9. From a Log Cabin.
10. The Joy of Autumn.
This album is the last work MacDowell published. It contains, not only some of his most beautiful and advanced lyrical tone poems, but, in Mid-Winter and From a Log Cabin, two of the most significant and inspired of all his shorter pieces. In the New England Idyls as a whole, we have the eloquence and poetry of MacDowell in its fullest maturity. The American atmosphere is strong in these pieces, the scene suggested by each one belonging unmistakably to New England. In addition to the expressive and suggestive power of these idyls, they possess a fragrance and freshness that are rare in music. Each piece is headed by a verse of the composer's, and it should also be noted that he has dropped his English directions as to expression, etc., and gone back to Italian. There is no great gain in this, for the terms he uses, although in the language traditionally employed for the purpose, are by no means always the actual terms of traditional standing; he simply took the unnecessary trouble to translate his English-thought directions into a foreign language. His Italian is not always that generally used in music.
1. An Old Garden (Semplice, teneramente). This opens with an expressive and tender little theme. In the middle part a beautifully formed lyricism appears. The opening theme eventually reappears and the piece ends with quiet, but rich and sonorous chords.
2. Mid-Summer (Come in sogno). This is a tone impression of a drowsy summer's day:—
… Above, the lazy cloudlets drift,
Below, the swaying wheat….
It is exquisitely done, with the composer's usual unerring instinct for creating atmosphere. The technical mastery is finer than that shown in the Woodland Sketches, and the tonality ranges in the thirty-six bars of its length from fortissimo to softly breathed ppp, and at the end even pppp.
3. Mid-Winter (Lento). Here we find a piece of dramatic significance and great power. Its deeper meaning is expressed in the verses that head it:—
In shrouded awe the world is wrapped,
The sullen wind doth groan,
'Neath winding-sheet the earth is stone,
The wraiths of snow have flown.
And lo! a thread of fate is snapped,
A breaking heart makes moan;
A virgin cold doth rule alone
From old Mid-winter's throne.