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As the first modern American composer to step forth with a highly characterized poetic individuality, Edward Alexander MacDowell (b. 1861, d. 1908) quickly took, and his work has held, since his untimely death in 1908, a unique and preëminent place in American music. As the first great pioneer of the romantic school in America his place is certainly assured, and, while the perspective thus far gained upon his work has by no means led to a unanimity of opinion concerning it, the dignity, charm, and poetic fancy of a great part of it must assuredly give it an enduring position in the musical world. All barriers of adverse criticism and opinion fall before creativeness, to the extent to which it is truly creative, and it is the creative character of MacDowell's music that insures its persistence. Noteworthy is it also that it is through his greatest works, such as the second piano concerto and the Celtic Sonata, that his fame chiefly endures, a convincing evidence that his highest aspirations did not strike wide of their mark.
An inquiry into the nature of MacDowell's genius must perforce lead us to a recognition of his Celtic antecedents and sympathies; for with all his early German experience and training, with all his substantial Teutonic technical foundation gained thereby, he was first and last a Celt in spirit. Over the heavy bog of German harmony and counterpoint his sensitive fancy danced like restless thistledown, following the lightest whimsey of the breeze and the most tremulous maneuverings of shadow-play. In his more powerful tone painting it is the elements, rather than the passions, that command him. The old nature-worship which is so ineradicable an element of the psychic constitution of the Celt, and which leads him to commune with the innumerable and elusive hosts of the land of faery, never forsook the soul of MacDowell, or ceased to direct the course of his genius. Impatient of the restraints of the outer world, and of its weight of poetry-quenching affairs and transactions, his spirit hurried ever to a communion with the moods and mysteries of nature, and to that corresponding dream-world of intensified nature-perceptions within the soul to which these are the appointed and the alluring gateway. MacDowell's dream-world was directly conjoined with that of 'Fiona Macleod,' whose subjective nature-pictures offer a close literary parallel to the tone-pictures of the composer. These two traversed the same region, which is that of the psychic perceptions, but the account of it brought back by MacDowell presents one striking fundamental difference from all accounts rendered by poetry-making Celts who have remained upon their native soil. In the American the soul no longer cries out from under an age-long burden of poverty and oppression; the heartache and the world-weariness have been sloughed off in the new-world birth. No outcry of the heart is the music of MacDowell, but an eager self-surrendering to the interpretation of the facts and moods of nature, the rocking of a lily-pad on cool waters, the lonely drift of an iridescent iceberg, the mad sudden impact of a hurrying gust. Often are these interpretations of an almost uncanny intimacy, so subtle and sensitive is their touch.
In one very important respect the personal analogy between MacDowell and William Sharp breaks down. The creator of 'Fiona Macleod' gained the freedom of the psychic world only at the expense of his virility. The man, Sharp, was left behind, when 'Fiona's' turn came, a fact attested by the writings of the latter at every point. MacDowell found no need for the splitting up of his personality into its masculine and feminine elements; he carried his manhood with him into the sphere of the psychic and brought forth not artistic shadowings merely, but also, especially in his heroic moments, solid structures. For all his instinctive abhorrence of the ponderousness often associated with the expression of the Teutonic spirit, his severe Frankfort training often served him in good stead; it may, indeed, have been the balance-wheel of his entire artistic life.
Too much the child of nature's dream-world to sound the depths of passion, too restless with the joy of nature's kaleidoscopic shift and play to touch the spiritual heights of peace, well severed from the material world, but not yet united with the spiritual, MacDowell hovered in the mid-region of the psychic, happily lost in its shadowy wonderworld of dissolving forms and elusive beauty. This was at once the limitation and tragedy, as well as the genius, of MacDowell's life and art. He remained a wanderer on the borderlands of spirit, never coming to his spiritual home, and at the end his mind itself wandered never to return in this life. But he had struck a telling blow for American musical art, and placed the nation upon a new musical footing.
MacDowell was a nationalist only by virtue of his instinctive sensitiveness to his environment. As the English critic, Ashton-Johnson, has pointed out, his autumn scenes spontaneously portray not the mere brown decay of the European "fall," but the golden splendor of the American autumn. The Indian and the negro find their way into his works here and there in delicate touches, because the tradition of them is in the American air and scarcely to be avoided.
