Among those music-makers of to-day who are both pre-eminent and representative the note of sincere romance is infrequently sounded. The fact must be obvious to the most casual observer of musical art in its contemporary development. The significant work of the most considerable musicians of our time of Strauss, Debussy, Loeffler, d’Indy has few essentially romantic characteristics. It is necessary to distinguish between that fatuous Romanticism of which Mr. Ernest Newman has given an unequalled definition: the Romanticism which expended itself in the fabrication of a pasteboard world of “gloomy forests, enchanted castles, impossible maidens, and the obsolete profession of magic,” and that other and imperishable Spirit of Romance whose infrequent embodiment in modern music I have remarked. That is a romance in no wise divorced from reality is, in fact, but reality diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanticistic properties, it uses them not because of any inherent validity which they possess, but because they may at times be made to serve as symbols. It deals in a truth that is no less authentic because it is conveyed in terms of a beauty that may often be in the last degree incalculable and aerial.

It is to its persistent embodiment of this valid spirit of romance that MacDowell’s work owes its final and particular distinction. I know of no composer who has displayed a like sensitiveness to the finer stuff of romance. He has chosen more than occasionally to employ, in the accomplishment of his purposes, what seems at first to be precisely the magical apparatus so necessary to the older Romanticism. Dryads and elves are his intimate companions, and he dwells at times under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of his music, the moods and events of the natural world, and of the drama that plays incessantly in the hearts of men, are vivified into shapes and designs of irresistible beauty and appeal. He is of those quickened ministers of beauty who attest for us the reality of that changeless and timeless loveliness which the visible world of the senses and the invisible world of the imagination are ceaselessly revealing to the simple of heart, the dream-filled, and the unwise.

MacDowell presents throughout the entire body of his work the noteworthy spectacle of a radical without extravagance, a musician at once in accord with, and detached from, the dominant artistic movement of his day. The observation is more a definition than an encomium. He is a radical in that, to his sense, music is nothing if not articulate. Wagner’s luminous phrase, “the fertilisation of music by poetry,” would have implied for him no mere aesthetic abstraction, but an intimate and ever-present ideal. He was a musician, yet he looked out upon the visible world and inward upon the world of the emotions through the transforming eyes of the poet. He would have none of a formal and merely decorative beauty a beauty serving no expressional need of the heart or the imagination. In this ultimate sense he is to be regarded as a realist a realist with the romantic’s vision, the romantic’s preoccupation; and yet he is as alien to the frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as he is to the academic ideal. Though he conceives the prime mission of music to be interpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, in its function as an expressional instrument, it shall concern itself with essences and impressions, and not at all with transcriptions. His standpoint is, in the last analysis, that of the poet rather than of the typical musician: the standpoint of the poet intent mainly upon a vivid embodiment of the quintessence of personal vision and emotion, who has elected to utter that truth and that emotion in terms of musical beauty. One is, indeed, almost tempted to say that he is paramountly a poet, to whom the supplementary gift of musical speech has been extravagantly vouchsafed.

He is a realist, as I have said applying the term in that larger sense which denotes the transmutation of life into visible or audible form, and which implicates Beethoven as well as Wagner, Schumann as well as Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Debussy as well as Strauss: all those in whom the desire for intelligible utterance coexists with, or supersedes, the impulse toward perfected design. But if MacDowell’s method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He occupies a middle ground between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so frequently declined. It is impossible to conceive him attempting the musical exposition of such themes as kindled the imagination of Strauss when he wrought out his “Heldenleben,” “Zarathustra,” and “Till Eulenspiegel”; nor has he any appreciable affinity with the prismatic subtleties of the younger French school: so that there is little in the accent of his musical speech to remind one of the representative voices of modernity.

Though he has avoided shackling his music to a detailed programme, he has never very seriously espoused the sophistical compromise which concedes the legitimacy of programme-music provided it speaks as potently to one who does not know the subject-matter as to one who does. The bulk of his music no more discloses its full measure of beauty and eloquence to one who is in ignorance of its poetic basis than would Wagner’s “Faust” overture, Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” or Debussy’s “L’Apres-midi d’un Faune.” Its appeal is conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional crisis upon which the musician has built; and in much of his music he has frankly recognized this fact, and has printed at the beginning of such works as the “Idyls” and “Poems” after Goethe and Heine, the “Norse” and “Keltic” sonatas, the “Sea Pieces,” and the “New England Idyls,” the fragment of verse or legend or meditation which has served as the particular stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works he has contented himself with the suggestion of a mood or subject embodied in his title, as, for example, in his “Woodland Sketches,” “To a Wild Rose,” “Will o’ the Wisp,” “At an Old Trysting Place,” “In Autumn,” “From an Indian Lodge,” “To a Water-Lily,” “A Deserted Farm.” That he has been tempted, however, in the direction of the compromise to which I have alluded, is evident from the fact that although his symphonic poem “Lancelot and Elaine” is built upon the frame of an extremely definite sequence of events, such as Lancelot’s downfall in the tournament, his return to the court, Guinevere’s casting away of the trophies, the approach of the barge bearing Elaine’s body, and Lancelot’s reverie by the river bank, he gives in the published score no hint whatever of the particular phases of that moving chronicle of passion and tragedy which he has so faithfully striven to represent. “I would never have insisted,” he wrote in 1899, “that this symphonic poem need mean ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ to everyone. It did to me, however, and in the hope that my artistic enjoyment might be shared by others, I added the title to my music.”

