SUMMARY
To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in American music it is
necessary to remember that twenty-five years ago, when he sent from
Germany, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, the earliest
outgivings of his talent, our native musical art was still little
more than a pallid reproduction of European models. MacDowell did
not at that time, of course, give positive evidence of the vitality
and the rarity of his gifts; yet there was, even in his early
music,--undeniably immature though it was, and modelled after easily
recognised Teutonic masters,--a fresh and untrammelled impulse. A new
note vibrated through it, a new and buoyant personality suffused it.
Thenceforth music in America possessed an artistic figure of
constantly increasing stature. MacDowell commanded, from the start,
an original idiom, a manner of speech which has been recognised even
by his detractors as entirely his own.
His style is as pungent and unmistakable as Grieg's, and far less
limited in its variety. Hearing certain melodic turns, certain
harmonic formations, you recognise them at once as belonging to
MacDowell, and to none other. This marked individuality of speech,
apparent from the first, became constantly more salient and more
vivid, and in the music which he gave forth at the height of his
creative activity,--in, say, the "Sea Pieces" and the last two
sonatas,--it is unmistakable and beyond dispute. This emphatically
personal accent it was which, a score of years ago, set MacDowell in a
place apart among native American music-makers. No one else was saying
such charming and memorable things in so fresh and individual a way.
We had then, as we have had since, composers who were entitled to
respect by virtue of their expert and effective mastery of a familiar
order of musical expression,--who spoke correctly a language acquired
in the schools of Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing to
say that was both important and new. They had grace, they had
dexterity, they had, in a measure, scholarship; but their art was
obviously derivative, without originality of substance or a telling
quality of style. It is not a needlessly harsh asseveration to say
that, until MacDowell began to put forth his more individual works,
our music had been palpably, almost frankly, dependent: an undisguised
and naïve transplantation, made rather feeble and anæmic in the
process, of European growths. The result was admirable, in its way,
praiseworthy, in its way--and wholly negligible.
The music of MacDowell was, almost from the first, in a wholly
different case. In its early phases it, too, was imitative,
reflective. MacDowell returned to America, after a twelve years'
apprenticeship to European influences, in 1888, bringing with him his
symphonic poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine," his
unfinished "Lamia," his two orchestral paraphrases of scenes from the
Song of Roland, two concertos, and numerous songs and piano pieces.
Not greatly important music, this, measured beside that which he
afterward put forth; but possessing an individual profile, a savour, a
tang, which gave it an immediately recognised distinction. A new voice
spoke out of it, a fresh and confident, an eloquent and forceful,
voice. It betrayed Germanic influences: of that there was no question;
yet it was strikingly rich in personal accent. Gradually his art came
to find, through various forms, a constantly finer and weightier
expression. For orchestra he wrote the "Indian" suite--music of superb
vigour, fantastically and deeply imaginative, wholly personal in
quality; for the piano he wrote four sonatas of heroic and passionate
content--indisputable masterworks--and various shorter pieces, free in
form and poetic in inspiration; and he wrote many songs, some of them
quite flawless in their loveliness and their emotional veracity.
It will thus be seen why the potent and aromatic art of MacDowell
impressed those who were able to feel its charm and estimate its
value. It is mere justice to him, now that he has definitely passed
beyond the reach of our praise, to say that he gave to the art of
creative music in this country (I am thinking now only of music-makers
of native birth) its single impressive and vital figure. His is the
one name in our music which, for instance, one would venture to pair
with that of Whitman in poetry.
An abundance of pregnant, beautiful, and novel ideas was his chief
possession, and he fashioned them into musical designs with great
skill and unflagging art. That he did not undertake adventures in all
of the forms of music, has been said. There is no symphony in the list
of his published works, no large choral composition. Yet he was far
from being a miniaturist,--he was, in fact, anything but that. His
four sonatas for the piano are planned upon truly heroic lines; they
are large in scope and of epical sweep and breadth; and his "Indian"
suite is the most impressive orchestral work composed by an American.
He wrote two piano concertos,--early works, not of his best
inspiration,--a large number of poetically descriptive smaller works,
and almost half a hundred songs of frequent loveliness and character.
The three symphonic poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia," "Lancelot and
Elaine," and "Lamia"; the two "fragments," "The Saracens," and "The
Lovely Aldâ," and the first orchestral suite, op. 42--which he might
have entitled "Sylvan"--complete the record of his output, save for
some spirited but not very important part-songs for male voices. The
list comprises sixty-two opus numbers and one hundred and eighty-six
separate compositions,--not a remarkable accomplishment, in point of
quantity, yet notable and rare in quality.
