Edward MacDowell | Page 2

the influence of music.
In some compositions combining both words and music, one will be
very much the inferior of the other, and the thoughtful student or
listener can but regret the discrepancy. Perhaps the words will be
imposing and the musical setting trivial, or the music rich and full of
color, but the words meaningless and inadequate. MacDowell's songs
are satisfying. In his work he reminds one very forcibly of Sidney
Lanier, whose genius was perfectly balanced. His music was full of
poetry and his poetry ran over with music. His was an harmonious
nature and no amount of external discord could cause him to lose his
keynote. Applying his own beautiful words to himself:
"His song was only living aloud,
His work a singing with his hands."
Lanier played beautifully upon a silver flute, which he lovingly
describes as "a petal on a harmony." He was a member of the Peabody
Symphony orchestra of Baltimore, and Asger Hamerik, his director for
six years, says of him: "In his hands the flute no longer remained a
mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set
heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth
and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry. His conception of music
was not reached by an analytic study of note by note, but was intuitive
and spontaneous, like a woman's reason." In 1878 he played a flute
concerto at a symphony concert, and the director said of him: "His tall,
handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble
joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound.

Such distinction, such refinement! He stood the master, the genius."
In studying MacDowell, one is reminded at every turn of this dual
genius. Like Lanier, his message is being better understood every year,
and now that he is gone, "fulfillment is dropping on a come-true
dream."
MacDowell had great advantages over Lanier in his early life in
freedom from financial worry. In his youth he was privileged to travel
and search until he found his own real masters, in the Frankfort
Conservatory, where he studied piano with Heymann and composition
with Raff. At Weimar he met Liszt, who recognized his ability and
accorded him such unstinted praise that he was invited to play his first
piano suite before the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musik-Verein at its
nineteenth annual convention, held at Zurich in July, 1882. Both the
composition and his rendition of it won enthusiastic appreciation and
applause.
Lanier had a hard, brave struggle to maintain his ideals in the face of a
continually thwarting fate that would have caused many a man,
stronger physically than he, to become discouraged, despairing. Ill
health, poverty and lack of appreciation of his life work had not the
power to destroy his optimism. He bravely waged an unequal combat
with the three, when many a man would have fallen on his own sword
to end the bitter struggle with either one of them. From out the gloom
he sang thus:
"The dark hath many dear avails,
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams and with the heavenly Muse."
Just at the awakening of public appreciation of his work and
recognition of his right to rank as America's greatest composer of
music, MacDowell died to the world of men through a mental collapse
brought on by over-work, and for two years, forgetting that there was
such a thing as music, the great tone-poet dwelt in a soundless world.

Sorrow for such a fate at the zenith of a career of so much promise was
world-wide, and many hoped that he would emerge from the dark, after
a time, with his genius enriched by long subjective communion with
the "heavenly Muse"; but he had dwelt too long in the abstract world of
sound and had heard the music of the spheres until earth tones became
fainter and fainter and finally ceased altogether.
Then, after having admitted his greatness during those two shadowed
years, when the hand of death rang down the curtain on his

earth-drama, his contemporaries began to examine more critically into
the why and wherefore of the decision that accorded him leadership.
A well-known critic calls him the American Grieg, but while
applauding the fanciful style of the Norwegian, one often hears
MacDowell accused of being merely capricious. But what is caprice?
Bishop Trench reminds us in his famous treatise that the word is
derived from capra, "a goat," and represents, in a picturesque manner, a
mental movement as unaccountable, as little to be calculated on
beforehand, as the springs and bounds of that whimsical animal.
The work of MacDowell certainly has the characteristic vigor and
vividness, the unstudied activity, the unexpected leaps and springs that
the derivation of the word "caprice" suggests. And, if one cares for
mysticism,