Edward MacDowell Part 2

"To ill.u.s.trate [a point in connection with a discussion of popular music], Professor MacDowell went to the piano to play 'A Hot Time in the Old Town To-night.' After playing a few measures, he turned abruptly toward the cla.s.s, saying: 'Why, that isn't it! What is it I am playing?' Someone answered 'Annie Rooney.' Facing us with a droll smile, he asked if there was anyone present who could play 'A Hot Time.' A dozen boys rushed forward and the one who gained the chair dashed it off with the abandon of a four weeks' old freshman ...

"The lectures on musical form were distinguished by many brilliant demonstrations of MacDowell's genius. The ease and rapidity with which he flashed his thoughts upon the blackboard were both inspiring and bewildering to the student who must grope his way through notes before he can reach an idea. If any were unwise enough to stop even for a moment to catch these spontaneous thoughts as they flew along the staff, they were very apt upon looking up to see them vanis.h.i.+ng like phantoms in a cloud of white chalk. At the same time he made sarabandes, gavottes, minuets, chaconnes, pa.s.sepieds, gigues, polonaises and rondos dance across the piano in quick succession; and his comments were as spirited as his playing.

"Professor MacDowell's criticisms were clear and forceful, and filled with many surprising and humorous touches. Of Bach he said, 'Bach spoke in close, scientific, contrapuntal language. He was as emotional and romantic as Chopin, Wagner or Tchaikovsky; his emotion was expressed in the language of his time. Young women who say they adore Bach play him like a sum in mathematics. They find a grim pleasure in it, like biting on a sore tooth.'

"He never approached the piano like a conqueror. He had a nervous way of saying that he didn't know whether things would go, because he had had no time to practise. After an apologetic little preamble, he would sit down and play these rococo bits of trailing sound with fingers dipped in lightning, fingers that flashed over the keys in perfect evenness and with perfect sureness.

"The closing lectures were in reality delightfully informal concerts for which the cla.s.s began to a.s.semble as early as 8.30 in the morning.

By 9.30 every student would be in his chair, which he had dragged as near to the piano as the early suburbanite would let him. Someone at the window would say, 'Here he comes!' and, entering the room with a huge bundle of music under one arm and his hat in his hand, MacDowell would deposit them on the piano and turn to us with his gracious smile. Then, instead of sitting down, he would continue to walk up and down the room, his thoughts following, apparently, the pace set by his energetic steps. He had an abundant word supply and his short, terse sentences were easy to follow."

This is not the picture of a man who was unqualified for his task, or indifferent, rebellious, or inept in its performance; it is the picture of a man of vital and electric temperament, with almost a genius--certainly with an extraordinary gift--for teaching. His ideals were lofty; he dreamed of a relations.h.i.+p between university instruction and a liberal public culture which was not to be realised in his time. He was anything but complacent; had he been less intolerant in his hatred of unintelligent and indolent thought on the subjects that were near his heart, his way would have been made far easier.

The results of his labours at the university, he finally came to feel, did not warrant the expenditure of the vitality and time that he was devoting to them. He was, in a sense, an anachronism in the position in which he found himself. Both in his ideals and in his plans for bringing about their fulfilment he had reached beyond his day. The field was not yet ripe for his best efforts. It became clear to him that he could not make his point of view operative in what he conceived as the need for a reformation of conditions affecting his work; and on January 18, 1904, after long and anxious deliberation and discussion with his wife, he tendered his resignation as head of the department. His att.i.tude in the matter was grievously misunderstood and misrepresented at the time, to his poignant distress and hara.s.sment. The iron entered deeply into his soul: it was the forerunner of tragedy.

When he took up his work at Columbia his activity as a concert pianist had, of course, to be virtually suspended. With the exception of two short tours of a few weeks' each, he gave up his public appearances altogether until the year of his sabbatical vacation (1902-03). In December, 1902, he went on an extensive concert tour, which took him as far west as San Francisco and occupied all of that winter. The following spring and summer were spent Abroad, in England and on the Continent. In London he appeared in concert, playing his second concerto with the Philharmonic Society on May 14. He returned to America in October, and resumed his work at Columbia.

