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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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