Edward MacDowell
Porte, John F.
English
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EDWARD MACDOWELL
A Great American Tone Poet, His Life and Music
by
JOHN F. PORTE
Author of _Edward Elgar_, _Sir Charles V. Stanford_, etc.
With a Portrait of Edward MacDowell and Musical Illustrations in
the Text
New York:
E.P. Dutton & Company
681 Fifth Avenue
1922
_I do like the works of the American composer MacDowell! What a
musician! He is sincere and personal--what a poet--what exquisite
harmonies!--Jules Massenet._
_I consider MacDowell the ideally endowed composer.--Edvard
Grieg._
[Illustration]
FROM MACDOWELL'S COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LECTURES.
(Published as _Critical and Historical Essays_).
_For it is in the nature of the spiritual part of mankind to
shrink from the earth, to aspire to something higher; a bird
soaring in the blue above us has something of the ethereal; we
give wings to our angels. On the other hand, a serpent impresses
us as something sinister. Trees, with their strange fight against
all the laws of gravity, striving upward unceasingly, bring us
something of hope and faith; the sight of them cheers us. A land
without trees is depressing and gloomy.
In spite of the strange twistings of ultra modern music, a simple
melody still embodies the same pathos for us that it did for our
grandparents.
We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us like a
homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky--we put this
confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed, the "sonata
form," or perhaps even the third rondo form, for we have quite an
assortment. Should the idea survive and grow too large for the
bed, and if we have learned to love it too much to cut off its
feet and thus make it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why
we run the risk of having some critic wise in his theoretical
knowledge, say, as was and is said of Chopin, "He is weak in
sonata form!"
In art our opinions must, in all cases, rest directly on the
thing under consideration and not on what is written about it.
Without a thorough knowledge of music, including its history and
development, and, above all, musical "sympathy," individual
criticism is, of course, valueless; at the same time the
acquirement of this knowledge and sympathy is not difficult, and
I hope that we may yet have a public in America that shall be
capable of forming its own ideas, and not be influenced by
tradition, criticism, or fashion.
Every person with even the very smallest love and sympathy for art
possesses ideas which are valuable to that art. From the tiniest
seeds sometimes the greatest trees are grown. Why, therefore,
allow these tender germs of individualism to be smothered by that
flourishing, arrogant bay tree of tradition--fashion, authority,
convention, etc.
No art form is so fleeting and so subject to the dictates of
fashion as opera. It has always been the plaything of fashion,
and suffers from its changes.
Always respectable in his forms, no one else could have made
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