He suggested, at his best, no one save himself. He was one of the most
individual writers who ever made music--as individual as Chopin, or
Debussy, or Brahms, or Grieg. His mannner of speech was utterly
untrammelled, and wholly his own. Vitality--an abounding freshness, a
perpetual youthfulness--was one of his prime traits; nobility--nobility
of style and impulse--was another. The morning freshness, the welling
spontaneity of his music, even in moments of exalted or passionate
utterance, was continually surprising: it was music not unworthy of the
golden ages of the world. Yet MacDowell was a Celt, and his music is
deeply Celtic--mercurial, by turns dolorous and sportive, darkly
tragical and exquisitely blithe, and overflowing with the unpredictable
and inexplicable magic of the Celtic imagination. He is unfailingly
noble--it is, in the end, the trait which most surely signalises him.
"To every man," wrote Maeterlinck, "there come noble thoughts, thoughts
that pass across his heart like great white birds." Such thoughts came
often to MacDowell--they seem always to be hovering not far from the
particular territory to which his inspiration has led him, even when he
is most gayly inconsequent; and in his finest and largest utterances,
in the sonatas, their majestic trend appears somehow to have suggested
the sweeping and splendid flight of the musical idea. Not often subtle
in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the
impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of
the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at the
dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty of
which we can see the end." He knew how to evoke a kind of beauty that
was both aerial and enchanted; but it was a clarified and lucid beauty,
even then: it was never dim or wavering. He would never, as I have
said, have comprehended the art of such a writer as Debussy--he viewed
the universe from a wholly different angle. Of the moderns, Wagner he
worshipped, Tchaikovsky deeply moved him, Grieg he loved--Grieg, who
was his artistic inferior in almost every respect. Yet none of these so
seduced his imagination that his independence was overcome--he was
always, throughout his maturity, himself; not arrogantly or
insistently, but of necessity; he could not be otherwise.
What are the distinguishing traits, after all, of MacDowell's music?
The answer is not easily given. His music is characterised by great
buoyancy and freshness, by an abounding vitality, by a constantly
juxtaposed tenderness and strength, by a pervading nobility of tone
and feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not brooding or
hectic, and it is seldom intricate or recondite in its psychology. It
is music curiously free from the fevers of sex. And here I do not wish
to be misunderstood. This music is anything but androgynous. It is
always virile, often passionate, and, in its intensest moments, full
of force and vigour. But the sexual impulse which underlies it is
singularly fine, strong, and controlled. The strange and burdened
winds, the subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir at times
in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, are not to be found
here. In Wagner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, as
Pater felt in William Morris's "King Arthur's Tomb," the tyranny of a
moon which is "not tender and far-off, but close down--the sorcerer's
moon, large and feverish," and the presence of a colouring that is "as
of scarlet lilies"; and there is the suggestion of poison, with "a
sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things." In the music of
MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the
infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their
interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow,
supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either
the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept
by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their
passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded,
but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he
is like Brahms. The passion by which he is swayed is never, in its
expression, ambiguous or exotic, his sensuousness is never luscious.
It is difficult to think of a single passage from which that accent
upon which I have dwelt--the accent of nobility, of a certain
chivalry, a certain rare and spontaneous dignity--is absent. Yet he
can be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply impassioned, with a
sharpness of emotion that is beyond denial. In such songs as
"Deserted" (op. 9); "Menie" (op. 34); "The Robin Sings in the Apple
Tree," "The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees" (op. 47); "The Swan
Bent Low to the Lily," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" (op. 56);
"Constancy" (op. 58); "Fair Springtide" (op. 60); in "Lancelot and
Elaine"; in "Told at Sunset," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in "An Old
Love Story," from "Fireside Tales": in this music the emotion is the
distinctive emotion of sex; but it is the sexual emotion known to
Burns rather than to Rossetti, to Schubert rather than to Wagner.
He had the rapt and transfiguring imagination, in the presence of
nature, which is the special possession of the Celt. Yet he was more
than a mere landscape painter. The human drama was for him a
continually moving spectacle; he was most sensitively attuned to its
tragedy and its comedy,--he was never more potent, more influential,
indeed, than in celebrating its events. He is at the summit of his
powers, for example, in the superb pageant of heroic grief and equally
heroic love which is comprised within the four movements of the
"Keltic" sonata, and in the piercing sadness and the transporting
tenderness of the "Dirge" in the "Indian" suite.
