Part 2 (1/2)
E.A. MACDOWELL, Op. 37, No. 1.
Copyright, 1889, Arthur P. Schmidt.]
But MacDowell did not reach his freedom without a struggle against academia. His opus 10 is a piano suite published at the age of twenty-two, and opus 14 is another; both contain such obsolescences as a presto, fugue, scherzino, and the like. But for all the cla.s.sic garb, the hands are the hands of Esau. In one of the pieces there is even a motto tucked, ”All hope leave ye behind who enter here!” Can he have referred to the limbo of cla.s.sicism?
It is a far cry from these to the liberality that inspired the new impressionism of ”Woodland Sketches” (op. 51) and ”Sea Pieces” (op.
55), in which he gives a legitimate musical presentation of a faintly perfumed ”Wild Rose” or ”Water Lily,” but goes farther, and paints, with wonderful tone, the moods inspired by reverie upon the uncouth dignity and stoic savagery of ”An Indian Lodge,” the lonely New England twilight of ”A Deserted Farm,” and all the changing humors of the sea, majesty of sunset or star-rise, and even the lucent emerald of an iceberg. His ”From Uncle Remus” is not so successful; indeed, MacDowell is not sympathetic with negro music, and thinks that if we are to found a national school on some local manner, we should find the Indian more congenial than the lazy, sensual slave.
He has carried this belief into action, not only by his scientific interest in the collection and compilation of the folk-music of our prairies, but by his artistic use of actual Indian themes in one of his most important works, his ”Indian Suite” for full orchestra, a work that has been often performed, and always with the effect of a new and profound sensation, particularly in the case of the deeply impressive dirge.
A proof of the success of MacDowell as a writer in the large forms is the fact that practically all of his orchestral works are published in Germany and here, not only in full score, but in arrangement for four hands. They include ”Hamlet;” ”Ophelia” (op. 22); ”Launcelot and Elaine” (op. 26), with its strangely mellow and varied use of horns for Launcelot, and the entrusting of the plaintive fate of ”the lily maid of Astolat” to the string and wood-wind choirs; ”The Saracens”
and ”The Lovely Alda” (op. 30), two fragments from the Song of Roland; and the Suite (op. 42), which has been played at least eight times in Germany and eleven times here.
The first movement of this last is called ”In a Haunted Forest.” You are reminded of Siegfried by the very name of the thing, and the music enforces the remembrance somewhat, though very slightly.
Everything reminds one of Wagner nowadays,--even his predecessors.
Rudyard Kipling has by his individuality so copyrighted one of the oldest verse-forms, the ballad, that even ”Chevy Chace” looks like an advance plagiarism. So it is with Wagner. Almost all later music, and much of the earlier, sounds Wagnerian. But MacDowell has been reminded of Bayreuth very infrequently in this work. The opening movement begins with a _sotto voce_ syncopation that is very presentative of the curious audible silence of a forest. The wilder moments are superbly instrumented.
The second movement, ”Summer Idyl,” is delicious, particularly in the chances it gives the flautist. There is a fragmentary cantilena which would make the fortune of a comic opera. The third number, ”In October,” is particularly welcome in our music, which is strangely and sadly lacking in humor. There is fascinating wit throughout this harvest revel. ”The Shepherdess' Song” is the fourth movement. It is not precieuse, and it is not ba.n.a.l; but its simplicity of pathos is a whit too simple. The final number, ”Forest Spirits,” is a brilliant climax. The Suite as a whole is an important work. It has detail of the most charming art. Best of all, it is staunchly individual. It is MacDowellian.
While the modern piano sonata is to me anathema as a rule, there are none of MacDowell's works that I like better than his writings in this form. They are to me far the best since Beethoven, not excepting even Chopin's (_pace_ his greatest prophet, Huneker). They seem to me to be of such stuff as Beethoven would have woven had he known in fact the modern piano he saw in fancy.
The ”Sonata Tragica” (op. 45) begins in G minor, with a bigly pa.s.sionate, slow introduction (metronomed in the composer's copy, [quarter-note]-50). The first subject is marked in the same copy, though not in the printed book, [half-note]-69, and the appealingly pathetic second subject is a little slower. The free fantasy is full of storm and stress, with a fierce pedal-point on the trilled leading-tone. In the reprise the second subject, which was at first in the dominant major, is now in the tonic major, though the key of the sonata is G minor. The allegro is metronomed [quarter-note]-138, and it is very short and very wild. Throughout, the grief is the grief of a strong soul; it never degenerates into whine. Its largo is like the tread of an aeschylean _choros_, its allegro movements are wild with anguish, and the occasional uplifting into the major only emphasizes the sombre whole, like the little rifts of clearer harmony in Beethoven's ”Funeral March on the Death of a Hero.”
