MacDowell attained his chief critical recognition through his two concertos and four sonatas for piano. The second concerto, in D minor, with its alternate phases of nobility and charm, stands as a monument to the composer's highest powers, with regard both to pianistic and orchestral mediums of expression. The composer's harmonic warmth and individuality, his freshness of melodic inspiration, his marked capacity for skillful and colorful orchestration, his eager and highly pitched temperament, are all manifest throughout the work. Of the four sonatas, the 'Tragica,' 'Eroica,' 'Norse,' and 'Keltic,' the last has been universally judged the greatest, and one of his greatest works. Lawrence Gilman calls it his 'masterpiece.' As their titles indicate, these works are all programmatic, though not slavishly so, and romantic in the highest degree. Their material, derived from the rich storehouse of Gaelic legend, finds the composer on his native spiritual heath, and in them he speaks with an authority not surpassed, perhaps not equalled, in the whole range of his work beside.
The 'Indian Suite' (opus 48) has been the most frequently heard of MacDowell's orchestral works, which have, as a class, been somewhat overshadowed by the piano compositions. In it the composer has touched but lightly upon his Indian thematic sources, building from his own fertile imagination a work of substantial character in five movements, depicting his conception of various phases of Indian life. The fourth movement, a dirge, has won great favor through its sheer imaginative beauty, but the work as a whole has not proved wholly convincing, and is far less true to the Indian than the sonatas are to the Gaelic genius. It represents, however, a matured mastery of orchestration and the formal presentation of ideas. An earlier orchestral suite (opus 42) is a less notable work, reflecting the influence of Raff, and is seldom heard. 'The Saracens' and 'The Lovely Alda,' two colorful orchestral fragments from a once-projected 'Roland' symphony, are not infrequently heard, and with pleasure, but, while characteristic of the composer's genius, are scarcely representative of it. An earlier 'Hamlet and Ophelia' overture has fared rather less well.
In a great number of little piano compositions, grouped under various titles, MacDowell has left an exquisite and extensive legacy of works which mirror forth the world of multitudinous fancy which he delighted to haunt. Not conceived with the view of displaying modern concert technique, but in a vein of sincere and intimate poetic expression, these works have been cherished and enjoyed wherever the piano is played. Reflecting more particularly the earlier phases of the composer's artistic sympathies are two suites (opera 10 and 14), 'Forest Idyls' (opus 19), 'Six Idyls' (opus 28), 'Four Little Poems' (opus 32), 'Marionettes' (opus 38), and 'Twelve Studies' (opus 39). The works in this form by which MacDowell has chiefly endeared himself to the rank and file of American music-lovers, are 'Woodland Sketches' (opus 51), containing 'To a Wild Rose' and 'To a Water Lily;' 'Sea Pieces' (opus 55); 'Fireside Tales' (opus 61), and 'New England Idyls' (opus 62), the last work of the composer.
By no means the least of MacDowell's contributions to musical literature, either in quantity or quality, are his songs, of which there are some ten groups for solo voice, and various part songs, chiefly for male voices. In the spheres of charm, fancy, and 'atmospheric' intuition these undoubtedly hold a very high place, though in respect to passion and imaginative vigor the same can scarcely be said, despite the claims of Henry T. Finck, who places MacDowell with the highest rank of the world's song-writers. The highest type of song-writing would seem to demand not so much a passion for beauty as a passion for passion itself, either physical or spiritual, and such a quality, while not absent from it, was not central to the ethereal character of MacDowell's genius.
Lawrence Gilman's 'Edward MacDowell' presents a sympathetic and illuminating study of the composer and his work.