Meanwhile his composition had continued uninterruptedly. Indeed, the eight years during which he held his Columbia professors.h.i.+p were, in a creative sense, the most important of his life; for to this period belong the "Sea Pieces" (op. 55), the two superb sonatas, the "Norse"

(op. 57) and the "Keltic" (op. 59), and the best of his songs--the four of op. 56 ("Long Ago," "The Swan Bent Low to the Lily," "A Maid Sings Light," "As the Gloaming Shadows Creep"), and the three of op.

58 ("Constancy," "Sunrise," "Merry Maiden Spring"): a product which contains the finest flower of his inspiration, the quintessence of his art.[7] He wrote also during these years the three songs of op.

60 ("Tyrant Love," "Fair Springtide," "To the Golden Rod"); the "Fireside Tales" (op. 61); the "New England Idyls" (op. 62); numerous part-songs, transcriptions, arrangements; and, finally, the greater part of a suite for string orchestra which he never finished to his satisfaction: in fact, nearly one quarter of the bulk of his entire work was composed during these eight years. During this period, moreover, was published all of the music hitherto unprinted which he cared to preserve.

[7] The only one of his works of equal calibre which does not, strictly speaking, belong to this period is the set of "Woodland Sketches"; these were composed during the last part of his stay in Boston, and were published in the year (1896) of his removal to New York.

He had bought in 1896 a piece of property near the town of Peterboro, in southern New Hamps.h.i.+re, consisting of a small farmhouse, some out-buildings, fifteen acres of arable land, and about fifty acres of forest. The buildings he consolidated and made over into a rambling and comfortable dwelling-house; and in this rural "asyl" (as Wagner would have called it), surrounded by the woods and hills that he loved, he spent his summers from then until the end of his life. There most of his later music was written, in a small log cabin which he built, in the heart of the woods, for use as a workshop. Thus his summers were devoted to composition, and his winters to the arduous though absorbing labours of his professors.h.i.+p; in addition, he taught in private a few cla.s.ses for which he made time in that portion of the day which was not taken up by his sessions at the university. During his first two winters in New York he also served as conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, and he was for a time president of the Ma.n.u.script Society, an a.s.sociation of American composers. Altogether, it was a scheme of living which permitted him virtually no opportunity for the rest and idleness which he imperatively needed.

In New York the MacDowells' home was, during the first year, a house in 88th Street, near Riverside Drive. Later they lived at the Majestic Hotel; but during most of the Columbia years--from 1898 till 1902--they occupied an apartment at 96th Street and Central Park West.

After their return from the sabbatical vacation abroad they lived for a year at the Westminster Hotel in Irving Place, and for a year in an apartment house on upper Seventh Avenue, near Central Park. When that was sold and torn down they returned to the Westminster; and there MacDowell's last days were spent.

After he left Columbia in 1904, he continued his private piano cla.s.ses (at some of which he gave free tuition to poor students in whose talent he had confidence). He should have rested--should have ceased both his teaching and his composing; for he was in a threatening condition. Had he spent a year in a sanitarium, or had he stopped all work completely and taken even a brief vacation, he might have averted the collapse which was to come. In the spring of 1905 he began to manifest alarming signs of nervous exhaustion. A summer in Peterboro brought no improvement. That autumn his ailment was seen to be far more deeply seated than had been supposed. There were indications of an obscure brain lesion, baffling but sinister. Then began a very gradual, progressive, and infinitely pathetic decline--the slow beginning of the end. He suffered little pain, and until the last months he preserved in an astonis.h.i.+ng degree his physical well-being.

It was clear almost from the start that he was beyond the aid of medical science, even the boldest and most expert. A disintegration of the brain-tissues had begun--an affection to which specialists hesitated to give a precise name, but which they recognized as incurable. His mind became as that of a little child. He sat quietly, day after day, in a chair by a window, smiling patiently from time to time at those about him, turning the pages of a book of fairy tales that seemed to give him a definite pleasure, and greeting with a fugitive gleam of recognition certain of his more intimate friends.

