The chief fault with the "Skeleton" chorus is that it is always choric. There are no solos, and the different registers are never used separately for more than a bar or two, before the whole mass chimes in. Even the instrumental interludes are short, and the general effect must be rather undiversified, one of sympathy, too, for the unrested chorus.
"The Wreck of the Hesperus" is an ambitious work, built on large lines, but hardly represents Mr. Foote at his best. It is for mixed voices, and is pitched in a most lugubrious key, being always either vociferous with panic or dismal with minor woe. A worse trouble yet is the attempt to make a short poem fit a long composition. The Procrustean operation strains even Longfellow sadly.
This blemish is lacking in "The Farewell of Hiawatha," which is written for men's voices. Though it, too, is of a sad tone, its sombre hues are rich and varied as a tapestry. Its effects, though potent, seem more sincere and less labored. It is altogether noble.
A larger body of sacred music for mixed voices than many other Americans can boast, also swells Foote's opus-score. Here he shows the same facility with the quartette as in his other works. In fact, I think the effect of glee-club training on his young mind has strongly influenced his whole life-work. And, by the way, the most talented of all the great Sebastian Bach's twenty-one children—every one a musical opus, too—was diverted from the philosopher's career for which he was intended, and into professional musicianship, by just such a glee-club training in the universities at Leipzig and Frankfort.
Almost all of Foote's compositions are written in the close harmony and limited range of vocal music, and he very rarely sweeps the keyboard in his piano compositions, or hunts out startling novelties in strictly pianistic effect. He is not fond of the cloudy regions of the upper notes, and though he may dart brilliantly skyward now and then just to show that his wings are good for lighter air, he is soon back again, drifting along the middle ether.
He has won his high place by faithful adherence to his own sober, serene ideals, and by his genuine culture and seriousness. He is thoroughly American by birth and training, though his direct English descent accounts for his decided leaning toward the better impulses of the English school of music. He was born at Salem, Mass., March 5, 1853, and though he played the piano a good deal as a boy, and made a beginning in the study of composition with Emery, he did not study seriously until he graduated from Harvard in 1874. He then took up the higher branches of composition under the tuition of John Knowles Paine, and obtained in 1875 the degree of A.M. in the special department of music. He also studied the organ and the piano with B.J. Lang at Boston, and has since made that city his home, teaching and playing the organ.
His overture, "In the Mountains," has been much played from the manuscript by orchestras, among them the Boston Symphony. Besides a considerable amount of highly valuable contributions to American chamber-music, and two fine piano suites, he has written a great many piano pieces and songs which deserve even greater popularity than they have won, because, while not bristling with technical difficulties, they are yet of permanent worth.
I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting the fires that beam in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes. His two gavottes are to me among the best since Bach. They are an example of what it is to be academic without being only a-rattle with dry bones. He has written a Nocturne that gets farther from being a mere imitation of Chopin than almost any night-piece written since the Pole appropriated that form bodily from John Field and made it his own.
One of his most original pieces is the Capriccio of his D minor Suite, which is also unusually brilliant in color at times; and he has an Allegretto that is a scherzo of the good old whole-souled humor. Foote, in fact, is never sickly in sentiment.
Of his rather numerous songs, the older English poets, like Marlowe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Suckling, and Herrick, have given him much inspiration. The song "[It Was a Lover and his Lass]" is especially taking. His three songs, "When You Become a Nun, Dear," "The Road to Kew," and "Ho, Pretty Page!" written by modern poets in a half-archaic way, display a most delicious fund of subtile and ironic musical humor. "The Hawthorn Wins the Damask Rose" shows how really fine a well conducted English ballad can be. Among his sadder songs, the "Irish Folksong," "I'm Wearing Awa'," and the weird "In a Bower" are heavy with deepest pathos, while "Sweet Is True Love" is as wildly intense and as haunting in its woe as the fate of the poor Elaine, whose despair it sings. This I count one of the most appealing of modern songs.