Influences and conditions of the period—Edward MacDowell—Edgar Stillman Kelley—Arne Oldberg; Henry Hadley; F. S. Converse—E. R. Kroeger; Rubin Goldmark; Brockway; H. N. Bartlett; R. G. Cole—Daniel Gregory Mason; David Stanley Smith; Edward Burlingame Hill—Philip G. Clapp; John Beach; Arthur Bergh; Joseph Henius; F. E. Ward; Carl Busch; Walter Damrosch—The San Francisco Group; Miscellany—Women Composers.
Between the founders of musical composition in America, who felt chiefly the influence of that musical world of which Beethoven was the great central figure, and those who have looked to aboriginal and other native sources for inspiration on the one hand, or European ultra-modern tendencies on the other, there exists a large and important group of American composers whose artistic origin is to be associated with the so-called 'romantic' school, of which Schumann is the generally accepted protagonist. Proudly as the dramatic phase of the romantic movement shone forth at the same time in the genius of Richard Wagner, it was left with the non-dramatic wing of the romantic school to establish the ideals which should dominate and direct the romantic movement which was subsequently to arise in America. There are a number of reasons why this should have been the case, as there are also reasons to believe that the full influence of Wagner's ideas has not yet been felt in America. In the first place, it was during the epoch of the romantic movement that the German musician and music teacher first began to look to the new world as a field for the broad extension of his labors. Every city and town of America came to have its German music teachers; they were accepted everywhere as representatives of the highest musical civilization of the world, and it is, in fact, to this early German musical emigration that the substantial foundations of our American musical education are due. As qualifying factors, however, in the influence which he was to exert upon the future, there were two facts in general which characterized him: his profession, which was usually that of pianist and piano teacher, and his anathematization of Wagner. While Beethoven was his musical god, in his capacity of pianist he also spread the influence of that side of the romantic movement which perpetuated, and developed, the tradition of piano music. Thus Schumann and Chopin, and their contemporaries, came to a measurable fullness of appreciation in America at a time when Wagner was held to be a mad and dangerous musical anarchist.
Quite aside from this group of circumstances, it was also true that nothing could be more remote from the American civilization of the time than the possibility of any semblance of the realization of Wagner's ideals. Opera was the most fitful and exotic of institutions, and the theatre in general, except for such occasional meteoric apparitions as Edwin Booth, was in a condition of the greatest crudity, as well as being under the ban of a puritanism which, fortunately, in these latter days, is beginning somewhat to relax its tenacity. Because of the unripeness of American life for a creative art of music, the influence of the early German invasion did not produce many composers. It had, however, implanted ideals which were to assume the greatest importance in the future. When the overwhelming Wagnerian flood at last arrived, in the splendid productions of the music-dramas under the direction of Seidl and the Damrosches, it found the ideals of the classical and romantic schools already well implanted; more than that, it found a rapidly increasing group of young composers who had arisen under the influence of those ideals. The result was that these composers, who did not share the prejudices of their Teutonic musical forbears, drank in with avidity the wonderful new harmonies of Wagner, and set about incorporating them, not in music-dramas, but in the sonatas and symphonies arising from the classical tradition, and all manner of free forms to which the romantic school had given birth. The Wagnerian harmonies were accepted, but the forms of the earlier movements were retained, except where the followers of Liszt ventured forth on scantily charted seas of formal emancipation. Similarly other new influences began to be felt, and Tschaikowsky, in a new symphonic emotionalism, and Brahms, in a new flowering of thematic development, gave encouragement in the retaining of earlier forms. The dual product of these various influences was, on the one hand, a romanticism which claimed both harmonic and formal freedom, and a neo-classicism which welcomed the new harmonic world opened up by Wagner, but inclined to cling to the forms of the classical epoch.
I
As the first modern American composer to step forth with a highly characterized poetic individuality, Edward Alexander MacDowell (b. 1861, d. 1908) quickly took, and his work has held, since his untimely death in 1908, a unique and preëminent place in American music. As the first great pioneer of the romantic school in America his place is certainly assured, and, while the perspective thus far gained upon his work has by no means led to a unanimity of opinion concerning it, the dignity, charm, and poetic fancy of a great part of it must assuredly give it an enduring position in the musical world. All barriers of adverse criticism and opinion fall before creativeness, to the extent to which it is truly creative, and it is the creative character of MacDowell's music that insures its persistence. Noteworthy is it also that it is through his greatest works, such as the second piano concerto and the Celtic Sonata, that his fame chiefly endures, a convincing evidence that his highest aspirations did not strike wide of their mark.