Toward the last his physical condition became burdensome, and he sank rapidly. At nine o'clock on the evening of January 23, 1908, in the beginning of his forty-seventh year, he died at the Westminster Hotel, New York, in the presence of the heroic woman who for almost a quarter of a century had been his devoted companion, counsellor, helpmate, and friend. After such simple services as would have pleased him, held at St. George's Episcopal Church, on January 25, his body was taken to Peterboro; and on the following day, a Sunday, he was buried in the sight of many of his neighbours, who had followed in procession, on foot, the pa.s.sage of the body through the snow-covered lane from the village. His grave is on an open hill-top, commanding one of the s.p.a.cious and beautiful views that he had loved. On a bronze tablet are these lines of his own, which he had devised as a motto for his "From a Log Cabin," the last music that he wrote:

"A house of dreams untold, It looks out over the whispering tree-tops And faces the setting sun."

CHAPTER II

PERSONAL TRAITS AND VIEWS

In his personal intercourse with the world, MacDowell, like so many sensitive and gifted men, had the misfortune to give very often a wholly false account of himself. In reality a man of singularly lovable personality, and to his intimates a winning and delightful companion, he lacked utterly the social gift, that capacity for ready and tactful address which, even for men of gifts, is not without its uses. It was a deficiency (if a deficiency it is) which undoubtedly cost him much in a material sense. Had he possessed this serviceable and lubricant quality it would often have helpfully smoothed his path.

For those who could penetrate behind the embarra.s.sed and painful reticence that was for him both an impediment and an unconscious s.h.i.+eld, he gave lavishly of the gifts of temperament and spirit which were his; even that lack of ready address, of social adaptability and adjustment, which it is possible to deplore in him, was, for those who knew him and valued him, a not uncertain element of charm: for it was akin to the shyness, the absence of a.s.sertiveness, the entirely genuine modesty, which were of his dominant traits. Yet in his contact with the outer world this incurable shyness sometimes, as I have said, led him into giving a grotesquely untrue impression of himself: he was at times _gauche_, blunt, awkwardly infelicitous in speech or silence, when he would have wished, as he knew perfectly how, to be considerate, gentle, sympathetic, responsive. On the other hand, his shyness and reticence were seemingly contradicted by a downright bluntness, a deliberate frankness in matters of opinion in which his convictions were involved; for his views were most positively held and his convictions were often pa.s.sionate in intensity, and he declared them, upon occasion, with an utter absence of diplomacy, compromise, or equivocation; with a superb but sometimes calamitous disregard of his own interests.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MACDOWELL IN 1892]

Confident and positive to a fault in his adherence to and expression of his principles, he was as morbidly dubious concerning his own performances as he was uneasy under praise. He was tortured by doubts of the value of each new work that he completed, after the flush and ardour generated in its actual expression had pa.s.sed; and he listened to open praise of it in evident discomfort. I have a memory of him on a certain occasion in a private house following a recital at which he had played, almost for the first time, his then newly finished "Keltic" Sonata. Standing in the center of a crowded room, surrounded by enthusiastically effusive strangers who were voluble--and not overpenetrating--in their expressions of appreciation, he presented a picture of unhappiness, of mingled helplessness and discomfort, which was almost pathetic in its genuineness of woe. I was standing near him, and during a momentary lull in the amiable siege of which he was the distressed object, he whispered tragically to me: "Can't we get out of this?--Do you know the way to the back door?" I said I did, and led him through an inconspicuous doorway into a comparatively deserted corridor behind the staircase. I procured for him, through the strategic employment of a pa.s.sing servant, something to eat, and we staid in concealment there until the function had come to an end, and his wife had begun to search for him. He was quite happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the stairs and telling me in detail his conception of certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which he had had in mind while composing his sonata.

To visitors at his house in Peterboro, he said one morning, on leaving them, "I am going to the cabin to write some of my rotten melodies!"

He was sincerely distrustful concerning the worth of any composition which he had finished; especially so, of course, concerning his more youthful performances. He once sent a frantic telegram to Teresa Carreno, upon learning from an announcement that she was to play his early Concert etude (op. 36) for the first time: "Don't put that dreadful thing on your programme"; and for certain of his more popular and hackneyed pieces, as the "Hexentanz" and the much-mauled and over-sentimental song, "Thy Beaming Eyes," he had a detestation that was amusing in its virulence. He regretted at times that his earlier orchestral works--"Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine"--had been published; and he was invariably tormented by questionings and misgivings after he had committed even his ripest work to his publisher. Only the a.s.surances of his wise and devoted wife at times prevented him from recalling a completed work. Yet he was always touched, delighted, and genuinely cheered by what he felt to be sincere and thoughtful praise. To a writer who had published an admiring article concerning some of his later music he wrote:

"MY DEAR MR.----:

"Your article was forwarded to me after all. I wish to thank you for the warm-hearted and sympathetic enthusiasm which prompted your writing it. While my outgivings have always been sincere, I feel only too often their inadequacy to express my ideals; thus what you speak of as accomplishment I fear is often but attempt.

