The Child's Book of American Biography

by Mary Stoyell Stimpson

"Why, I am sure he will make a famous piano player."

There was the same old tiresome question: if Edward could do three or four things well, how was any one to know which he might do best?

Finally the matter was left to Edward. After a good many days of thinking, he decided his life should be given to music. Art was given up, and Edward promised to waste no more time on his drawing. But he was a great reader and liked good books to the end of his days.

After study of the piano in Paris, MacDowell went to Frankfort for two years. He had many pupils there, and to one of them he was married.

The young married couple crossed the ocean and stayed in Boston long enough for MacDowell to give some concerts. His fingers were like velvet on the keys of the piano, and every one declared he must take part in a grand American concert that was to be given during the Paris Exposition. He did as he was asked, and the French people waved their handkerchiefs and cried in their language: "Good for the little American!" The French people invited him everywhere and begged him to remain in Paris, but from first to last Edward MacDowell was a loyal American, and he returned to Boston, where for eight years he played in concerts, took pupils, and best of all wrote much of the music which makes Americans so proud of him. He became a professor of music in Columbia College, and his piano pieces were played the world over.

Many men who write music try to give it a style like some old Italian or German composer, but MacDowell's music does not remind one of any German, Italian, or French writers; it is just itself—it is MacDowell. Some of his music is heavy and grand, but more of it is delicate. It was wonderful to hear MacDowell himself play "To a Wild Rose." A friend who knew how much the composer liked that said once: "Mac, something dreadful happened a few weeks ago. I heard your 'Wild Rose' played at a high school graduation, on a high school piano, by a high school girl—awful!"

MacDowell laughed and answered: "I suppose she pulled it up by the roots, didn't she?"

MacDowell loved outdoor life, and after he bought a farm at Peterboro, New Hampshire, he built a log cabin way off in the woods, had a grand piano carried there, and in the quiet of that forest wrote some of his sweetest musical sketches.

The names of MacDowell's compositions show he loved life under the sky. There are "The Woodland Sketches", "Sea Pieces", "From a Log Cabin", and single titles like "The Eagle", "A Water Lily", and "The Bars at Sunset."

MacDowell worked too steadily and died when he was quite young, but he had written enough music to be remembered as a great American composer. He said any man who wanted to write music that described his country must love that country so well that he would put into his notes what the nation had put into its life. He felt that America was a happy, brave, hopeful nation, and he tried to make his music show that.