Lawrence Gilman

“ In it inheres a capacity for expression, and a quality of enchantment in the result, that music had not before exerted—an enchantment that invades the mind by stealth yet holds it with enchaining power. In a curious degree the music is both contemplative and impassioned; its pervading note is that of still flame, of emotional quietude—the sweeping and cosmic winds of "Tristan und Isolde" are absent. Yet the dramatic fibre of the score is strong and rich; for all its fineness and delicacy of-165- texture and its economy of accent, it is neither amorphous nor inert. ”

“ In the music of MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded, but he is never febrile: in this (though certainly in nothing else) he is like Brahms. ”

“ But now the call to battle sounds, and it may not be ignored. Distant fanfares of trumpets summon the Hero to the conflict. The orchestra becomes a battle-field; the music is chaos—tumultuous, cataclysmic: "it evokes the picture of countless and waging hosts, of forests of waving spears and clashing blades. The din, heat, and turmoil of conflict are spread over all, and the ground piled high with the slain." Through the dust and din we are reminded of the inspiration of the beloved, which urges on and enheartens the champion, whose motive contests for supremacy with that of his adversaries. ”

“ The music, as a whole, is as insinuating as it is unparalleled. Many passages are of an hypnotic and abiding fascination. There is something necromantic in the art which can so swiftly and so surely cast an ineluctable spell upon the heart and the imagination: such a spell as is cast in the scene at the Fontaine des Aveugles, in the second act; or when, from the window in the castle tower, Mélisande's unbound hair falls and envelops Pelléas—an unforgettable page; or when the lovers meet for the last time at the Fountain of the Blind ”

“ A solo violin, in a long and elaborate passage, introduces the Hero's beloved. She is pictured at first as capricious—a coquette; but the music grows more tender, more gentle; the full orchestra enters; the oboe sings an expressive melody; there are rapturous and passionate phrases for the strings [295] amid sweeping arpeggios in the harps, and the love scene reaches its climax. The mocking voices of the foe are heard remotely, like the distant croaking of night birds through an ecstatic dream: they are powerless to disturb the peace and felicity of the lovers. ”

“ While my outgivings have always been sincere, I feel only too often their inadequacy to express my ideals; thus what you speak of as accomplishment I fear is often but attempt. Certainly your sympathy for my aims is most welcome and precious to me, and I thank you again most heartily."
Those who knew the man only through his music have thought of him as wholly a dreamer and a recluse, a poet brooding in detachment, and unfriendly to the pedestrian and homely things of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was overflowingly human, notably full-blooded. ”

“ He wastes no words, he makes no superfluous gestures: he is masterfully direct, pregnant, expeditious, compact. Could anything be more-48- admirable, in what it attempts and brilliantly contrives to do, than almost the entire second act of "Tosca," with the exception of the sentimental and obstructive Prayer? How closely, with what unswerving fidelity, the music clings to the contours of the play; and with what an economy of effort its effects are made! Puccini is thus, at his best, a Wagnerian in the truest sense—a far more consistent Wagnerian than was Wagner himself. ”

“ They have a common kinship in their dim and muted loveliness, their grave reticence, the deep and immitigable sadness with which, even at their most rapturous, they are penetrated. This is a score rich in beauty and strangeness, yet the music has often a deceptive naïveté, a naïveté that is so extreme that it reveals itself, finally, as the quintessence of subtlety and reticence—in which respect, again, we are reminded of its perfect, its well-nigh uncanny, correspondence with the quality of Maeterlinck's drama. ”

“ With Tschaikowsky, here, as in the 'Manfred' symphony, the drum is the most tragic of instruments. The persistent drum-beat in this trio is poignant in despair not untouched with irony. Man says: 'Come now, I'll be gay'; and he tries to sing and to dance and to forget. His very gaiety is labored, forced, constrained, in an unnatural rhythm. And then the drum is heard, and there is wailing, there is angry protest, there is the conviction that the struggle against Fate is vain. Again there is the deliberate effort to be gay, but the drum once heard beats in the ears forever. ”

