell is one of the comparatively few composers who have been thrall 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 Whitman 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 apparitions. There is an exhilaration even in his titles (which he has supplemented with mottos): as "To the Sea," "From a Wandering Iceberg," "Starlight," "From the Depths," "In Mid-Ocean." I make no concealment of my unqualified admiration for these pieces: with the sonatas, the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite, and certain of the "Woodland Sketches," they record, I think, his high-water mark. He has carried them through with superb gusto, with unwearying 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

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