Edward MacDowell Part 7

"A song, if at all dramatic, should have climax, form, and plot, as does a play. Words to me seem so paramount and, as it were, apart in value from the musical setting, that, while I cannot recall the melodies of many of the songs that I have written, the words of them are so indelibly impressed upon my mind that they are very easy of recall.... Music and poetry cannot be accurately stated unless one has written both."

It is clear that these are the views of a composer who placed veracious declamation of the poetic idea very much to the front in his conception of the art of the song-writer. They explain in part, also, the fact that MacDowell himself wrote the words of many of his songs, though, quite characteristically, he did not avow the fact in the printed music. The verses of all the songs of op. 56, save one, op.

58, and op. 60 (the last three sets that he wrote), of the "Slumber Song" of op. 9, of "The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree," "Confidence,"

and "The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees" (op. 47), and of some of the choruses, were of his authorship. He enjoyed what he called "stringing words together," and most of his verses were written off-hand, with a facility which betrayed the marked gift for verbal expression which is apparent in his often admirably stated lectures.

But his especial reason for writing the words for his songs was his difficulty hi finding texts which quite suited him. Many poems which he would have liked to set were, as he explained in the words I have quoted, full of snags in the way of unsingable words. And though it used to make him uncomfortable to do so, he often felt compelled for this reason to refuse much otherwise excellent poetry that was sent to him with the request that he use it for music. Some of the verse that he wrote for use in his songs is of uncommon quality--imaginative, distinguished in diction, and, above all, perfectly suited to musical utterance. Of uncommon quality, too, are some of the brief verses which he used as mottos for certain of his later piano pieces--as for the "Sea Pieces" and "New England Idyls."

That his songs, as a whole, are comparable in inherent artistic consequence with his sonatas, or with such things as the "Woodland Sketches," the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England Idyls," I do not believe, although I readily grant the beauty and fascination of many pa.s.sages, and of certain pages in which he is incontestably at the height of his powers. Here, as in his writing for piano and for orchestra, one will find abundant evidence of his distinguishing traits--sensitiveness and fervour of imagination, a lovely and intimate sense of romance, whimsical and piquant humour, virility, pa.s.sion, an unerring instinct for atmospheric suggestion. But there are times when, despite his avowed principles in the matter, he sacrifices truth of declamation to the presumed requirements of melodic design--when he seems to pay more heed to the unrelated effect of tonal contours than to the dramatic or emotional needs of his text.

As an instance of his not infrequent indifference to justness of declamatory utterance, examine his setting of "in those brown eyes,"

at the bottom of the last page of "Confidence" (op. 47), and of the word "without" in the fourth bar of "Tyrant Love" (op. 60). I dwell upon this point, not in any spirit of captiousness, I need scarcely say, but because it exemplifies a fairly persistent characteristic of MacDowell's style as a song writer.

Of that other trait to which I have referred--his not exceptional preoccupation with a purely musical plan at the expense of dramatic and emotional congruity--the attentive observer will not want for examples in almost any of MacDowell's song-groups. As a single instance, I may allege the run in eighth-notes which enc.u.mbers the setting of the second syllable of the word "again," in the fourth bar of "Springtide" (op. 60). Such infelicities are difficult to account for in the work of a musician so exceedingly sensitive in matters of poetic fitness as he. It may be that his acute sense of dramatic and emotional values operated perfectly only when he was unhampered by the thought of the voice.

I have dwelt upon this point because it should be noted in any candid study of his traits as a song writer. Yet it is not a defect which weighs heavily against him when one considers the musical quality of his songs as a whole. Not, as a whole, equal to his piano music, they are admirable and deeply individual; and the best of them are not surpa.s.sed in any body of modern song-writing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MUSIC-ROOM AT PETERSBORO]

In almost all of his songs the voice is predominant over the piano part--although he is far, indeed, from writing mere accompaniments: the support which he gives the voice is consistently important, for he brings to bear upon it all his rich resources of harmonic expression.

