Edward MacDowell Part 3

In his composition he was growing away from piano work,--he felt that the future must mean larger, probably orchestral, forms, for him, and his dream of an ultimate leisure was a dream for which his friends can be thankful. He did not end with despair at his heart that the distracting work, the yearly drudgery, were to go on forever.

His preferences in music were governed by the independence which characterised his intellectual judgments. Of the moderns, Wagner was his G.o.d; for Liszt he had an unbounded admiration, though he detected the showman, the mere juggler, in him; Tchaikovsky stirred him mightily; Brahms did not as a rule give him pleasure, though certain of that master's more fertile moments compelled his appreciation. Grieg he delighted in. To him he dedicated both his "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas. In response to his request for permission to inscribe the first of these to his eminent contemporary, he received from Grieg the following delectable letter--one of the Norwegian's very few attempts at English composition (I quote it verbatim; the spelling is Grieg's):--

COPENHAGEN, 26/10/99.

Hotel King of Denmark.

MY DEAR SIR!

Will you remit me in bad English to express my best thanks for your kind letter and for the sympathi you feel for my music. Of course it will be a great honor and pleasure for me to accept your dedication.

Some years ago I thought it possible to shake hands with you in your own country. But unfortunately my delicat health does not seem to agree. At all events, if we are not to meet, I am glad to read in the papers of your artistical success in Amerika.

With my best wishes,

I am, dear Sir,

Yours very truly,

EDVARD GRIEG.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM GRIEG TO MACDOWELL, ACCEPTING THE DEDICATION OF THE "NORSE" SONATA. ONE OF GRIEG'S RARE ATTEMPTS AT ENGLISH COMPOSITION (SEE PAGE 73)]

I may quote also, in this place, because of its unusual interest, a letter written (in German) by Grieg to Mrs. MacDowell when he learned of her husband's collapse:--

CHRISTIANIA, December 14, 1905.

DEAR MADAM:

The news of MacDowell's serious illness has deeply affected me.

Permit me therefore to express to you my own and my wife's sincerest sympathy for you. I am a great admirer of MacDowell's Muse, and would regard it as a severe blow if his best creative period should be so hastily broken off. From all that I hear of your husband, his qualities as a man are as remarkable as his qualities as an artist. He is a complete Personality, with an unusually sympathetic and sensitive nervous system. Such a temperament gives one the capacity not only for moods of the highest transport, but for an unspeakable sorrow tenfold more profound. This is the unsolvable riddle. An artist so ideally endowed [_ein so ideal angelegter Kunstler_] as MacDowell must ask himself: Why have I received from nature this delicately strung lyre, if I were better off without it? So unmerciful is Life that every artist must ask himself this question. The only consolation is: Work--yes, even the severest labours. ... _But_: the artist is an optimist. Otherwise he would be no artist. He believes and hopes in the triumph of the good and the beautiful. He trusts in his lucky star till his last breath. And you, the wife of a highly gifted artist, will not and must not lose hope! In similar cases, happily, one often witnesses a seemingly inexplicable recovery. If it can give MacDowell a moment's cheer, say to him that he has in distant Norway a warm and understanding friend who feels for him, and wishes from his heart that for him, as for you, better times may soon come.

With best greeting to you both,

Your respectful

EDVARD GRIEG.

MacDowell's feeling in regard to Strauss, whom he considered to have developed what he called the "suggestive" (delineative) power of music at the expense of its finer potentialities, is indicated in a lecture which he prepared on the subject of "Suggestion in Music." "'Thus Spake Zarathustra,'" he wrote, "may be considered the apotheosis of this power of suggestion in tonal colour, and in it I believe we can see the tendency I allude to [the tendency "to elevate what should be a means of adding power and intensity to musical speech, to the importance of musical speech itself"]. It stuns by its glorious magnificence of tonal texture. The suggestion, at the beginning, of the rising sun, is a mighty example of the overwhelming power of tone-colour. The upward sweep of the music to the highest regions of light has something splendrous about it; and yet I remember once hearing in London a song sung in the street at night that seemed to me to contain a truer germ of music."--From which it will be seen that there were limits to the aesthetic sympathy of even so liberal and divining an appreciator as MacDowell.

