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."
[12] The suite is dedicated to this Orchestra and its former
conductor, Mr. Emil Paur.
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 played _Not
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 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 outstanding moments in a
masterpiece of the first rank: a page which would honour any
music-maker, living or dead.
[13] The "Tragica" sonata, op. 45, which antedates the suite by
several years, and of which I shall write in another chapter, has a
considerably less definite content.
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 and _insouciance_, 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
"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 tenderness. 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 offer a more pertinent theme
for comment in a consideration of the sonatas. Their littleness is
wholly a quantitative matter; their spiritual and imaginative
substance is not only of rare quality, but of striking 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, together with the songs of op.
60, constitute the 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
number 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 emotion. 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 number of the book, "By Smouldering Embers."
In the "New England Idyls," the point is still more evident. One
passes over "From an Old Garden" and "Midsummer" as belonging
fundamentally to the period of the "Woodland Sketches" and "Sea
Pieces." But one halts at "Mid-Winter," No. 3 of the collection; with
those 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
Lavender": 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 resourceful 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 "Woodland 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 memorial tablet near his
grave:--
"A house of dreams untold,
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun."
[Illustration: 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]
The music of this piece is suffused with a mood 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 profoundly contemplative than any to which he had hitherto
responded.