Unicorns

Admirers of Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica may recall the last movement, in which, after a triumphant climax, the curtain falls on tragic misery. It was the very Greek-like belief of MacDowell that nothing is more sublimely awful than "to heighten the darkness of tragedy by making it follow closely on the heels of triumph." This he accomplished in his first sonata, and fate has ironically transposed to the life of its composer the cruel and tragic drama of his own music. Despite occasional days brightened by a flitting hope, the passing of Edward MacDowell has begun. He is no longer an earth-dweller. His body is here, but his brain elsewhere. Not mad, not melancholy, not sunken in the stupor of indifference, his mind is translated to a region where serenity, even happiness, dwells. It is doubtless the temporary arrest of the dread mental malady before it plunges its victims into darkness. Luckily, with the advent of that last phase, the body will also succumb, and the most poetic composer of music in America be for us but a fragrant memory.

Irony is a much-abused word, yet does it not seem the very summit of pitiless irony for a man of MacDowell's musical and intellectual equipment and physical health to be stricken down at the moment when, after the hard study of twenty-five years, he has, as the expression goes, found himself? And the gods were good to him--too good.

At his cradle poetry and music presided. He was a born tone-poet. He had also the painter's eye and the interior vision of the seer. A mystic and a realist. The practical side of his nature was shown by his easy grasp of the technics of pianoforte-playing. He had a large, muscular hand, with a formidable grip on the keyboard. Much has been said of the idealist MacDowell, but this young man, who had in his veins Scotch, Irish, and English blood, loved athletic sports; loved, like Hazlitt, a fast and furious boxing-match. The call of his soul won him for music and poetry. Otherwise he could have been a sea-captain, a soldier, or an explorer in far-away countries. He had the physique; he had the big, manly spirit. We are grateful, selfishly grateful, considering his life's tragedy, that he became a composer.

Here, again, in all this abounding vitality, the irony of the skies is manifest. Never a dissipated man, without a touch of the improvidence we ascribe to genius, a practical moralist--rare in any social condition--moderate in his tastes, though not a Puritan, he nevertheless has been mowed down by the ruthless reaper of souls as if his were negligible clay. But he was reckless of the most precious part of him, his brain. He killed that organ by overwork. Not for gain--the money-getting ideal and this man were widely asunder--but for the love of teaching, for the love of sharing with others the treasures in his overflowing storehouse, and primarily for the love of music. He, American as he was--it is sad to speak of him in the past tense--and in these piping days of the pursuit of the gold piece, held steadfast to his art. He attempted to do what others have failed in, he attempted to lead, here in our huge, noisy city, antipathetic to æsthetic creation, the double existence of a composer and a pedagogue. He burned away the delicate neurons of the cortical cells, and to-day he cannot say "pianoforte" without a trial. He suffers from aphasia, and locomotor ataxia has begun to manifest itself. It would be tragedy in the household of any man; it is doubly so in the case of Edward MacDowell.

He has just passed forty-five years and there are to his credit some sixty works, about one hundred and thirty-two compositions in all. These include essays in every form, except music-drama--symphonic and lyric, concertos and sonatas for piano, little piano pieces of delicate workmanship, charged with poetic meanings, suites for orchestra and a romance for violoncello, with orchestral accompaniment. As a boy of fifteen MacDowell went to the Paris Conservatoire, there entering the piano classes of Marmontel. It was in 1876. Two years later I saw him at the same institution and later in comparing notes we discovered that we had both attended a concert at the Trocadero, wherein Nicholas Rubinstein, the brilliant brother of Anton, played the B flat minor concerto of a youthful and unknown composer, Peter Illyitch Tschaikovsky by name. This same concerto had been introduced to America in 1876 by Hans von Bülow, to whom it is dedicated. Rubinstein's playing took hold of young MacDowell's imagination. He saw there was no chance of mastering such a torrential style in Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany. He had enjoyed lessons from Teresa Carreño, but the beautiful Venezuelan was not then the virtuosa of to-day.

So MacDowell, who was accompanied by his mother, a sage woman and deeply in sympathy with her son's aims, went to Frankfort, where he had the benefit of Karl Heymann's tuition. He was the only pianist I ever heard who could be compared to our Rafael Joseffy. But his influences, while marked in the development of his American pupil, did not weaken MacDowell's individuality. Studies in composition under Joachim Raff followed, and then he journeyed to Weimar for his baptism of fire at the hands of Liszt. That genial Prospero had broken his wand of virtuoso and devoted himself to the culture of youthful genius and his own compositions. He was pleased by the force, the surety, the brilliancy and the poetic qualities of MacDowell's playing, and he laughingly warned Eugen d'Albert to look to his laurels. But music was in the very bones of MacDowell, and a purely virtuoso career had no attraction for him. He married in 1884 Marian Nevins, of New York, herself a pianist and a devoted propagandist of his music. The pair settled in Wiesbaden, and it was the happiest period of MacDowell's career. He taught; he played as "guest" in various German cities; above all, he composed. His entire evolution is surveyed in Mr. Lawrence Gilman's sympathetic monograph. It was in Wiesbaden that he laid the foundation of his solid technique as a composer.