The modern Frenchmen he knew scarcely at all. Some of d'Indy's earlier music he had heard and admired: but that he would have cared for such a score as Debussy's "La Mer" I very much doubt. I remember his amus.e.m.e.nt over what he called the "queerness" of a sonata by the Belgian Lekeu for violin and piano, which he had read or heard. It is likely that he would have found little to attract him in the more characteristic music of d'Indy, Debussy, and Ravel; his instincts and temperament led him into a wholly different region of expression. He was a prophet of modernity; but it was a modernity that he alone exemplifies: it has no exact parallel.

Concerning the cla.s.sics he had his own views. Of Bach he wrote that he believed him to have accomplished his work as "one of the world's mightiest tone-poets not by means of the contrapuntal methods of his day, but in spite of them. The laws of canon and fugue are based upon as prosaic a foundation as those of the Rondo and Sonata Form, and I find it impossible to imagine their ever having been a spur, an incentive, to poetic musical speech."

Of Mozart he wrote: "It is impossible to forget the fact that in his piano works he was first and foremost a piano virtuoso, a child prodigy: of whom filigree work (we cannot call this Orientalism, for it was more or less of German pattern, traced from the _fioriture_ of the Italian opera singer) was expected by the public for which his sonatas were written.... We need freshness and sincerity in forming our judgments of art.... If we read on one page of some history (every history of music has such a page) that Mozart's sonatas are sublime; that they far transcend anything written for the harpsichord or clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we are apt to echo the saying ... But let us look the thing straight in the face: Mozart's sonatas are compositions entirely unworthy of the author of 'The Magic Flute' and 'Don Giovanni,' or of any composer with pretensions to more than mediocre talent. They are written in a style of flashy harpsichord virtuosity such as Liszt in his most despised moments never descended to. Yet I am well aware that this statement would be dismissed as either absurd or heretical, according to the point of view of the particular objector."

Of Mendelssohn he said: "Mendelssohn professed to be an 'absolutist'

in music. As a matter of fact, he stands on the same ground that Liszt and Berlioz did; for almost everything he wrote, even to the smallest piano piece, he furnished with an explanatory t.i.tle.... Formalist though he was, his work often exhibits eccentricities of form--as, for instance, in the Scotch Symphony, where, in the so-called 'exposition'

of the first movement, he throws in an extra little theme that laps over his frame with a jaunty disregard of the rules that is delightful.... His technic of piano writing was perfect; compared with Beethoven's it was a revelation. He never committed the fault of mere virtuoso writing, which is remarkable when we consider how strong a temptation there must have been to do so. In his piano music can be found the germs of most of the pianistic innovations that are usually identified with other composers--for instance, the manner of enveloping the melody with runs, the discovery of which has been ascribed to Thalberg, but which we find in Mendelssohn's first Prelude, written in 1833. The interlocking pa.s.sages which have become so prevalent in modern music we find in his compositions dating from 1835."

Of Schumann he said happily: "His music is not avowed programme-music; neither is it, as was much of Schubert's, pure delight in beautiful sound. It did not break through formalism by sheer violence of emotion, as did Beethoven's: it represents the rhapsodical revery of an inspired poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems strange or alien, and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to give them coherence, and unaware of their character until perhaps when, awakened from his dream, he navely wonders what they may have meant--you remember that he added t.i.tles to his music after it was composed. He put his dreams in music and guessed their meaning afterward."

Of Liszt and Chopin: "To all of this new, strange music [the piano music of the Romantics] Liszt and Chopin added the wonderful tracery of Orientalism. The difference between these two is, that with Chopin this tracery developed poetic thought as with a thin gauze; whereas with Liszt [in his piano music] the embellishment itself made the starting-point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John Field."

Of Wagner: "His music-dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emanc.i.p.ated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furniture, must be considered the greatest achievement in our art."

Concerning Form in music, he observed: "If by the word 'form' our purists meant the most poignant expression of poetic thought in music, if they meant by this term the art of arranging musical sounds so that they const.i.tuted the most telling presentation of a musical idea, I should have nothing to say. But as it is, the word in almost its invariable use by theorists stands for what are called 'stoutly-built periods,' 'subsidiary themes' and the like, a happy combination of which in certain prescribed keys is supposed to const.i.tute good form.