In its general aspect his later music is not German, or French, or
Italian--its spiritual antecedents are Northern, both Celtic and
Scandinavian. MacDowell had not the Promethean imagination, the
magniloquent passion, that are Strauss's; his art is far less
elaborate and subtle than that of such typical moderns as Debussy and
d'Indy. But it has an order of beauty that is not theirs, an order of
eloquence that is not theirs, a kind of poetry whose secrets they do
not know; and there speaks through it and out of it an individuality
that is persuasive, lovable, unique.
There is no need to attempt, at this juncture, to speculate concerning
his place among the company of the greater dead; it is enough to avow
the conviction that he possessed genius of a rare order, that he
wrought nobly and valuably for the art of the country which he loved.
LIST OF WORKS
COMPOSITIONS OF EDWARD MACDOWELL
Op. 9. _Two Old Songs_, for voice and piano (1894)[18]:
1. Deserted
2. Slumber Song
[18] The publication dates given here are those of the original
editions.
Op. 10. First _Modern Suite_, for piano (1883):
Præladium--Presto--Andantino and
Allegretto--Intermezzo--Rhapsody--Fugue
Op. 11.] _An Album of Five Songs_, for voice and piano
Op. 12.] 1. My Love and I
2. You Love me Not
3. In the Skies
4. Night-Song
5. Bands of Roses
Op. 13. _Prelude and Fugue_, for piano (1883)
Op. 14. _Second Modern Suite_, for piano (1883):
Præludium--Fugato--Rhapsody--Scherzino--March--Fantastic
Dance
Op. 15. _First Concerto_, in A-minor, for piano and orchestra (1885)
Op. 16. _Serenata_, for piano (1883)
Op. 17. _Two Fantastic Pieces_, for piano (1884):
1. Legend
2. Witches' Dance
Op. 18. _Two Compositions_, for piano (1884):
1. Barcarolle
2. Humoresque
Op. 19. _Forest Idyls_, for piano (1884):
1. Forest Stillness
2. Play of the Nymphs
3. Revery
4. Dance of the Dryads
Op. 20. _Three Poems_, for piano, four hands (1886):
1. Night at Sea
2. A Tale of the Knights
3. Ballad
Op. 21. _Moon Pictures_, for piano, four hands (1886):
1. The Hindoo Maiden
2. Stork's Story
3. In Tyrol
4. The Swan
5. Visit of the Bear
Op. 22. _Hamlet and Ophelia_, symphonic poem for orchestra (1885)
Op. 23. _Second Concerto_, in D-minor, for piano and orchestra
(1890)
Op. 24. _Four Compositions_, for piano (1887):
1. Humoresque
2. March
3. Cradle Song
4. Czardas
Op. 25. _Lancelot and Elaine_, symphonic poem for orchestra (1888)
Op. 26. _From an Old Garden_, for voice and piano (1887):
1. The Pansy
2. The Myrtle
3. The Clover
4. The Yellow Daisy
5. The Blue Bell
6. The Mignonette
Op. 27. _Three Songs_, for male chorus (1890):
1. In the Starry Sky Above Us
2. Springtime
3. The Fisherboy
Op. 28. _Six Idyls after Goethe_, for piano (1887):
1. In the Woods
2. Siesta
3. To the Moonlight
4. Silver Clouds
5. Flute Idyl
6. The Bluebell
Op. 29. _Lamia_, symphonic poem for orchestra (1908)[19]
[19] Posthumous.
Op. 30. _The Saracens; The Lovely Aldâ_, two fragments
(after the Song of Roland), for orchestra (1891)
Op. 31. _Six Poems after Heine_, for piano (1887):
1. From a Fisherman's Hut
2. Scotch Poem
3. From Long Ago
4. The Post Wagon
5. The Shepherd Boy
6. Monologue
Op. 32. _Four Little Poems_, for piano (1888):
1. The Eagle
2. The Brook
3. Moonshine
4. Winter
Op. 33. _Three Songs_, for voice and piano (1894):
1. Prayer
2. Cradle Hymn
3. Idyl
Op. 34. _Two Songs_, for voice and piano (1889):
1. Menie
2. My Jean
Op. 35. _Romance_, for violoncello and orchestra (1888)
Op. 36. _Étude de Concert_, in F-sharp, for piano (1889)
Op. 37. _Les Orientales_, for piano (1889):
1. Clair de Lune
2. Dans le Hamac
3. Danse Andalouse
Op. 38. _Marionettes_, Eight Little Pieces, for piano (1888)[20]:
1. Prologue
2. Soubrette
3. Lover
4. Witch
5. Clown
6. Villain
7. Sweetheart
8. Epilogue
[20] In their original form this set comprised only six pieces.
MacDowell afterward revised them extensively, rearranged their order,
and added the "Prologue" and "Epilogue." In this altered form they
were published in 1901.