But though he makes the voice the paramount element, he uses it, in general, rather as a vehicle for the unconscious exposition of a determined lyricism than as an instrument of precise emotional utterance. When one thinks of how Hugo Wolf, for example, or Debussy, would have treated the phrase, "to wake again the bitter joy of love,"

in "Fair Springtide," it will be felt, I think, that MacDowell's setting leaves something to be desired on the score of emotional verity, although the song, as a whole, is one of the loveliest and most spontaneous he has written. I do not mean to say that he does not often achieve an ideal correspondence between the significance of his text and the effect of his music; but when he does--as in, for instance, that superb tragedy in little, "The Sea,"[16] or in the still finer "Sunrise"[17]--one's impression is that it is the fortunate result of chance, rather than the outcome of deliberate artistic purpose. It is in songs of an untrammelled lyricism that his art finds its chief opportunity. In such he is both delightful and satisfying--in, for instance, the six flower songs, "From an Old Garden"; in "Confidence" and "In the Woods" (op. 47); in "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid Sings Light," and "Long Ago" (op. 56); and in the delectable "To the Golden Rod," from his last song group (op. 60). This is music of blithe and captivating allurement, of grave or riant tenderness, of compelling fascination; and in it, the word and the tone are ideally mated. Yet even in others of his songs in which they do not so invariably correspond, one must acknowledge gladly the beauty and freshness of the music itself: such music as he has given us in "Constancy" (op. 58), in "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" (op. 56), in "Fair Springtide"--which represent his ripest utterances as a song writer. If he is not, in this particular form, quite at his happiest, he is among the foremost of those who have kept alive in the modern tradition the conception of the song as a medium of lyric utterance no less than of precise dramatic signification.

[16] No. VII. of the "Eight Songs," op. 47.

[17] Op. 58, No. II.

CHAPTER VIII

SUMMARY

To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in American music it is necessary to remember that twenty-five years ago, when he sent from Germany, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, the earliest outgivings of his talent, our native musical art was still little more than a pallid reproduction of European models. MacDowell did not at that time, of course, give positive evidence of the vitality and the rarity of his gifts; yet there was, even in his early music,--undeniably immature though it was, and modelled after easily recognised Teutonic masters,--a fresh and untrammelled impulse. A new note vibrated through it, a new and buoyant personality suffused it.

Thenceforth music in America possessed an artistic figure of constantly increasing stature. MacDowell commanded, from the start, an original idiom, a manner of speech which has been recognised even by his detractors as entirely his own.

His style is as pungent and unmistakable as Grieg's, and far less limited in its variety. Hearing certain melodic turns, certain harmonic formations, you recognise them at once as belonging to MacDowell, and to none other. This marked individuality of speech, apparent from the first, became constantly more salient and more vivid, and in the music which he gave forth at the height of his creative activity,--in, say, the "Sea Pieces" and the last two sonatas,--it is unmistakable and beyond dispute. This emphatically personal accent it was which, a score of years ago, set MacDowell in a place apart among native American music-makers. No one else was saying such charming and memorable things in so fresh and individual a way.

We had then, as we have had since, composers who were ent.i.tled to respect by virtue of their expert and effective mastery of a familiar order of musical expression,--who spoke correctly a language acquired in the schools of Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing to say that was both important and new. They had grace, they had dexterity, they had, in a measure, scholarship; but their art was obviously derivative, without originality of substance or a telling quality of style. It is not a needlessly harsh a.s.severation to say that, until MacDowell began to put forth his more individual works, our music had been palpably, almost frankly, dependent: an undisguised and nave transplantation, made rather feeble and anaemic in the process, of European growths. The result was admirable, in its way, praiseworthy, in its way--and wholly negligible.

The music of MacDowell was, almost from the first, in a wholly different case. In its early phases it, too, was imitative, reflective. MacDowell returned to America, after a twelve years'

apprenticeship to European influences, in 1888, bringing with him his symphonic poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine," his unfinished "Lamia," his two orchestral paraphrases of scenes from the Song of Roland, two concertos, and numerous songs and piano pieces.