Such a principle, inherited from the necessities and fashions of the dance, and changing from time to time, is surely not worthy of the strange worship it has received. In their eagerness to press this great revolutionist [Beethoven] into their own ranks in the fight of narrow theory against expansion and progress, the most amusing mistakes are constantly occurring. For example, the first movement of this sonata [the so-called "Moonlight"]--which, as we know, is a poem of profound sorrow and the most poignant resignation alternating with despair--has, by some strange torturing, been cited as being in strict sonata-form by one theorist (Harding: Novello's primer), is dubbed a free fantasy by another (Matthews), and is described as being in song-form by another: all of which is somewhat weakened by the dictum of still another theorist that the music is absolutely formless! A form of so doubtful an ident.i.ty can surely lay small claim to any serious intellectual value.... In our modern days we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out of the mystery of the blue sky--we put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed: the 'sonata-form'--or perhaps even the 'third-rondo form,' for we have quite an a.s.sortment; and should the idea survive, and grow, and become too large for the bed, and if we have grown to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus _make_ it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why then we run the risk of having some wiseacre say, as is said of Chopin: 'Yes--but he is weak in sonata-form'! ... Form should be nothing more than a synonym for _coherence_. No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance without form; but that form will be inherent in the idea, and there will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas in the world."

Concerning programme-music he wrote at length. "In my opinion," he says in one of his lectures, "the battle over what music can express and what it cannot express has been carried on wrong lines. We are always referred back to language as actually expressing an idea, when, as a matter of fact, language expresses nothing but that which its vital parallel means of expression, gesture and facial expression, permit it to express. Words mean nothing whatsoever in themselves; the same words in different languages mean wholly different things; for written words are mere symbols, and no more express things or ideas than any marks on paper would. Yet language is forever striving to emulate music by actually expressing something, besides merely symbolising it, and thus we have in poetry the coining of onomatopoetic words--words that will bring the things they stand for more vividly before our eyes and minds. Now music may express all that words can express and much more, for it is the natural means of expression for all animals, mankind included. If musical sounds were accepted as symbols for things we would have another speech. It seems strange to say that by means of music one could say the most commonplace thing, as, for instance: 'I am going to take a walk'; yet this is precisely what the Chinese have been doing for centuries. For such things, however, our word-symbols do perfectly well, and such a symbolising of musical sounds must detract, I think, from the high mission of music: which, as I conceive, is neither to be an agent for expressing material things; nor to utter pretty sounds to amuse the ear; nor a sensuous excitant to fire the blood, or a sedative to lull the senses: it is a _language_, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language. It appeals directly to the _Seelenzustande_ it springs from, for it is the natural expression of it, rather than, like words, a translation of it into set stereotyped symbols which may or may not be accepted for what they were intended to denote by the writer"--a _credo_ which sums up in fairly complete form his theory of music-making, whatever validity it may have as a philosophical generalisation.

In regard to the sadly vexed question of musical nationalism, especially in its relation to America, his position was definite and positive. His views on this subject may well be quoted somewhat in detail, since they have not always been justly represented or fully understood. In the following excerpt, from a lecture on "Folk-Music,"

he pays his respects to Dvorak's "New World" symphony, and touches upon his own att.i.tude toward the case as exemplified in his "Indian"

suite:

"A man is generally something different from the clothes he wears or the business he is occupied with; but when we do see a man identified with his clothes we think but little of him. And so it is with music.

So-called Russian, Bohemian, or any other purely national music has no place in art, for its characteristics may be duplicated by anyone who takes the fancy to do so. On the other hand, the vital element of music--personality--stands alone. We have seen the Viennese Strauss family adopting the cross rhythms of the Spanish--or, to be more accurate, the Moorish or Arab--school of art. Moszkowski the Pole writes Spanish dances. Cowen in England writes a Scandinavian Symphony. Grieg the Norwegian writes Arabian music; and, to cap the climax, we have here in America been offered a pattern for an 'American' national musical costume by the Bohemian Dvorak--though what the Negro melodies have to do with Americanism in art still remains a mystery. Music that can be made by 'recipe' is not music, but 'tailoring.' To be sure, this tailoring may serve to cover a beautiful thought; but--why cover it? and, worst of all, why cover it (if covered it must be: if the trademark of nationality is indispensable, which I deny)--why cover it with the badge of whilom slavery rather than with the stern but at least manly and free rudeness of the North American Indian? If what is called local tone colour is necessary to music (which it most emphatically is not), why not adopt some of the Hindoo _Ragas_ and modes--each one of which (and the modes alone number over seventy-two) will give an individual tonal character to the music written according to its rules? But the means of 'creating' a national music to which I have alluded are childish.

