Edward MacDowell was a distinguished American composer.
Background
Edward Alexander MacDowell was born on December 18, 1861, in New York City. He was the son of Thomas and Frances (Knapp) MacDowell and the grandson of Alexander MacDowell, born in Belfast of Scotch parents, who emigrated to New York early in the nineteenth century.
His father was a businessman with an aptitude for painting. His mother had no talents in art but was high-spirited, witty, and ambitious. Thomas MacDowell was a Quaker. His wife was not.
Blest with remarkable parents, Edward McDowell escaped the misunderstandings and the lack of sympathy which often shadow the early years of genius. He spent his boyhood in a home rich in culture and affection.
Though he was a sensitive and imaginative child, he had his share of fun and mischief, and with his brother Walter, three years his senior, he exercised all the instincts which belong to normal and happy children.
Education
When MacDowell began his piano studies he showed the usual reluctance to practice. On one occasion the family were astonished at the noises he was making and discovered at the piano not Edward but Walter, whom Edward had hired to do his practicing for him, at two cents an hour, while he read a storybook.
His first piano teacher was a friend of his father's, Juan Buitrago, a native of Colombia. Buitrago brought the talented boy to the attention of Teresa Carreno, who became his next teacher. He seems to have studied at about the same time with Paul Desvernine. Since all these teachers were of the Latin tradition, it is not surprising that when he was later taken abroad to study, it was to France rather than to Germany.
MacDowell went to the public schools, and after his tenth year, when his father removed to East Nineteenth Street, near Third Avenue, close to Gramercy Park, he attended a French school, the Institution Elie Charlier, on East Twenty-fourth Street. Coming home from this school one day he exhibited to his astonished Quaker father a revolver which he had won in a public contest at a local shooting gallery.
McDowell's education became exactly what it should have been for his art. He spoke the modern languages and knew more about the ancient ones than most college graduates. He was widely read in literature and history, and he had a passion for ideas.
But he had no opportunity to know the educational system in America, the obligations or the traditions of faculties and curricula, and to his innocence of such matters may be ascribed some of his disappointment later at Columbia University. His early teachers were impressed more by his versatility than by his excellence in any one direction.
Though he disliked practicing, he liked to play and he liked to compose. He also liked to draw, and there are portraits of his father and of himself, reproduced in Abbie Farwell Brown's The Boyhood of Edward MacDowell, which show convincing talent. It is no disparagement of his achievements in music to say that all his life he gave the impression of greater powers than he ever fully developed.
In April 1876, his mother took him to Paris, where he passed his examinations for the Conservatoire, and studied the piano with Marmontel and theory and composition with Savard. He also took private lessons in French. Some of his drawings came to the attention of Carolus Duran, who offered free instruction if he would give up music for painting, but Marmontel persuaded him without much difficulty to continue in the art of his first choice. His stay in France influenced him deeply, but his temperament was not at home with French music.
Later on, he cared little for Debussy, a fellow student at the Conservatoire, or for Cesar Franck, and one cannot imagine him enthusiastic about D'Indy, or Ravel. At the end of three years in Paris, he followed his natural bent and turned to Germany.
After nearly a year at Wiesbaden (1878 - 79), where he studied composition with Louis Ehlert, he entered the Frankfort Conservatory, attracted by the brilliant pianist Carl Heymann, then at the height of his tragically brief career. Joachim Raff, the director of the Conservatory, took charge of MacDowell's studies in composition, and with Heymann gave him prompt recognition and encouragement.
When Heymann retired because of failing health in 1881, he suggested the young American, barely twenty, as his successor, and Raff seconded the nomination. Though the faculty refused to make the appointment, on the ground that the candidate was as yet unproved, the confidence which these two master musicians showed in him gave MacDowell a place of respect in the musical world.
Career
Appointed head piano teacher at the Darmstadt Conservatory in 1881, MacDowell continued to live in Frankfort, giving his private lessons, and commuting to Darmstadt. Most of his composing at this period he did on the train. This program soon proved too great a tax on his strength, and he resigned the Darmstadt post.
