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The old gentleman had laughed out genially. "MacDowell doesn't write poetry, except short things lines for headings. He makes it on the piano." "Makes an old white-pine tree?" demanded Uncle William. "Well something like that." Uncle William returned to his program.
The final examination in course I of the Department of Music was in progress in the back room, the door of which opened at intervals as one pupil came out and another went in. The examination was oral and private, and when the door closed behind me Professor MacDowell, who was standing at the open window, turned with a smile and motioned me toward a chair.
At Florence, we left the stage, and went to the little tavern once more; the stage route did not lie in our direction, so we must hire a private conveyance to bring us to Camp MacDowell. Jack found a man who had a good pair of ponies and an open buckboard. Towards night we set forth to cross the plain which lies between Florence and the Salt River, due northwest by the map.
New York is rather the Mecca than the birthplace of artists, but it can boast the nativity of MacDowell, who improvised his first songs here December 18, 1861. He began the study of the piano at an early age. One of his teachers was Mme. Teresa Carreño, to whom he has dedicated his second concerto for the piano.
This state continued for over two years, until his final release, January 23, 1908, as he had just entered his forty-seventh year. The old Westminster Hotel had been the MacDowell home through the long illness. From here is but a step to St. George's Episcopal Church, where a simple service was held.
It would have afforded much comfort to the Roman Catholics had there been a priest stationed there. The only sermon I ever heard in old Camp MacDowell was delivered by a Mormon Bishop and was of a rather preposterous nature, neither instructive nor edifying. But the good Catholics read their prayer-books at home, and the rest of us almost forgot that such organizations as churches existed.
James Huneker has not extravagantly called "the most marked contribution to solo sonata literature since Brahms' F-minor piano sonata"; yet it is not so fine a work as any one of the three sonatas which MacDowell afterward wrote.
Rubinstein himself, MacDowell was told by one of the students, would have had to reform his pianistic manners if he had placed himself under the guidance of the Stuttgart pedagogues. Nor does the system of instruction then in effect at the Conservatory appear to have been thorough even within its own sphere.
"Often though I was with him sometimes a week at a time in Peterboro I never could persuade him to play for me. I once asked Paderewski to play for me his new set of songs, and he promptly did so. But MacDowell always was 'out of practice, or had some other excuse, generally a witticism or bit of sarcasm at his own expense. I am sorry now that I did not urge him with more persistence, for he might have yielded in the end, and I would have got a more intime idea of his playing; for after all a musical tête-
At all events, if we are not to meet, I am glad to read in the papers of your artistical success in Amerika. With my best wishes, I am, dear Sir, Yours very truly, MacDowell when he learned of her husband's collapse: CHRISTIANIA, December 14, 1905. DEAR MADAM: The news of MacDowell's serious illness has deeply affected me.
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