That crept 'round Harald's throne
Rang out a Skald's strong voice
With tales of battles won:
Of Gudrun's love
And Sigurd, Siegmund's son."
Here, evidently, is a subject after his own heart, presenting such opportunities as he is at his happiest in improving—and he has improved them magnificently. The spaciousness of the plan, the boldness of the drawing, the fulness and intensity of the colour scheme, engage one's attention at the start. He has indulged almost to its extreme limits his predilection for extended chord formations and for phrases of heroic span—as in, for example, almost the whole of the first movement. The pervading quality of the musical thought is of a resistless and passionate virility. It is steeped in the barbaric and splendid atmosphere of the sagas. There are pages of epical breadth and power, passages of elemental vigour and ferocity—passages, again, of an exquisite tenderness and poignancy. Of the three movements which the work comprises, the first makes the most lasting impression, although the second (the slow movement) has a haunting subject, which is recalled episodically in the final movement in a passage of unforgettable beauty and character.
With the publication, in 1901, of the "Keltic" sonata (his fourth, op. 59),[[15] ] MacDowell achieved a conclusive demonstration of his capacity as a creative musician of unquestionable importance. Not before had he given so convincing an earnest of the larger aspect of his genius: neither in the three earlier sonatas, in the "Sea Pieces," nor in the "Indian" suite, had he attained an equal magnitude, an equal scope and significance. Nowhere else in his work are the distinguishing traits of his genius so strikingly disclosed—the breadth and reach of imagination, the magnetic vitality, the richness and fervour, the conquering poetic charm. Here you will find a beauty which is as "the beauty of the men that take up spears and die for a name," no less than "the beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow and the wandering road"—a harp shaken with a wild and piercing music, a sorrow that is not of to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual and imperishable, and men lived the tales of beauty and of wonder which now are but a discredited and fading memory.
It was a fortunate, if not an inevitable, event, in view of his temperamental affiliations with the Celtic genius, that MacDowell should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, and that he should have gone for his inspiration, in particular, to the legends comprised in the famous Cycle of the Red Branch: that wonderful group of epics which comprises, among other tales, the story of the matchless Deirdré,—whose loveliness was such, so say the chroniclers, that "not upon the ridge of earth was there a woman so beautiful,"—and the life and adventures and glorious death of the incomparable Cuchullin. These two kindred legends MacDowell has welded into a coherent and satisfying whole; and in a verse with which he prefixes the sonata, he gives this index to its poetic content:
"Who minds now Keltic tales of yore,
Dark Druid rhymes that thrall;