Certainly your sympathy for my aims is most welcome and precious to me, and I thank you again most heartily."

Those who knew the man only through his music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely things of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was overflowingly human, notably full-blooded. On his "farm" (as he called it) at Peterboro he lived, when he was not composing, a robust and vigorous outdoor life. He was an ardent sportsman, and he spent much of his time in the woods and fields, fis.h.i.+ng, riding, walking, hunting. He had a special relish for gardening and for photography, and he liked to undertake laborious jobs in carpentry, at which he was quite deft. That his feeling for the things of the natural world was acutely sensitive and coloured by imagination and emotion is abundantly evidenced in his music. He was fond of taking long, leisurely drives and rides through the rich and varied hill country about Peterboro, and many of the impressions that were then garnered and stored have found issue in some of his most intimate and affecting music--as in the "Woodland Sketches" and "New England Idyls." He had an odd, naive tenderness for growing things and for the creatures of the woods: it distressed him to have his wife water some of the flowers in the garden without watering them all; and though an excellent shot, he never brought down game without a pang--it used to be said at Peterboro that for this reason he only "pretended to hunt," despite his expertness as a marksman.

In his intellectual interests and equipment he presented a striking contrast to the brainlessness of the average musician. His tastes were singularly varied and catholic. An omnivorous reader of poetry, an inquisitive delver in the byways of mediaeval literature, an authority in mythological detail, he was at the same time keenly interested in contemporary affairs. He read, and discussed with eagerness and ac.u.men, scientific, economic, and historical deliverances; and he enjoyed books of travel, biographies, dramatic literature. Mark Twain he adored, and delighted to quote, and almost to the end of his life he read with inexhaustible pleasure Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus." In the later years of his activity he fell captive to the new and unaccustomed music of Fiona Macleod's exquisite prose and verse; he wanted to dedicate his "New England Idyls" to the author of "Pharais" and "From the Hills of Dream," and wrote for her permission; but the ident.i.ty of the mysterious author was then jealously guarded, and his letter must have gone astray; for it was never answered.

His erudition was extraordinary. He exemplified in a marked degree the truth that the typical modern music-maker touches hands with the whole body of culture and the humanities in a sense which would have been simply incredible to Mozart or Schubert. He was, intellectually, one of the most fully and brilliantly equipped composers in the history of musical art. He had read widely and curiously in many literatures, and the knowledge which he had acquired he applied to the elucidation of aesthetic and philosophical problems touching the theory and practice of music. He had meditated deeply concerning the art of which he was always a tireless student--had come to conclusions concerning its actual and a.s.sumed records, its tendencies, its potentialities. He was a vigorous and original critic, and he had shrewd, cogent, and clear-cut reasons for the particular views at which he had arrived; whether one could always agree with them or not, they invariably commanded respect. Yet his erudition was seldom displayed. One came upon it unexpectedly in conversation with him, through the accident of some reference or the discussion of some disputed point of fact.

In his appearance MacDowell suggested a fusion of Scandinavian and American types. His eyes, of a light and brilliant blue, were perhaps his most salient feature. They betrayed his inextinguishable humour.

When he was amused--and he was seldom, in conversation, grave for long--they lit up with an extraordinary animation; he had an unconscious trick of blinking them rapidly once or twice, with the effect of a fugitive twinkle, which was oddly infectious. His laugh, too, was communicative; he did not often laugh aloud; his enjoyment found vent in a low, rich chuckle, which, with the lighting up of his eyes, was wholly and immediately irresistible. The large head, the strong, rather boyish face, with its singular mobility and often sweetness of expression, the bright, vital eyes, set wide apart, the abundant (though not long), dark hair tinged with grey, the white skin, the sensitive mouth, rather large and full-lipped, the strong jaws, the st.u.r.dy and athletic build,--he was somewhat above medium height, with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and large, muscular, finely shaped hands,--his general air of physical soundness and vigour: all these combined to form an outer personality that was strongly attractive. His movements were quick and decisive. To strangers, even when he felt at ease, his manner was diffident, yet of an indescribable, almost childlike, simplicity and charm. His voice in speaking was low-pitched and subdued, like his laugh; in conversation, when he was entirely himself, he could be brilliantly effective and witty, and his mirth-loving propensities were irrepressible.