In 1882, at Raff's suggestion, he called upon Liszt at Weimar, with the manuscript of his first concerto, in A-minor. This work, afterward revised, had been improvised in little more than a fortnight, though the themes had been gathered in advance. MacDowell arrived on Liszt's doorstep in such a condition of nervousness and self-distrust that he could not ring the bell.
Liszt received him with characteristic generosity, told one of his pupils, Eugen d'Albert, to play the orchestral part on the second piano, and listened to the concerto with approval. Immediately after this visit, he recommended MacDowell's First Modern Suite for the program of the nineteenth annual convention of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musik-Verein, at Zurich, July 1882.
MacDowell himself played the Suite with success, on July 11. He still thought he was primarily a pianist, and set little value on his compositions. Some of the German critics objected to his playing the Suite with the notes before him. Years later, he explained to Henry T. Finck that until his appearance before the Musik-Verein he had not considered his notes worth memorizing.
In 1883, Breitkopf & Hertel brought out this Suite, together with the Second Modern Suite. Nothing of MacDowell's had previously been published, and this beginning he owed to Liszt.
For the next two years, he devoted himself seriously to composition, chiefly in orchestral forms, seizing the opportunity to hear his experiments rehearsed by the local orchestras of Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden. To this period belong the five songs of opus 11 and opus 12, the Prelude and Fugue, the "Serenata" for piano, the "Two Fantastic Pieces", the "Barcarolle" and "Humoresque", and "Forest Idyls".
In June 1884, he returned to America to marry Miss Nevins. After their marriage, they went to London and Paris and settled in Wiesbaden for the winter of 1885-86, to complete, among other things, his second concerto, in D-minor, and his symphonic poem, "Hamlet and Ophelia".
Later, he bought a small cottage outside of Wiesbaden, near the forest, and settled down for one of the happiest periods of his life, storing up inspiration for much that he composed later, as well as for the orchestral works, the piano pieces, and the songs which belong to this fertile time. On November 19, 1888, he appeared with the Kneisel Quartet in Chickering Hall, Boston, playing the Prelude, the Intermezzo, and the Presto from his First Piano Suite, and the piano part in Goldmark's B-flat Quintet.
On March 5, 1889, he played his Second Concerto for the first time in public at Chickering Hall, New York, Theodore Thomas conducting. A few weeks later, he repeated the same concerto in Boston, under Gericke, and in July, he made a flying trip to France to play the same work in an American concert at the Paris Exposition, with Frank Van der Stucken conducting.
The critics acclaimed him at once as the leading American pianist and composer.
The performance of his larger compositions by the American and European orchestras became frequent. No American musician before him had achieved, or perhaps deserved, such recognition.
He organized an excellent orchestra, he gathered a male chorus to sing serious music, perhaps the earliest attempt to interest a college glee club in art, he composed six Columbia Songs, as an experiment in the improvement of undergraduate music, he held departmental concerts and tried to make music function in the academic community.
When his work became too much even for his devotion, he had an assistant for his classes, Leonard McWhood, and a conductor for the orchestra, Gustav Hinrichs. But the students in his classes received no academic credit for music courses. Music in those days was an "extra. "
For two seasons, he conducted the Mendelssohn Glee Club, he gave occasional performances, he taught private pupils, and he composed though this was chiefly during the vacations. But he was a singularly healthy figure, above medium height, who walked vigorously, dressed usually in brown or grey tweeds, with heavy brown shoes an out-of-doors person, strongly Nordic.
His blue eyes were alternately merry and dreamy. When he spoke, his listeners were caught by the quiet beauty of his voice and by the exquisiteness of his speech. It was not apparent that he was killing himself by overwork.
To this period belong his Norse Sonata and his Keltic Sonata, many of his finest songs and part-songs, and a suite for stringed orchestra which he left unfinished. That he was able to accomplish so much in these years of teaching, he owed to his wife's foresight in securing, in 1896, the little farm at Peterboro, North Hampshire, which became his happiest refuge and home. There, in a log cabin, at a distance from the main house, he spent his summers composing. After his resignation from Columbia, he resumed his private teaching.