No: before a people can find a musical writer to echo its genius it must first possess men who truly represent it--that is to say, men who, being part of the people, love the country for itself: men who put into their music what the nation has put into its life; and in the case of America it needs above all, both on the part of the public and on the part of the writer, absolute freedom from the restraint that an almost unlimited deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us. Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us. What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. This is what I hope to see echoed in American music."

Of MacDowell as a pianist, Mr. Henry T. Finck, who had known him in this capacity almost from the beginning of his career in America, has written for me his impressions, and I shall quote them, rather than any of my own; since I had comparatively few opportunities to hear him display, at his best, the full measure of his ability:

"As he never felt quite sure," writes Mr. Finck, "that what he was composing was worth while, so, in the matter of playing in public, he was so self-distrustful that when he came on the stage and sat down on the piano stool he hung his head and looked a good deal like a school-boy detected in the act of doing something he ought not to do.

"Often though I was with him--sometimes a week at a time in Peterboro--I never could persuade him to play for me. I once asked Paderewski to play for me his new set of songs, and he promptly did so. But MacDowell always was 'out of practice,' or had some other excuse, generally a witticism or bit of sarcasm at his own expense. I am sorry now that I did not urge him with more persistence, for he might have yielded in the end, and I would have got a more _intime_ idea of his playing; for after all a musical tete-a-tete like that is preferable to any public hearing. I never heard Grieg play at a concert, but I am sure that the hour I sat near him in his Bergen home, while he played and his wife sang, gave me a better appreciation of his skill as an interpreter than I could have got in a public hall with an audience to distract his attention. One afternoon I called on Saint-Saens at his hotel after one of his concerts in New York.

Talking about it, he sat down at the piano, ran over his _Valse Canariote_, and said: 'That's the way I _ought_ to have played it!'

"MacDowell was quite right in saying that he was out of practice; he generally was, his duties as professor allowing him little time for technical exercising; but once every few years he set to work and got his fingers into a condition which enabled them to follow his intentions; and those intentions, it is needless to say, were always honourable! He never played any of those show pieces which help along a pianist, but confined himself to the best he could find.

"Usually the first half of a recital was devoted to the cla.s.sical and romantic masters, the second to his own compositions. Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, were likely to be represented, and he also did missionary work for Templeton Strong and other Americans. His interpretation of the music of other composers was both objective and subjective; there was no distortion or exaggeration, yet one could not mistake the fact that it was MacDowell who was playing it.

"The expression, 'he played like a composer,' is often used to hint that the technic was not that of a virtuoso. In this sense MacDowell did not play like a composer; his technical skill was equal to everything he played, though never obtrusive. In another sense he did play 'like a composer,' especially when interpreting his own pieces; that is, he played with an insight, a subtlety of expression, which only a creative performer has at his command. I doubt if Chopin himself could have rendered one of his pieces with more ravishing delicacy than MacDowell showed in playing his 'To a Wild Rose.' I doubt if Liszt could have shown a more overwhelming dramatic power than MacDowell did in playing his 'Keltic' sonata. In this combination of feminine tenderness with masculine strength he was, as in his creative gift, a man of genius. After one of his concerts I wrote in the glow of enthusiasm that I would rather hear him than any pianist in the field excepting Paderewski; that utterance I never saw reason to modify."

For an interesting and closely observed description of MacDowell's technical peculiarities as a piano player I am indebted to his friend and pupil, Mr. T.P. Currier, who had followed MacDowell's career as a pianist from the time of his first public appearance in Boston:

"[His finger velocity] was at that time [in 1888] the most striking characteristic of his playing," says Mr. Currier. "For him, too, it was a mere bagatelle. He took to prestissimo like a duck to water. He could, in fact, play fast more easily than he could slowly. One of his ever-present fears was that in performance his fingers would run away with him. And many hours were spent in endeavours to control such an embarra.s.sing tendency. This extraordinary velocity, acquired in the Paris Conservatory, and from his friend and teacher, Carl Heymann, of Frankfort, invariably set his listeners agape, and was always one of the chief sensations at his concerts.