His sense of humour, which was of true Celtic richness, was fluent and inexhaustible. To an admirer who had affirmed in print that certain imaginative felicities in some of the verse which he wrote for his songs recalled at moments the phrasing of Whitman and Shakespeare, he wrote:

"I will confide in you that if, in the next world, I should happen upon the wraiths of Shakespeare, Whitman, and Co., I would light out without delay. Good heavens! I blush at the thought of it! A header through a cloud would be the only thing.--Seriously, I was deeply touched by your praise and wish I were more worthy."

His pupil and friend, Mr. W.H. Humiston, recalls that, in going over MacDowell's sketchbooks and ma.n.u.scripts after his death, he found that many of the ma.n.u.scripts had been rewritten several times: "I would find a movement begun and continued for half a page, then it would be broken off suddenly, and a remark like this written at the end:--'Hand organ to the rescue!'"

I told him once that I had first heard his "To a Wild Rose" played by a high-school girl, on a high-school piano, at a high-school graduation festivity. "Well," he remarked, with his sudden illumination, "I suppose she pulled it up by the roots!" Some one sent him at about this time, relates Mr. Humiston, a programme of an organ recital which contained this same "Wild Rose" piece. "He was not pleased with the idea, having in mind the expressionless organ of a dozen years ago when only a small portion of most organs was enclosed in a swell-box. Doubtless thinking also of a style of organ performance which plays Schumann's _Traumerei_ on the great organ diapasons, he said it made him think of a hippopotamus wearing a clover leaf in his mouth."

A member of one of his cla.s.ses at Columbia, finding some unoccupied s.p.a.ce on the page of his book after finis.h.i.+ng his exercise, filled up the s.p.a.ce with rests, at the end of which he placed a double bar. When his book was returned the page was covered with corrections--all except these bars of rests, which were enclosed in a red line and marked: "This is the only correct pa.s.sage in the exercise."

He once observed in a lecture that "Bach differed in almost everything from Handel, except that he was born the same year and was killed by the same doctor."

He was often sarcastic; but his was a sarcasm without sting or rancour. Bitterness, indeed, was one of the few normal attributes which he did not possess. Mr. Humiston tells of lunching with him unexpectedly at a restaurant one day, just after his resignation from Columbia had been accepted. "We sat over our coffee and cigars until nearly four o'clock, and among other things he talked of that [the Columbia matter]. There was not a word of bitterness or reproach toward anyone, but rather a deep feeling of disappointment that his plans and ideals for the training and welfare of young artists should have been so completely defeated."

In his methods of work he was, like most composers of first-rate quality, at the mercy of his inspiration. He never composed at the piano, in the ordinary meaning of the phrase. That is to say, he never sat down to the piano with the idea that he wanted to compose a song or a piano piece. But sometime, when he might be improvising, as he was fond of doing when alone, a theme, an idea, might come to him, and almost before he knew it he had sketched something in a rudimentary form. He had a fancy that the technique of composition suffered as much as that of the piano if it was allowed to go for weeks and months without exercise. The constant work and excitement that his winters in Boston and New York involved, made it necessary for him to let days and weeks slip by with no creative work accomplished. Yet he always tried to write each day a few bars of music. Often in this way he evolved a theme for which he afterward found a use. In looking over a sketch-book in the summer he would run across something he liked, and the idea would expand into a matured work.

His sketch-books are full of all kinds of random and fugitive material--half-finished fugues, canons, piano pieces, songs, single themes. Undoubtedly this habit of work had its value when he came to the leisurely months of summer; for he did not then have to go through a period of technical "warming up." There were many days when he did not write a note, but he always intended to, and usually did. When he was absorbed in a particular composition he kept at it, almost night and day, save for the hours he always tried to spend in the open air, and two hours in the evening when, no matter how late it might be, he sat quietly with his wife, reading or talking, smoking, and, in earlier days, enjoying a gla.s.s of beer and some food. His love of reading was a G.o.dsend to him when the waters were more than usually troubled and his brain was in a whirl.