In 1905, his health began to break. A nervous collapse was succeeded by an obscure brain trouble which proved incurable. He died January 23, 1908, at his New York home in the Westminster Hotel, Irving Place, in the neighborhood where his boyhood had been passed. After the funeral at St. George's Church, he was buried at Peterboro, on a favorite hilltop.
The deep emotions of Edward's early manhood were bound up with Europe, with a tradition and an atmosphere not to be found on this side the ocean.
Perhaps he was always looking for it here, wistfully and tragically. He gave the impression, against his will, of being a visitant in his own land, trying to establish himself in alien conditions.
His interest in America was genuine and deep, reaching far beyond the field of music, but it is doubtful whether he knew how close he was to his country, how ready it was to welcome him, how instinctively it looked to him to be its spokesman in his art.
On the other hand, the Europe he loved was a dream country, suggested by the great poets and artists and by ancient monuments, by folk-lore, by enchanting forests. Had he remained abroad he would probably not have been happy.
Personality
It was the devotion and sympathy of his wife which provided MacDowell with this ideal opportunity to develop his genius. In September 1888, he gave up his Wiesbaden cottage and sailed for Boston. The growth of his reputation, the success of his works at home as well as in Europe, made this step natural, but with it, the tragic chapters of his life began.
Some of his admirers regret for his sake that he did not stay in Europe, others lament that in his youth musical conditions in America were such that for even these few years he had to expatriate himself. Undoubtedly he missed some of the contacts with national life which are helpful to creative art.
He was by temperament energetic and surprisingly active, needing the society of his fellows as well as creative solitude. He came a little late for Europe and a little early for America. In Boston, the MacDowells lived first in Mt. Vernon Street, then at 13 West Cedar Street, then at 38 Chestnut Street. For eight busy and successful years, he composed, taught his pupils, gave frequent performances and recitals.
MacDowell also learned to his disappointment that the best musical talent rarely goes to college, nor does the best talent, with some exceptions, in painting and sculpture. He tried to persuade his colleagues to open the academic doors to the arts.
His resignation was a sad blow for his Columbia students, even for many who were not in his classes but who knew instinctively that he had stood in the community for something ideal. He was in some respects a great teacher, certainly a great musician and a scholar, as his lectures, published after his death, indicate. Given a student who was already well prepared, with something of the professional attitude toward the arts, MacDowell was one of the most stimulating of lecturers.
But many of the pupils in his Columbia classes, though charmed by his personality and impressed with his genius, did not know what he was talking about, and their distress bewildered him. If part of the teacher's mission is to diagnose ignorance, MacDowell was not a teacher at all. Perhaps he failed to recognize some talent because it did not take the forms he was accustomed to in European conservatories.
As a tribute to his memory, his widow developed the farm into a large and beautiful estate, incorporated as a memorial to the composer, and equipped with studios for the use of poets, musicians, painters, and sculptors.
MacDowell's music is highly original and extremely colorful. The popularity of some of his small things, such as "To a Wild Rose, " or the song, "Thy Beaming Eyes, " threatened for a while to obscure his large qualities, but in time competent musicians showed increasing respect for the orchestral works, for the greater piano pieces, the sonatas particularly, and the second concerto, and for the best of the songs.
In all his work the quality is lyrical, a quality revealed in his poems written for his songs, as well as in his music. He once said that he would never compose an opera since the form always seemed to him unreal.
His temperament was for a song, not for drama. Though his work is harmonically rich, he deliberately turned away from the extreme experiments of the music of his day. He understood them and could say illuminating things about them, but he believed that art progresses by developing national and racial impulses, by developing hints supplied by the folk, rather than by imposing on the folk a new idiom intellectually arrived at.
Even in the popular rhythms of dance music, he recognized a significant development. Whatever the course of American music, he will remain one of its first great figures.
Connections
On July 21, MacDowell married Marian Griswold Nevins at Waterford, Connecticut. Marian suffered an illness that resulted in her being unable to bear children.