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Coleridge Taylor's "Song of Hiawatha" was the hit of the Festival, and its performance at Birmingham has hall marked the young composer's fresh, picturesque, and melodic music. I might write a great deal more about the Birmingham Musical Festivals, but time and space forbid.
Where the cantilena appears, every melodic tone must stand apart from the tones of the accompaniment as if in "relief." Compare with this etude the introduction to the Capriccio in B minor, with orchestra, by Felix Mendelssohn, first page. Aside from a few rallentando places, the etude is to be played strictly in time.
The melodic figure was shattered like a bouquet of flowers in a waterfall almost before it had had time to take shape and display real composure. The dissipated elements, scattered to the four corners of the earth, then returned, hesitatingly and with evident contrition, to be reunited in a single chain. It seemed that the mad whirlwind had left them richer, purer and more spiritual.
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.
"Wonderful tone blending in finger passages; a peculiarly crisp, yet veiled staccato; chord playing extraordinary in variety, tender, mysterious, sinister, heroic; a curiously unconventional yet effective melodic delivery; playing replete with power, vitality, and dramatic significance, always forcing upon the ear the phrase, never the tickling of mere notes; a really marvellous command and use of both pedals, these were the characteristics of MacDowell's pianistic art as he displayed it in the exposition of his own works.
The sinister passages seem but developments of moments in "Der Freischütz"; the grand melodic style, the romantic orchestra with its sighing horns and chivalry and flourishes, seem to come directly out of "Euryanthe"; the orchestral scene-painting from the sunrise and other original effects in "Oberon."
Later on, the correct signature should be evolved by experiment, and the same plan followed for the other keys, before the 'rule' for finding the signature is discussed. The melodic form of the scale can then be taught, and both forms practised to give plenty of freedom in the new tonality. The various minor keys should then be taken in the same order as that in which the major keys were taken.
Even Heinrich Porges describes it as a sequence of tones apparently without rule, and has not a word to say about its enthralling melodic beauty. Really what difficulty there is, is only for the eye, and only in one note, the constantly recurring G flat, which is easily accounted for.
Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz, if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness of his melodic line. The music of the "Requiem" is almost entirely a singularly powerful and characteristic line. It is practically unsupported.
This was all that Wagner aimed at in wearing his mediæval costumes; and the wonderful realism and vividness of his dramatic conceptions certainly more than justify the unusual methods he pursued to attain them. After elaborating the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic details of his scores, Wagner considered his main task done, and the orchestration was completed down-stairs in his music room.
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