In the actual work of composition he was elaborately meticulous--not often to the extent of changing an original plan, but in minor details; he never ceased working on a score until the music was out of his hands, or entirely put aside. Sometimes he tried over a few measures on the piano as many as fifty times, changing the value or significance of a note; as a result, his piano writing is almost always "pianistic." In one respect he was sometimes careless: in the noting of the expression marks. By the time he arrived at that duty he was usually tired out. For this reason, much in his printed music is marked differently from the way he actually played it in concert. He never, in performance, changed a note, save in a few of the earlier pieces; but in details of expression he often departed widely from the printed directions.

He was always profoundly absorbed when at work, though not to the extent of being able to compose amid noise or disturbance. He needed to isolate himself as much as possible; although, when it could not be avoided, he contrived to work effectively under obstructive conditions; the Largo of the "Sonata Tragica," for example, was written in Boston when he was hara.s.sed by drudgery and care. During the earlier days at Peterboro he composed in a music room which was joined to the main body of the house by a covered pa.s.sage; in this way he could hear nothing of the household workings, and was unaware of the chance caller. No one was ever allowed to intrude upon him, save his wife. Yet certain outside noises were still apparent; so the log cabin in the woods was built. There he used to go nearly every morning, coming home when he felt disposed, and usually going to the golf grounds for a game before dinner, which he always had at night.

He kept a piano in the music room as well as at the log cabin; so if he felt like working in the evening he could do so; and when he was especially engrossed he often worked into the small hours. His unselfishness made it easy for his wife, when she deemed a change and rest essential, to make the excuse that _she_ needed it. After a preliminary protest he would usually give in, and they would leave Peterboro for a few days' excursion.

He knew discouragement in an extreme form. Many weeks, even months, had to pa.s.s before his discontent over the last child of his imagination would become normal. Particularly was this so with the larger works; though each one was started in a fever of inspiration, a longing to reduce to actual form the impossible. He was always disheartened when a work was finished, but he was too sane in his judgment not to have moments when he could estimate fairly the quality of what he had written. But those were rare moments; as a rule, it was in his future music that he was always going to do his "really good work," and he longed ardently for leisure and freedom from care, so that, as he once bitterly said, he would not have to press into a small piano piece material enough to make a movement of a symphony.

His preferences in the matter of his own music were not very definite.

In 1903, when he had finished all that he was to write, he expressed a preference for the "Dirge" from the "Indian" suite above anything that he had composed. "Of all my music," he confessed at this time, "the 'Dirge' in the 'Indian' suite pleases me most. It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it. In it an Indian woman laments the death of her son; but to me, as I wrote it, it seemed to express a world-sorrow rather than a particularised grief." His estimate of the value of the music has, naturally, no extraordinary importance; but my conviction is that, in this instance, his judgment was correct. As to the sonatas, he cared most for the "Keltic"; after that, for the "Eroica," as a whole; though I doubt whether there was anything in the two that he cared for quite as he did for the Largo in the "Tragica"

and certain parts of the "Norse." He felt concerning the "Keltic" that there was hardly a bar in it that he wanted changed, that he had scarcely ever written any thing so rounded, so complete, in which the joining was so invisible. He played it _con amore_, and it grew to be part of himself as no other of his works ever did. Technically, it was never hard for him, whereas he found the "Eroica" exhausting, physically and mentally.

Of the smaller works he preferred the "Sea Pieces," as a whole, above all the others; yet there were single things in each of the other sets for which he cared perhaps as much. Of the "Sea Pieces" those he liked best were: "To the Sea," "From the Depths," "In Mid-Ocean"; of the "Fireside Tales": the "Haunted House," "Salamander," "'Brer Rabbit"; and he had a tender feeling for "In a German Forest," which always seemed to bring back the Frankfort days to his memory. Of the "New England Idyls," his favorites were: "In Deep Woods," "Mid-Winter,"

"From a Log Cabin."