MacDowell's teachers in theory were Savard, at the Paris Conservatoire, and Joachim Raff, in Frankfurt, and in piano, at these places respectively, Marmontel and Heyman. An interim was spent with Ehlert in Wiesbaden. Franz Liszt was MacDowell's friend and helped him to recognition in Germany. No American composer has been so prominent as MacDowell as a concert pianist. His sensitive performances of his own works served to make them broadly known and to establish the traditions of their interpretation. The composer took up his residence in America again in 1888, after twelve years of absence, first in Boston, and later in New York, where, until his unfortunate friction with the academic authorities, he exerted a wide influence as professor of music at Columbia University. The malady which alienated him from his powers in his last years, and which finally brought about his end, called universal attention to America's musical awakening and prowess by the same stroke in which it removed the nation's musical leader.
MacDowell attained his chief critical recognition through his two concertos and four sonatas for piano. The second concerto, in D minor, with its alternate phases of nobility and charm, stands as a monument to the composer's highest powers, with regard both to pianistic and orchestral mediums of expression. The composer's harmonic warmth and individuality, his freshness of melodic inspiration, his marked capacity for skillful and colorful orchestration, his eager and highly pitched temperament, are all manifest throughout the work. Of the four sonatas, the 'Tragica,' 'Eroica,' 'Norse,' and 'Keltic,' the last has been universally judged the greatest, and one of his greatest works. Lawrence Gilman calls it his 'masterpiece.' As their titles indicate, these works are all programmatic, though not slavishly so, and romantic in the highest degree. Their material, derived from the rich storehouse of Gaelic legend, finds the composer on his native spiritual heath, and in them he speaks with an authority not surpassed, perhaps not equalled, in the whole range of his work beside.
The 'Indian Suite' (opus 48) has been the most frequently heard of MacDowell's orchestral works, which have, as a class, been somewhat overshadowed by the piano compositions. In it the composer has touched but lightly upon his Indian thematic sources, building from his own fertile imagination a work of substantial character in five movements, depicting his conception of various phases of Indian life. The fourth movement, a dirge, has won great favor through its sheer imaginative beauty, but the work as a whole has not proved wholly convincing, and is far less true to the Indian than the sonatas are to the Gaelic genius. It represents, however, a matured mastery of orchestration and the formal presentation of ideas. An earlier orchestral suite (opus 42) is a less notable work, reflecting the influence of Raff, and is seldom heard. 'The Saracens' and 'The Lovely Alda,' two colorful orchestral fragments from a once-projected 'Roland' symphony, are not infrequently heard, and with pleasure, but, while characteristic of the composer's genius, are scarcely representative of it. An earlier 'Hamlet and Ophelia' overture has fared rather less well.
In a great number of little piano compositions, grouped under various titles, MacDowell has left an exquisite and extensive legacy of works which mirror forth the world of multitudinous fancy which he delighted to haunt. Not conceived with the view of displaying modern concert technique, but in a vein of sincere and intimate poetic expression, these works have been cherished and enjoyed wherever the piano is played. Reflecting more particularly the earlier phases of the composer's artistic sympathies are two suites (opera 10 and 14), 'Forest Idyls' (opus 19), 'Six Idyls' (opus 28), 'Four Little Poems' (opus 32), 'Marionettes' (opus 38), and 'Twelve Studies' (opus 39). The works in this form by which MacDowell has chiefly endeared himself to the rank and file of American music-lovers, are 'Woodland Sketches' (opus 51), containing 'To a Wild Rose' and 'To a Water Lily;' 'Sea Pieces' (opus 55); 'Fireside Tales' (opus 61), and 'New England Idyls' (opus 62), the last work of the composer.
By no means the least of MacDowell's contributions to musical literature, either in quantity or quality, are his songs, of which there are some ten groups for solo voice, and various part songs, chiefly for male voices. In the spheres of charm, fancy, and 'atmospheric' intuition these undoubtedly hold a very high place, though in respect to passion and imaginative vigor the same can scarcely be said, despite the claims of Henry T. Finck, who places MacDowell with the highest rank of the world's song-writers. The highest type of song-writing would seem to demand not so much a passion for beauty as a passion for passion itself, either physical or spiritual, and such a quality, while not absent from it, was not central to the ethereal character of MacDowell's genius.
Lawrence Gilman's 'Edward MacDowell' presents a sympathetic and illuminating study of the composer and his work.