An inquiry into the nature of MacDowell's genius must perforce lead us to a recognition of his Celtic antecedents and sympathies; for with all his early German experience and training, with all his substantial Teutonic technical foundation gained thereby, he was first and last a Celt in spirit. Over the heavy bog of German harmony and counterpoint his sensitive fancy danced like restless thistledown, following the lightest whimsey of the breeze and the most tremulous maneuverings of shadow-play. In his more powerful tone painting it is the elements, rather than the passions, that command him. The old nature-worship which is so ineradicable an element of the psychic constitution of the Celt, and which leads him to commune with the innumerable and elusive hosts of the land of faery, never forsook the soul of MacDowell, or ceased to direct the course of his genius. Impatient of the restraints of the outer world, and of its weight of poetry-quenching affairs and transactions, his spirit hurried ever to a communion with the moods and mysteries of nature, and to that corresponding dream-world of intensified nature-perceptions within the soul to which these are the appointed and the alluring gateway. MacDowell's dream-world was directly conjoined with that of 'Fiona Macleod,' whose subjective nature-pictures offer a close literary parallel to the tone-pictures of the composer. These two traversed the same region, which is that of the psychic perceptions, but the account of it brought back by MacDowell presents one striking fundamental difference from all accounts rendered by poetry-making Celts who have remained upon their native soil. In the American the soul no longer cries out from under an age-long burden of poverty and oppression; the heartache and the world-weariness have been sloughed off in the new-world birth. No outcry of the heart is the music of MacDowell, but an eager self-surrendering to the interpretation of the facts and moods of nature, the rocking of a lily-pad on cool waters, the lonely drift of an iridescent iceberg, the mad sudden impact of a hurrying gust. Often are these interpretations of an almost uncanny intimacy, so subtle and sensitive is their touch.
In one very important respect the personal analogy between MacDowell and William Sharp breaks down. The creator of 'Fiona Macleod' gained the freedom of the psychic world only at the expense of his virility. The man, Sharp, was left behind, when 'Fiona's' turn came, a fact attested by the writings of the latter at every point. MacDowell found no need for the splitting up of his personality into its masculine and feminine elements; he carried his manhood with him into the sphere of the psychic and brought forth not artistic shadowings merely, but also, especially in his heroic moments, solid structures. For all his instinctive abhorrence of the ponderousness often associated with the expression of the Teutonic spirit, his severe Frankfort training often served him in good stead; it may, indeed, have been the balance-wheel of his entire artistic life.
Too much the child of nature's dream-world to sound the depths of passion, too restless with the joy of nature's kaleidoscopic shift and play to touch the spiritual heights of peace, well severed from the material world, but not yet united with the spiritual, MacDowell hovered in the mid-region of the psychic, happily lost in its shadowy wonderworld of dissolving forms and elusive beauty. This was at once the limitation and tragedy, as well as the genius, of MacDowell's life and art. He remained a wanderer on the borderlands of spirit, never coming to his spiritual home, and at the end his mind itself wandered never to return in this life. But he had struck a telling blow for American musical art, and placed the nation upon a new musical footing.
MacDowell was a nationalist only by virtue of his instinctive sensitiveness to his environment. As the English critic, Ashton-Johnson, has pointed out, his autumn scenes spontaneously portray not the mere brown decay of the European "fall," but the golden splendor of the American autumn. The Indian and the negro find their way into his works here and there in delicate touches, because the tradition of them is in the American air and scarcely to be avoided.
MacDowell's teachers in theory were Savard, at the Paris Conservatoire, and Joachim Raff, in Frankfurt, and in piano, at these places respectively, Marmontel and Heyman. An interim was spent with Ehlert in Wiesbaden. Franz Liszt was MacDowell's friend and helped him to recognition in Germany. No American composer has been so prominent as MacDowell as a concert pianist. His sensitive performances of his own works served to make them broadly known and to establish the traditions of their interpretation. The composer took up his residence in America again in 1888, after twelve years of absence, first in Boston, and later in New York, where, until his unfortunate friction with the academic authorities, he exerted a wide influence as professor of music at Columbia University. The malady which alienated him from his powers in his last years, and which finally brought about his end, called universal attention to America's musical awakening and prowess by the same stroke in which it removed the nation's musical leader.