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.
_That_ is 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").
[8] 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 withholding 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 accepted meaning of the term, either it must be
beautiful music in itself,--that is, composed of beautiful sounds,--or
its excuse for _not_ 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 'absolute 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 modern 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 MacDowell's "Lancelot
and Elaine." This passage is intended to express the rage and jealousy
of Guinevere; but MacDowell 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 wrote a
complete and detailed key to the significance of the music at every
point. Such are the ways of the musical realist!
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.
[9] The revised version, published in 1901, is referred to. The
original edition, which appeared in 1888, is decidedly inferior.
[10] From the "Sea Pieces," for piano.
[Illustration: 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 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 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.