But if MacDowell displayed at times the usual inconsistency of the modern tone-poet in his attitude toward the whole subject of programme-music, the tendency was neither a persistent nor determined one; and he was, as I have noted, even less disposed toward the frankly literal methods of which Strauss and his followers are such invincible exponents. His nearest approach to such diverting expedients as the bleating sheep and the exhilarating wind-machine of “Don Quixote” is in the denotement of the line:

“And like a thunderbolt he falls”

in his graphic paraphrase of Tennyson’s poem, “The Eagle” an indulgence which the most exigent champion of programmatic reserve would probably condone. In the main, MacDowell’s predilection for what he chose to call “suggestive” music finds expression in such continent symbolism as he employs in those elastically wrought tone-poems, brief or vigorously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with memorable vividness in such things as his terse though astonishingly eloquent apostrophe “To a Wandering Iceberg,” and his “In Mid-Ocean,” from the “Sea Pieces”; in “To a Water-lily,” from the “Woodland Sketches”; in the “Winter” and “In Deep Woods” from the “New England Idyls”; in the “Marionettes” ("Soubrette,” “Lover,” “Witch,” “Clown,” “Villain,” “Sweetheart"); in the Raff-like orchestral suite, o ("In a Haunted Forest,” “Summer Idyll,” “The Shepherdess’ Song,” “Forest Spirits"), and in the later and far more important “Indian” suite for orchestra ("Legend,” “Love Song,” “In War-time,” “Dirge,” “Village Festival").

He was, in an extraordinarily complete sense, a celebrant of the natural world. His imagination was enslaved by the miraculous pageant of the visible earth, and he sought tirelessly to transfix some moment of its wonder or its splendour or its terror in permanent images of tone. The melancholy beauty of the autumn woods, the loveliness of quiet waters under fading skies, the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in its voicing of that indefinable and evanescent sense of association which is evoked by certain aspects, certain phases, of the outer world that sudden emotion of things past and irrecoverable which may cling about a field at sunset, or a quiet street at dusk, or a sudden intimation of spring in the scent of lilacs.

But although such themes as he loved to dwell upon in his celebration of the magic of the natural world were very precious to his imagination, the human spectacle held for him, from the first, an emotion scarcely less swift and abundant. His scope is comprehensive: he can voice the archest gaiety, a naïve and charming humour, as in the “Marionettes” and in the songs “From an Old Garden”; there is passion in the symphonic poems and in many of the songs; while in the sonatas and in the “Indian” suite the tragic note is struck with impressive and indubitable authority.

Of the specifically musical traits in which MacDowell exhibits the tendencies and preferences which underlie his art, one must begin by saying that his distinguishing quality that which puts so unmistakable a stamp upon his work eludes precise definition. His tone is unmistakable. Its chief possession is a certain clarity and directness which is apparent no less in moments of great stress and complexity of emotion than in passages of simpler and slighter content. His style has little of the torrential rhetoric, the unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, though it owns something of his forthright quality; nor has it any of Debussy’s withdrawals. One thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the “broad Shakespearian daylight” of Fitzgerald’s fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell’s writing. He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive. It is difficult to recall, in any example of his maturer work, a single passage that is not touched with a measure of beauty and character. He had, of course, his period of crude experimentation, his days of discipleship. In his earlier writing there is not a little that is unworthy of him: much in which one seeks vainly for that note of distinction and personality which sounds so constantly throughout the finer body of his work. But in that considerable portion of his output which is genuinely representative say from his opus 45 onward he sustains his art upon a noteworthy level of fineness and strength.