"But for this finger speeding and for his other technical acquirements as well, MacDowell cared little, except as they furthered his one absorbing aim. He was heart and soul a composer, and to be able to play his own music as he heard it in his inner ear was his single spur to practice. From the time of his complete immersion in composition, his ideas of pianistic effects, of tone colour, gradually led him farther and farther away from conventional pianism. Scales and arpeggios, as commonly rendered, had no longer interest or charm for him. He cared for finger pa.s.sages only when they could be made to suggest what he wanted them to suggest in his own colour-scheme. With his peculiar touch and facility at command, he rejoiced in turning such pa.s.sages into streams and swirls of tone, marked with strong accents and coloured with vivid, dynamic contrasts.

"That his pa.s.sage playing rarely sounded clean and pure--like that of a Rosenthal--was due not only to his musical predilections, but to his hand formation as well. His hand was broad and rather thick-set, and tremendously muscular. It would not bend back at the knuckles; and the fingers also had no well-defined knuckle movement. It appears, therefore, that he could not, if he would, have succeeded on more conventional technical lines. Gradually he developed great strength and intense activity in the middle joints, which enabled him to play with a very close, often overlapping, touch, and to maintain extremely rapid tempi in legato or staccato with perfect ease and little fatigue. With this combination of velocity and close touch, it was a slight matter to produce those pianistic effects which were especially dear to him.

"MacDowell's finger development has been thus dwelt upon, because it was, as has been said, the feature of his technic which immediately surprised and captivated his hearers. Less noticeable was his wrist and octave work. But his chord playing, though also relatively unattractive, was even in those early days almost as uncommon in its way as was his velocity. And in this field of technic, during his later years, when in composition his mind turned almost wholly to this mode of expression, he reached a plane of tonal effect which, for variety, from vague, shadowy, mysterious _ppp_, to virile, orchestral _ffff_, has never been surpa.s.sed by any pianist who has visited these sh.o.r.es in recent years. His tone in chord playing, it is true, was often harsh, and this fault also appeared in his melodic delivery. But in both cases any unmusical effect was so greatly overbalanced by many rare and beautiful qualities of tone production, that it was easily forgiven and forgotten.

"Wonderful tone blending in finger pa.s.sages; a peculiarly crisp, yet veiled staccato; chord playing extraordinary in variety,--tender, mysterious, sinister, heroic; a curiously unconventional yet effective melodic delivery; playing replete with power, vitality, and dramatic significance, always forcing upon the ear the phrase, never the tickling of mere notes; a really marvellous command and use of both pedals,--these were the characteristics of MacDowell's pianistic art as he displayed it in the exposition of his own works. Unquestionably he was a born pianist. If it had not been for his genius for composition, he would, without doubt, have been known as a brilliant and forceful interpreter of the greatest piano literature. But his compositional bent turned him completely away from mere piano playing.

He was a composer-pianist, and as such he ever desired to be regarded."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOUSE AT PETERBORO, NEW HAMPSHIRE, WHERE MACDOWELL SPENT HIS SUMMERS]

As a pianist, as in all other matters touching his own capacities, he was often tortured by doubts concerning the effect of his performances. "I shall never forget," recalls his wife, "the first time he played it [the "Eroica" sonata] in Boston. We all thought he did it wonderfully. But when I went around to the green-room door to find him, fearing something might be wrong, as he had not come to me, he had gone. When I got home, accompanied by two friends, there he was almost in a corner, white, and as if he were guilty of some crime, and he said as we came in: 'I can play better than that. But I was so tired!' We almost wept with the pity of the unnecessary suffering, which was yet so real and intense. In a short time he was more himself, and navely admitted that he had played three movements well, but had been a 'd---- fool in one.' I grew to be very used to this as the years went on, for he could not help emphasising to himself what he did badly, and ignoring the good."

He left few uncompleted works. There are among his ma.n.u.scripts three movements of a symphony, two movements of a suite for string orchestra, a suite for violin and piano, some songs and piano pieces, and a large number of sketches. He had schemes for a music-drama on an Arthurian subject, and sketched a single act of it. He had planned this work upon novel lines: there was to be comparatively little singing, and much emphasis was to be laid upon the orchestral commentary; the action was to be carried on by a combination of pantomime and tableaux, and the scenic element was to be conspicuous--a suggestion which he got in part from E.A. Abbey's Holy Grail frescoes in the Boston Public Library. But he had determined to write his own text: and the prospective labour of this, made more formidable by his restricted leisure, finally discouraged him, and he abandoned the project. Five years before his death he destroyed the sketches that he had made; only a few fragments remain.