A 2010 unsung's anniversary

[chill319]

No one would call MacDowell the equal of the once-unsung Schubert, but quite a bit of MacDowell's best music, like Schubert's, is haunted by preternatural intimations of mortality. While Schubert spent his last creative months sharing some of his ripest musical thoughts, MacDowell, as syphilitic senility approached, focused on revising (substantially) his first major work, the piano suite in E dedicated to Raff's widow. Perhaps lack of confidence had something to do with MacDowell's reluctance to leap. The composer's cultural environment surely was another factor.

The novelist Upton Sinclair's "American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences" is difficult to find, so I hope the forum will forgive me if I quote a passage from it in which Sinclair reflects on MacDowell and his environment as he knew them as a college student.

"Since we are dealing with the phenomena of genius, I will tell about the one authentic man of genius I met at Columbia. Edward MacDowell was the head of the department of music, struggling valiantly to create a vital music center in America, against heavy odds of philistinism, embodied in the banker trustees of the great university. MacDowell gave two courses in general musical culture, and these I took in successive years, and they were not among the courses I dropped. The composer was a man of wide culture, and full of a salty humor, a delightful teacher. There were less than a dozen students taking the course -- such was the amount of interest in genius at Columbia.

"Early in the course I noted that MacDowell suffered in his efforts to say in words something which could only be said in music, and I suggested to him that instead of trying to describe musical ideas, he should play them for us. This suggestion he at once accepted, and thereafter the course consisted in a piano rendition of the great music of  the world, with incidental running comments.  . . .

"Since I was going in for the genius business myself, I was interested in every smallest detail of this great man's behavior and appearance. Here was one who shared my secret of ecstasy; and this set him apart from all the other teachers, the dull plodding ones who dealt with bones and dust of inspirations. . ."