Not greatly important music, this, measured beside that which he afterward put forth; but possessing an individual profile, a savour, a tang, which gave it an immediately recognised distinction. A new voice spoke out of it, a fresh and confident, an eloquent and forceful, voice. It betrayed Germanic influences: of that there was no question; yet it was strikingly rich in personal accent. Gradually his art came to find, through various forms, a constantly finer and weightier expression. For orchestra he wrote the "Indian" suite--music of superb vigour, fantastically and deeply imaginative, wholly personal in quality; for the piano he wrote four sonatas of heroic and pa.s.sionate content--indisputable masterworks--and various shorter pieces, free in form and poetic in inspiration; and he wrote many songs, some of them quite flawless in their loveliness and their emotional veracity.

It will thus be seen why the potent and aromatic art of MacDowell impressed those who were able to feel its charm and estimate its value. It is mere justice to him, now that he has definitely pa.s.sed beyond the reach of our praise, to say that he gave to the art of creative music in this country (I am thinking now only of music-makers of native birth) its single impressive and vital figure. His is the one name in our music which, for instance, one would venture to pair with that of Whitman in poetry.

An abundance of pregnant, beautiful, and novel ideas was his chief possession, and he fashioned them into musical designs with great skill and unflagging art. That he did not undertake adventures in all of the forms of music, has been said. There is no symphony in the list of his published works, no large choral composition. Yet he was far from being a miniaturist,--he was, in fact, anything but that. His four sonatas for the piano are planned upon truly heroic lines; they are large in scope and of epical sweep and breadth; and his "Indian"

suite is the most impressive orchestral work composed by an American.

He wrote two piano concertos,--early works, not of his best inspiration,--a large number of poetically descriptive smaller works, and almost half a hundred songs of frequent loveliness and character.

The three symphonic poems, "Hamlet and Ophelia," "Lancelot and Elaine," and "Lamia"; the two "fragments," "The Saracens," and "The Lovely Alda," and the first orchestral suite, op. 42--which he might have ent.i.tled "Sylvan"--complete the record of his output, save for some spirited but not very important part-songs for male voices. The list comprises sixty-two opus numbers and one hundred and eighty-six separate compositions,--not a remarkable accomplishment, in point of quant.i.ty, yet notable and rare in quality.

He suggested, at his best, no one save himself. He was one of the most individual writers who ever made music--as individual as Chopin, or Debussy, or Brahms, or Grieg. His mannner of speech was utterly untrammelled, and wholly his own. Vitality--an abounding freshness, a perpetual youthfulness--was one of his prime traits; n.o.bility--n.o.bility of style and impulse--was another. The morning freshness, the welling spontaneity of his music, even in moments of exalted or pa.s.sionate utterance, was continually surprising: it was music not unworthy of the golden ages of the world. Yet MacDowell was a Celt, and his music is deeply Celtic--mercurial, by turns dolorous and sportive, darkly tragical and exquisitely blithe, and overflowing with the unpredictable and inexplicable magic of the Celtic imagination. He is unfailingly n.o.ble--it is, in the end, the trait which most surely signalises him.

"To every man," wrote Maeterlinck, "there come n.o.ble thoughts, thoughts that pa.s.s across his heart like great white birds." Such thoughts came often to MacDowell--they seem always to be hovering not far from the particular territory to which his inspiration has led him, even when he is most gayly inconsequent; and in his finest and largest utterances, in the sonatas, their majestic trend appears somehow to have suggested the sweeping and splendid flight of the musical idea. Not often subtle in impulse or recondite in mood, his art has nothing of the impalpability, the drifting, iridescent vapours of Debussy, nothing of the impenetrable backgrounds of Brahms. He would have smiled at the dictum of Emerson: "a beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty of which we can see the end." He knew how to evoke a kind of beauty that was both aerial and enchanted; but it was a clarified and lucid beauty, even then: it was never dim or wavering. He would never, as I have said, have comprehended the art of such a writer as Debussy--he viewed the universe from a wholly different angle. Of the moderns, Wagner he worshipped, Tchaikovsky deeply moved him, Grieg he loved--Grieg, who was his artistic inferior in almost every respect. Yet none of these so seduced his imagination that his independence was overcome--he was always, throughout his maturity, himself; not arrogantly or insistently, but of necessity; he could not be otherwise.