The last movement begins with a ringing _pomposo_, and I cannot explain its meaning better than by quoting Mrs. MacDowell's words: ”Mr. MacDowell's idea was, so to speak, as follows: He wished to heighten the darkness of tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph. Therefore, he attempted to make the last movement a steadily progressive triumph, which, at its climax, is utterly broken and shattered. In doing this he has tried to epitomize the whole work.
While in the other movements he aimed at expressing tragic details, in the last he has tried to generalize; thinking that the most poignant tragedy is that of catastrophe in the hour of triumph.”
The third sonata (op. 57) is dedicated to Grieg and to the musical exploitation of an old-time Skald reciting glorious battles, loves, and deaths in an ancient castle. The atmosphere of mystery and barbaric grandeur is obtained and sustained by means new to piano literature and potent in color and vigor. The sonata formula is warped to the purpose of the poet, but the themes have the cla.s.sic ideal of kins.h.i.+p. The battle-power of the work is tremendous. Huneker calls it ”an epic of rainbow and thunder,” and Henry T. Finck, who has for many years devoted a part of his large ardor to MacDowell's cause, says of the work: ”It is MacDowellish,--more MacDowellish than anything he has yet written. It is the work of a musical thinker. There are harmonies as novel as those we encounter in Schubert, Chopin, or Grieg, yet with a stamp of their own.”
The ”Sonata Eroica” (op. 50) bears the legend ”Flos regum Arthurus.”
It is also in G minor. The spirit of King Arthur dominates the work ideally, and justifies not only the ferocious and warlike first subject with its peculiar and influential rhythm, but the old-fas.h.i.+oned and unadorned folk-tone of the second subject. In the working out there is much bustle and much business of trumpets. In the reprise the folk-song appears in the tonic minor, taken most unconventionally in the ba.s.s under elaborate arpeggiations in the right hand. The coda, as in the other sonata, is simply a strong pa.s.sage of climax. Arthur's supernatural nature doubtless suggested the second movement, with its elfin airs, its flibbertigibbet virtuosity, and its magic of color. The third movement might have been inspired by Tennyson's version of Arthur's farewell to Guinevere, it is such a rich fabric of grief. The finale seems to me to picture the Morte d'Arthur, beginning with the fury of a storm along the coast, and the battle ”on the waste sand by the waste sea.” Moments of fire are succeeded by exquisite deeps of quietude, and the death and apotheosis of Arthur are hinted with daring and complete equivalence of art with need.
Here is no longer the tinkle and swirl of the elf dances; here is no more of the tireless search for novelty in movement and color. This is ”a flash of the soul that can.” Here is Beethoven _redivivus_. For half a century we have had so much pioneering and scientific exploration after piano color and tenderness and fire, that men have neglected its might and its tragic powers. Where is the piano-piece since Beethoven that has the depth, the breadth, the height of this huge solemnity? Chopin's sensuous wailing does not afford it.
Schumann's complex eccentricities have not given it out. Brahms is too pa.s.sionless. Wagner neglected the piano. It remained for a Yankee to find the austere peak again! and that, too, when the sonata was supposed to be a form as exhausted as the epic poem. But all this is the praise that one is laughed at for bestowing except on the graves of genius.
The cautious Ben Jonson, when his erstwhile taproom roisterer, Will Shakespeare, was dead, defied ”insolent Greece or haughty Rome” to show his superior. With such authority, I feel safe in at least defying the contemporary schools of insolent Russia or haughty Germany to send forth a better musicwright than our fellow townsman, Edward MacDowell.
_Edgar Stillman Kelley._
[Ill.u.s.tration: EDGAR STILLMAN KELLEY.]
While his name is known wherever American music is known in its better aspects, yet, like many another American, his real art can be discovered only from his ma.n.u.scripts. In these he shows a very munificence of enthusiasm, scholars.h.i.+p, invention, humor, and originality.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of Edgar Stillman Kelley]
Kelley is as thorough an American by descent as one could ask for, his maternal ancestors having settled in this country in 1630, his paternal progenitors in 1640, A.D. Indeed, one of the ancestors of his father made the dies for the pine-tree s.h.i.+lling, and a great-great-grandfather fought in the Revolution.
Kelley began his terrestrial career April 14, 1857, in Wisconsin. His father was a revenue officer; his mother a skilled musician, who taught him the piano from his eighth year to his seventeenth, when he went to Chicago and studied harmony and counterpoint under Clarence Eddy, and the piano under Ledochowski. It is interesting to note that Kelley was diverted into music from painting by hearing ”Blind Tom”