Op. 39. _Twelve Studies_, for piano (1890):
[ Hunting Song
| Alla Tarantella
| Romance
Book 1. | Arabesque
| In the Forest
| Dance of the Gnomes]
[ Idyl
| Shadow Dance
Book 2. | Intermezzo]
| Melody
| Scherzino
| Hungarian]
Op. 40. _Six Love Songs_, for voice and piano (1890):
1. Sweet, Blue-eyed Maid
2. Sweetheart, Tell Me
3. Thy Beaming Eyes
4. For Love's Sweet Sake
5. O Lovely Rose
6. I Ask but This
Op. 41. _Two Songs_, for male chorus (1890):
1. Cradle Song
2. Dance of the Gnomes
Op. 42. _First Suite_, for orchestra (1891-1893[21]):
1. In a Haunted Forest
2. Summer Idyl
3. In October
4. The Shepherdess' Song
5. Forest Spirits
[21] As originally published, in 1891, this suite comprised only the
first, second, fourth, and fifth movements. The third, "In October,"
though composed at the same time as the others, and intended for
inclusion in the suite, was not published until 1893, when it was
issued as a "supplement" under the same opus number.
Op. 43. _Two Northern Songs_, for mixed chorus (1891):
1. The Brook
2. Slumber Song
Op. 44. _Barcarolle_, for mixed chorus with four-hand piano
accompaniment (1892)
Op. 45. _Sonata Tragica_, for piano (1893)
Op. 46. _Twelve Virtuoso Studies_, for piano (1894):
1. Novelette
2. Moto Perpetuo
3. Wild Chase
4. Improvisation
5. Elfin Dance
6. Valse triste
7. Burleske
8. Bluette
9. Träumerei
10. March Wind
11. Impromptu
12. Polonaise
Op. 47. _Eight Songs_, for voice and piano (1893):
1. The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree
2. Midsummer Lullaby
3. Folk Song
4. Confidence
5. The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees
6. In the Woods
7. The Sea
8. Through the Meadow
Op. 48. _Second (Indian) Suite_, for orchestra (1897):
1. Legend
2. Love Song
3. In War-time
4. Dirge
5. Village Festival
Op. 49. _Air and Rigaudon_, for piano (1894)
Op. 50. _Second Sonata (Eroica)_, for piano (1895)
Op. 51. _Woodland Sketches_, for piano (1896):
1. To a Wild Rose
2. Will'-o-the-Wisp
3. At an Old Trysting Place
4. In Autumn
5. From an Indian Lodge
6. To a Water-lily
7. From Uncle Remus
8. A Deserted Farm
9. By a Meadow Brook
10. Told at Sunset
Op. 52. _Three Choruses_, for male voices (1897):
1. Hush, hush!
2. From the Sea
3. The Crusaders
Op. 53. _Two Choruses_, for male voices (1898):
1. Bonnie Ann
2. The Collier Lassie
Op. 54. _Two Choruses_, for male voices (1898):
1. A Ballad of Charles the Bold
2. Midsummer Clouds
Op. 55. _Sea Pieces_, for piano (1898):
1. To the Sea
2. From a Wandering Iceberg
3. A.D. 1620
4. Starlight
5. Song
6. From the Depths
7. Nautilus
8. In Mid-Ocean
Op. 56. _Four Songs_, for voice and piano (1898):
1. Long Ago
2. The Swan Bent Low to the Lily
3. A Maid Sings Light
4. As the Gloaming Shadows Creep
Op. 57. _Third Sonata (Norse)_, for piano (1900)
Op. 58. _Three Songs_, for voice and piano (1899):
1. Constancy
2. Sunrise
3. Merry Maiden Spring
Op. 59. _Fourth Sonata (Keltic)_, for piano (1901)
Op. 60. _Three Songs_, for voice and piano (1902):
1. Tyrant Love
2. Fair Springtide
3. To the Golden Rod
Op. 61. _Fireside Tales_, for piano (1902):
1. An Old Love Story
2. Of Br'er Rabbit
3. From a German Forest
4. Of Salamanders
5. A Haunted House
6. By Smouldering Embers
Op. 62. _New England Idyls_, for piano (1902):
1. An Old Garden
2. Midsummer
3. Mid-winter
4. With Sweet Lavender
5. In Deep Woods
6. Indian Idyl
7. To an Old White Pine
8. From Puritan Days
9. From a Log Cabin
10. The Joy of Autumn
WITHOUT OPUS NUMBER
_Two Songs from the Thirteenth Century_, for male chorus (1897):
1. Winter Wraps his Grimmest Spell
2. As the Gloaming Shadows Creep