“ In its total aspect as a dramatic commentary the score provokes wonder at its precision and flexibility. The manner in which each scene is individualised, differentiated and set apart from every other scene, is of a vividness and fidelity beyond praise. For every changing aspect of the play, for its every emotional phase, the composer has discovered the exact and illuminating equivalent. The eloquence of this music is seldom abated; it is as pervasive as it is extreme. ”

“ An artist so ideally endowed [ein so ideal angelegter Künstler] as MacDowell must ask himself: Why have I received from nature this delicately strung lyre, if I were better off without it? So unmerciful is Life that every artist must ask himself this question. The only consolation is: Work—yes, even the severest labours. ... But: the artist is an optimist. Otherwise he would be no artist. He believes and hopes in the triumph of the good and the beautiful. He trusts in his lucky star till his last breath. And you, the wife of a highly gifted artist, will not and must not lose hope! ”

“ Mélisande enters. Their greeting is simple. Pelléas bids her come under the shade of the linden. She wishes to remain where it is lighter; she wishes to stay where she may be seen. Golaud, she says, is sleeping. It is late. In an hour the great gates of the castle will be closed. Pelléas tells her that it is perhaps the last time he shall see her, that he must go away forever. She asks him why it is that he is always saying that. "Must I tell you what you know already?" rejoins Pelléas. "You know not what I am going to tell you?" "Why, no; I know nothing," says Mélisande. ”

“ The culminating and concluding scene of the tragedy has its counterpart in the climax of the symphonic poem: an anguished crescendo ascent of the strings and wood-wind, allegro frenetico, punctuated by gasping ejaculations of trumpets and cornets, is suddenly cut short, as it were, in mid-air, while above a roll of the drums and the sinister vibration of the gong the theme of the Evil Queen—the theme of Death—is proclaimed fortissimo by violins, English horn, and clarinet. Then begins an epilogue which has no actual equivalent in the drama—which transcends yet fulfils it. ”

“ There are here no echoes of Raff, or Wagner, or Brahms, men that have each influenced mightily the musical thought of to-day. There is the voice of one composer: a virile, tender voice that does not stammer, does not break, does not wax hysterical: the voice of a composer that not only must pour out that which has accumulated within him, but knows all the resources of musical oratory—in a word, the voice of MacDowell. ”

“ Never in the history of music has such instrumentation found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its total effect, and the-87- almost uncanny art with which it is accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment. ”

“ Art, he has said, "is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced ...by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower of eternity." Everywhere, throughout his most deeply characteristic work, he emphasizes this thought—he would have us realize that we are the unconscious protagonists of an overshadowing, vast, and august drama whose significance and dénouement we do not and cannot know, but of which mysterious intimations are constantly to be perceived and felt. ”

“ To achieve his end—to express all those varied emotions of anguish, terror, longing, despair, aspiration, triumph—he stops at nothing: he heaps dissonance upon dissonance, he writes in several keys at once, he assaults our ears with what would have seemed to the placid soul of Haydn the pandemonium of a mad-house. Yet, if he be a genius, we are swayed and enthralled. We even derive a double pleasure from this new kind of art-work, which is at once music and drama. ”

“ Here you will find a beauty which is as "the beauty of the men that take up spears and die for a name," no less than "the beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow and the wandering road"—a harp shaken with a wild and piercing music, a sorrow that is not of to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual and imperishable, and men lived the tales of beauty and of wonder which now are but a discredited and fading memory. ”

“ In a day when magnitude of plan and vividness of color, rhetorical emphasis and dynamic brilliancy, are the ideals which preëminently sway our tonal architects, emerges this reticent, half-lit, delicately structured, subtly accented music; which is incorrigibly unrhetorical; which never declaims or insists: an art alembicated, static, severely restrained—for even when it is most harmonically untrammeled, most rhythmically fantastic, one is aware of a quietly inexorable logic, an uncompromising ideal of form, underlying its seemingly unregulated processes. ”