Associated with Fry in his musical life was another pioneer of the opera field, George F. Bristow (born in 1825; died in 1898), whose scores, however, have less of dramatic freedom than have those of Fry, being more strongly marked with the influences of German classicism. Bristow's works include an opera, 'Rip Van Winkle,' an unfinished opera, 'Columbus,' the oratorios 'Praise to God' and 'Daniel,' five symphonies, two overtures, string quartets, and many shorter works.
Another name that finds place in the early annals of American music is that of Stephen Emery (born 1841; died 1891), counted a composer in his day but now known to us chiefly as one of America's first theoreticians and the teacher of many whose names are now well known.
Larger is the place filled by the name of Gottschalk. Louis Moreau Gottschalk may be claimed as an American, having been born at New Orleans in 1829, but his decidedly Creole origin and French education seem to remove him from the line of relationship with those Anglo-Saxon traditions which we are apt to consider as constituting the purely American.
Gottschalk enjoyed during his life equal fame as pianist and composer. His claim to the former was probably just; Berlioz himself spoke with enthusiasm of his playing and of our own artists we have the testimony of many, such as William Mason, Carl Bergmann, and Richard Hoffman, as to the genuine enjoyment which they obtained in hearing the concerts of Gottschalk. But how evanescent has been the fame of his compositions, existing only in the memory of comparatively few; as entities they are already silent pages of notes. All that is heard of his music to-day is an occasional faint tinkle of that surviving strain of sentimentality which was destined to such continued popularity in the polite répertoire, 'The Last Hope.' Gottschalk wrote two operas and several orchestral scores and many songs, but his piano compositions comprise the bulk of his works. While there are among these compositions many pages of beauty not unlike that of Chopin, and in the dance compositions on negro-creole and Spanish themes a certain vigor and distinction, the majority of them represent the merest vehicles of virtuosity written to tickle the ears of a public which had been brought up on the banalities played by the sensational pianists that visited America in those days. Over-sentimental, and at times vulgar, as the art of Gottschalk now appears to us, his place in American music is an important one and we cannot but feel that amid environments more sustaining to a higher ideal of art such a genuinely musical temperament as was his would have produced an art less ephemeral.
II
These early apparitions of American musical art are now to us only matters of history. Whatever influence they may have had on the conditions of their day, our present day musical life has been unaffected by them. For the establishment of that which, for lack of better name, we call the American school of composers we again look to New England. Through the few composers known as the Boston group America first assimilated into its musical life the best traditions of European musical culture and in the labors of these men the American community was taught in some degree to look seriously upon the native composer and his achievement.
First in this list is the name of the man who stands as the patriarch of American music, John Knowles Paine, the first professor of music at Harvard University and the pioneer in the field of symphonic composition. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1839, Paine received a thorough academic training in Germany (1858-1862). While still abroad he produced several ambitious works and he returned to America with a fame that eventually secured for him the chair of music at Harvard. Here he filled an important mission in guiding the steps of many of the younger composers who studied with him. In the meantime Paine's academic life by no means stifled his creative impulse and his list of works shows a steady output up to within a short time before his death in 1906.
Important among Paine's larger works are the two symphonies, the first in C minor and the second ('Spring Symphony') in A major, the oratorio 'St. Peter,' two symphonic poems, 'The Tempest' and 'An Island Fantasy,' the music to Sophocles' 'Œdipus' for male voices and orchestra, and an opera, 'Azara.' Besides these there is a considerable list of chamber music and much in the smaller forms.
Paine's music, while never approaching modernity in the present-day application of the word, in passing through several periods of development arrived at a point where the idiom employed could in a broad sense be termed modern. An anti-Wagnerite in the early days of his academic austerity, he lived to be drawn into the Wagner vortex and in some of his later works the Wagner influence asserts itself. Perhaps the most representative of Paine's works is one which belongs to an earlier period, the music to Œdipus Tyrannus (1881). In this work Paine uses a classic-romantic medium far from rich in its color possibilities, with which, however, he obtains a notable variety of effect and a glowing warmth of style. In size of conception the summit of Paine's achievement is to be found in his opera Azara (1901) composed to a libretto of his own after the old Breton legend 'Aucassin and Nicolette.' Containing much that is beautiful, and estimable in its workmanship, the opera fails in dramatic force and has never come to a stage production. A concert performance of it was given, however, in 1906 by the Cecilia Society of Boston under the direction of B. J. Lang.
The most representative member of the present Boston colony, as well as one of the most eminent of American composers, is George W. Chadwick (born 1854). Mr. Chadwick's education also was a German one and on his return to America after three years' study in Leipzig and Munich he began to produce works of a scholarly formality. Had the course of Mr. Chadwick's development been arrested at this point he might fittingly bear the title of 'academic' which Mr. Rupert Hughes puts on him.[86] But between the date of these earlier works and Chadwick's latest works there has been in his art a steady development both in form and spirit, so that his recent scores, 'Adonis' (1901), 'Euterpe' (1904), 'Cleopatra' (1906), and 'Aphrodite' (1912), are distinctly representative of the modern school. These works, while purporting to be program music, are only qualifiedly so, for Chadwick always preserves a certain severe formalism which precludes the possibilities of his capitulation either to the impressionist vagaries of modern French music or to the polyphonic complexities of the Germans of to-day. In spite of this tendency to formality, Mr. Chadwick in his writing has achieved a notable freedom of style, a dramatic force and a mastery of orchestral color which contribute to give him a certain place among living orchestral composers. Mr. Chadwick enjoys the largest hearing of living American composers.