The "Melpomene" overture is a work of such inspiration and such scholarship that it must surely find a long youth in the chronicle of our music.
Arthur Foote.
The nearest approach Americans make to the enthusiastic German Männerchor is in the college glee clubs. The dignity of their selections is not always up to that of the Teutonic chorus, but they develop a salutary fondness for color and shading, exaggerating both a little perhaps, yet aiming at the right warmth and variety withal. Even those elaborate paraphrases and circumlocutions of Mother Goose rhymes, to which they are so prone, show a striving after dramatic effect and richness of harmony, as well as a keen sense of wit and humor that are by no means incompatible with real value in music.
ARTHUR FOOTE.
Among their other good deeds must be counted the fostering of the musical ambitions of Arthur Foote, who was for two years the leader of the Glee Club of Harvard University. Though he has by no means been content to delve no deeper into music than glee-club depths, I think the training has been of value, and its peculiar character is patent in his works. He is especially fond of writing for men's voices, and is remarkably at home in their management, and he strives rather for color-masses than for separate individualities in the voices.
Among his larger works for men's voices is an elaborate setting of Longfellow's poem, "The Skeleton in Armor," which is full of vigor and generally sturdy in treatment, especially in its descriptions of Viking war and seafaring. The storm-scenes, as in Mr. Foote's "Wreck of the Hesperus," seem faintly to suggest Wagnerian Donner und Blitzen, but in general Mr. Foote has resisted the universal tendency to copy the mannerisms so many take to be the real essence of the Bayreuthian. A pretty bit of fancy is the use of a spinning-wheel accompaniment to the love-song, although the spindle is nowhere suggested by the poem. Indeed, the spinning is treated as a characteristic motif for the Norseman's bride, somewhat as it is Senta's motif in "The Flying Dutchman."