II
One of the rocks upon which the high character of modern American music is founded is the art-activity of Edgar Stillman-Kelley (b. April 14, 1857). While he has not given forth his compositions in rapid succession or in great quantity, he has, nevertheless, struck a series of telling blows for the honor and dignity of creative musical art in America. Especially is this true in view of the fact that he has formulated, maintained and promulgated definite ideals of music throughout a period which has been characterized mainly, in this respect, by confusion and groping, and, too frequently, even by grovelling. In a post-Wagnerian period in which vacillation, obscurity, and disorder have reigned throughout a large part of the musical world, he has steadily advanced the standard of lucidity, order, and faith. Lofty in imagination, of a high sense of beauty, and at the same time exceptional in scholarship and breadth of intellectual vision, he combines qualities which must necessarily single him out as a leader of importance in the musical movement to which America has given birth. The same qualities have also fitted him to exercise a beneficent influence, in certain directions, upon more recent and newly appearing phases of native musical evolution. It has been Stillman-Kelley's fate that both his name and his influence have outdistanced the general knowledge of his works. Two circumstances may be held accountable for this: the fact that he has given out no quantity of works in small forms through which his music might become accessible to music-lovers everywhere through the universal medium of the piano, and the further fact that it is particularly in just such forms as Stillman-Kelley has produced that, as a nation, we are slow in giving our own composers a wide hearing. The American symphony, on American programs, must wait, first, and perhaps rightfully, upon the classics, and, second, and often with bitter wrong, upon the sensational European novelties of the hour.
So independent and individual a thinker is Stillman-Kelley, so sui generis his work, that it can be explained by no theory of particular or individual influences, but only by a knowledge of the composer's broad survey of the modern field, with emphasis, to be sure, upon the greatest in Germanic tradition. The fundamentals of that tradition one feels the composer to have grasped, but of the principles thus deeply assimilated he makes his own use. In short, he follows principles, and not men, and for this reason the Wagnerian 'passage,' the Tschaikowskian phrase, which drip so easily from the pen of many latter-day composers, are never to be encountered in Stillman-Kelley's music. Into this technique, acquired through close observation and analysis of the works of the masters, the composer imports his own spirit; he has his own story to tell and is very certain of the manner in which he wishes to tell it. The superficial criticism of the day, which looks for raw and sensational departures from the pre-Debussyian musical scheme, will find Stillman-Kelley conservative, at moments even downright Teutonic; but the gulf which separates him, in spirit and message, from both his precursors and contemporaries, European and American, must be plain to every observant person. In this rapid age people are, however, not apt to be closely observant, and it appears that there will still be a considerable interval before Stillman-Kelley's true artistic and intellectual stature will be recognized.
To grasp the nature of the high distinction which must be accorded him, it must be understood that Stillman-Kelley's formative period was that very epoch of the Wagnerian cataclysm which blasted the individuality of composers as the cyclone devastates the forest. So surcharged with the dominating personality of Wagner was this epoch that it seemed no composer sympathetic to that personality could breathe the air of its period and retain his musical individuality. Futile blotches of misunderstood Wagnerian harmony took the place of compositions. This was the tide that Stillman-Kelley stemmed, and his position takes on the aspect of solitary grandeur when it is perceived that he is the only composer in the contemporary American ranks, receptive to the changing order, who can be said to have come through wholly unscathed. While guided primarily by a sense of the beautiful, it was through sheer force of mentality, and standing alone, that the composer achieved this feat and preserved for his nation a straight path for the classical tradition and ideal without relinquishing that freedom of mind which alone can secure the growth of the individual through the apprehension and application of contemporary thought.
The thought can almost be ventured that Stillman-Kelley was the first composer to use the post-Wagnerian harmonic vocabulary without the result sounding like Wagner. If a heroic instinct for thematic development in the face of the harmonic orgies of the time contributed to this achievement, it was secondary to a contribution of even greater distinction. This more original contribution may be termed the application of a geometrical poetic sense to the new harmony. Of the tyrant that enslaved the composers of the time Stillman-Kelley promptly made himself the master. Out of the new material he generated for his use harmonic motives, symmetrical blocks of harmony, bearing a particular relation to his thematic material, and, by the application of these well-defined and well-rounded harmonic motives to his formal structure, he attained, at a stroke, the employment of the new medium, the preservation of clarity and order, and thereto a new musical personality. He did not recede to an archaic classical purism and offer the familiar excuse of those who found in Wagner the ruination of pure music. He advanced bravely on to the dangerous ground of the new territory and made it his own without sacrificing the fundamental classical character of his ideals and without losing his wits.