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Updated: May 28, 2025
MacDowell's first interview with Raff, in the autumn of 1879, was, as he relates, "not promising." "Heymann took me to him and told him, among other things, that, having studied for several years the 'French School' of composition, I wished to study in Germany.
The following summer , the death of a friend of his earlier Frankfort days, Lindsay Deas, a Scotchman, left vacant in Edinburgh the post of examiner for the Royal Academy of Music, and Deas's family presented MacDowell's name as a candidate.
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.
The influence of Raff is of the utmost importance in MacDowell's music, and I have been told that the great romancist made a protégé of him, and would lock him in a room for hours till he had worked out the most appalling musical problems. Through Raff's influence he became first piano teacher at the Darmstadt Conservatorium in 1881.
With difficulty he reached it and he leaned awhile against the pillar, for his mind wandered, and he knew nothing for a space. So stood Cuculain, even in death-pangs, a terror to his enemies, for a deep spring of stern valour was opened in his soul, and the might of his unfathomable spirit sustained him. Thus perished Cuculain ..." Superb as this is, it is paralleled by MacDowell's tone-picture.
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. MacDowell's impulse toward significant expression was not slow in declaring itself.
Of that other trait to which I have referred his not exceptional preoccupation with a purely musical plan at the expense of dramatic and emotional congruity the attentive observer will not want for examples in almost any of MacDowell's song-groups. Such infelicities are difficult to account for in the work of a musician so exceedingly sensitive in matters of poetic fitness as he.
Burnham is a warm admirer of the works of our great American composer, and has prepared an entire program of MacDowell's music, which included the Tragica Sonata, Polonaise, and many of the shorter pieces. In a conversation with Mr.
It was a fortunate and charming conceit which prompted the plan of the series, with its half-playful, half-ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, there is, throughout, an undertone of grave and meditative tenderness which it is one of the peculiar properties of MacDowell's art to communicate and enforce.
There is here a turn of phrase, a quality of sentiment, which are notably fresh and strange. There is in this, and in "By Smouldering Embers," a graver tenderness, a more pervasive sobriety, than he had revealed before. Read over the D-flat major section of "An Old Love Story." Throughout MacDowell's previous work one will find no passage quite like it in contour and emotion.
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