What are the distinguishing traits, after all, of MacDowell's music?

The answer is not easily given. His music is characterised by great buoyancy and freshness, by an abounding vitality, by a constantly juxtaposed tenderness and strength, by a pervading n.o.bility of tone and feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not brooding or hectic, and it is seldom intricate or recondite in its psychology. It is music curiously free from the fevers of s.e.x. And here I do not wish to be misunderstood. This music is anything but androgynous. It is always virile, often pa.s.sionate, and, in its intensest moments, full of force and vigour. But the s.e.xual impulse which underlies it is singularly fine, strong, and controlled. The strange and burdened winds, the subtle delirium, the disorder of sense, that stir at times in the music of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, are not to be found here. In Wagner, in certain songs by Debussy, one often feels, as Pater felt in William Morris's "King Arthur's Tomb," the tyranny of a moon which is "not tender and far-off, but close down--the sorcerer's moon, large and feverish," and the presence of a colouring that is "as of scarlet lilies"; and there is the suggestion of poison, with "a sudden bewildered sickening of life and all things." In the music of MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their interior lives both pa.s.sionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their pa.s.sion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded, but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he is like Brahms. The pa.s.sion by which he is swayed is never, in its expression, ambiguous or exotic, his sensuousness is never luscious.

It is difficult to think of a single pa.s.sage from which that accent upon which I have dwelt--the accent of n.o.bility, of a certain chivalry, a certain rare and spontaneous dignity--is absent. Yet he can be, withal, wonderfully tender and deeply impa.s.sioned, with a sharpness of emotion that is beyond denial. In such songs as "Deserted" (op. 9); "Menie" (op. 34); "The Robin Sings in the Apple Tree," "The West Wind Croons in the Cedar Trees" (op. 47); "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep" (op. 56); "Constancy" (op. 58); "Fair Springtide" (op. 60); in "Lancelot and Elaine"; in "Told at Sunset," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in "An Old Love Story," from "Fireside Tales": in this music the emotion is the distinctive emotion of s.e.x; but it is the s.e.xual emotion known to Burns rather than to Rossetti, to Schubert rather than to Wagner.

He had the rapt and transfiguring imagination, in the presence of nature, which is the special possession of the Celt. Yet he was more than a mere landscape painter. The human drama was for him a continually moving spectacle; he was most sensitively attuned to its tragedy and its comedy,--he was never more potent, more influential, indeed, than in celebrating its events. He is at the summit of his powers, for example, in the superb pageant of heroic grief and equally heroic love which is comprised within the four movements of the "Keltic" sonata, and in the piercing sadness and the transporting tenderness of the "Dirge" in the "Indian" suite.

In its general aspect his later music is not German, or French, or Italian--its spiritual antecedents are Northern, both Celtic and Scandinavian. MacDowell had not the Promethean imagination, the magniloquent pa.s.sion, that are Strauss's; his art is far less elaborate and subtle than that of such typical moderns as Debussy and d'Indy. But it has an order of beauty that is not theirs, an order of eloquence that is not theirs, a kind of poetry whose secrets they do not know; and there speaks through it and out of it an individuality that is persuasive, lovable, unique.

There is no need to attempt, at this juncture, to speculate concerning his place among the company of the greater dead; it is enough to avow the conviction that he possessed genius of a rare order, that he wrought n.o.bly and valuably for the art of the country which he loved.