The range of his expressional gamut is striking. One is at a loss to say whether he is happier in emotional moments of weighty significance, as in many pages of the sonatas and some of the “Sea Pieces,” or in such cameo-like performances as the “Woodland Sketches,” certain of the “Marionettes," and the exquisite song group, “From an Old Garden,” in which he attains an order of delicate eloquence difficult to associate with the mind which shaped the heroic ardours of the “Norse” and “Keltic” sonatas. His capacity for forceful utterance is remarkable. Only in certain pages of Strauss is there anything in contemporary music which compares, for superb virility, dynamic power, and sweep of line, with the opening of the “Keltic” sonata. He has, moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expression. Time and again he astonishes by his ability to charge a composition of the briefest span with an emotional or dramatic content of large and far-reaching significance. His “To the Sea," for example, is but thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a tone-picture which for breadth of conception and concentrated splendour of effect is paralleled in the contemporary literature of the piano only by himself. Consider, also, the “Epilogue” in the revised version of the “Marionettes.” The piece comprises only a score of measures; yet within it the thought of the composer traverses a world of philosophical meditation: here is reflected the mood of one who looks with grave tenderness across the tragi-comedy of human life, in which, he would say to us, we are no less the playthings of a controlling destiny than are the figures of his puppet microcosm.

This scope and amplitude of expression are realised through a method at once plastic and unlaboured; his art has spontaneity the deceptive spontaneity of the expert craftsman. It is not, in its elements, a strikingly novel style. His harmony, per se, is not unusual, if one sets it beside the surprising combinations evolved by such innovators as d’Indy, Debussy, and Strauss. It is in the novel disposition of familiar material in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his “free, instinctive application of the old in a new way” that MacDowell’s emphatic individuality consists. Whether it is a more signal achievement to create a new speech through the readjustment of established locutions than to evolve it from fresh and unworked elements, is open to debate. Be that as it may, however, MacDowell’s achievement is of the former order.

His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable. An over-insistence upon certain formulas eloquent enough in themselves has been charged against it, and the accusation is not without foundation. MacDowell is exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the diminished seventh. There is scarcely a page throughout his later work in which one does not encounter this effect in but slightly varied form. Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely woven he avoids “thinness” as he avoids the banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices. Dissonance in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method. The climax of the second of the “Sea Pieces” “From a Wandering Iceberg” marks about as extreme a point of harmonic conflict as he ever touches. Nor has he been profoundly affected by the passion for unbridled chromaticism engendered in modern music by the procedures of Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. Even in the earlier of the orchestral works, “Hamlet and Ophelia” and “Lancelot and Elaine” both written in Germany in the days when the genius of Wagner was an ambient and inescapable flame the writing is comparatively free from chromatic effects. On the other hand, he is far less audaciously diatonic than Richard Strauss. His style is, in fact, a subtle blend of opposing tendencies.

That his songs constitute almost a third of the entire bulk of his work is not without significance; for his melodic gift is, probably, the most notable possession of his art. His insistence upon the value and importance of the melos was, indeed, one of his cardinal tenets; and he is, in his practice, whether writing for the voice, for piano, or for orchestra, inveterately and frankly melodic: melodic with a suppleness, a breadth, a freshness and spontaneity which are anything but common in the typical music of our day. It is a curious experience to turn from the music of such typical moderns as Loeffler and Debussy, with its elusive melodic contours, its continual avoidance of definite patterns, its passion for the esoteric and its horror of direct communication, to the music of such a writer as MacDowell. For he has accomplished the difficult and perilous feat of writing frankly without obviousness, simply without triteness. His melodic outlines are firm, clean-cut, apprehendable; but they are seldom commonplace in design. His thematic substance at its best in, say, the greater part of the sonatas, the “Sea Pieces,” the “Woodland Sketches,” the “Four Songs” of o has saliency, character, and often great beauty; and even when it is not at its best as in much of his writing up to his opus 45 it has a spirit and colour that lift it securely above mediocrity.

It must have already become evident to anyone who has followed this essay at an exposition of MacDowell’s art that his view of the traditional musical forms is a liberal one. Which is briefly to say that, although his application to his art of the fundamental principles of musical design is deliberate and satisfying, he shares the typical modern distaste for the classic forms. His four sonatas, his two piano concertos, and his two “modern suites” for piano are his only important adventures in the traditional instrumental moulds. The catalogue of his works is innocent of any symphony, overture, string quartet, or cantata. The major portion of his work is as elastic and emancipated in form as it is unconfined in spirit. He preferred to shape his inspiration upon the mould of a definite poetic concept, rather than upon a constructive formula which was, for him, artificial and anomalous. Even in his sonatas the classic prescription is altered or abrogated at will in accordance with the requirements of the underlying poetic idea.