The Decline of America’s Greatest Composer

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The New York Sun

On December 14, 1894, Edward MacDowell, then considered America’s greatest living composer, performed his Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. Although it had been first performed in Boston in 1889, the work was new to New Yorkers: After all, before phonographs and radios, orchestral music could be heard only in performance. MacDowell, a magnificent pianist, triumphed. W.J. Henderson of the New York Times found the concerto impossible to speak of “in terms of judicial calmness, for it is made of the stuff that calls for enthusiasm…here is one young man who has placed himself on a level with the men owned by the world.”


MacDowell was born at 220 Clinton St. in Manhattan on December 18, 1860. His father was a milk wholesaler who loved the arts; his mother, having ensured he knew French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek, arranged his first piano lessons. In 1876, MacDowell, the youngest of 300 applicants to the Paris Conservatoire, won one of the two scholarships awarded to foreign students through a brilliant performance on the entrance examinations.


But he found the conservatory’s method of teaching piano – which relied on sight-reading skills – absurd. His instructors made him play with the score upside down, or transpose the music into a different key, or, say, “correct” Bach’s works into conformity with their notions of proper composition. MacDowell felt they were wasting his time and, in 1878, he left for the Frankfurt Conservatory, where he found the instructors taught and played the classics “as if they had actually been written by men with blood in their veins.”


In 1880, one of his teachers, composer Joachim Raff, walked in on MacDowell, who was fooling around at a piano instead of practicing. Raff asked what he was doing. Embarrassed, MacDowell said he was working on a composition. Raff asked to see it when it was done. Trapped, Mac-Dowell wrote his first piano concerto during the next two weeks. Raff glanced at it. Then he scribbled a letter and said, “Take it to Liszt.” Franz Liszt, the model of the great Romantic pianist, who had lived the rock star’s life, groupies and all, was living in semi-retirement at the time. He knew a good thing when he heard it: He persuaded his publishers to take the American’s concerto and impresarios to put it on their concert programs. Premiered in 1882, the concerto written in two weeks made Mac-Dowell famous overnight. A masterpiece of late Romanticism demanding a dazzling technique, it proved a splendid vehicle for his own concerts, with critics hailing MacDowell’s mastery of the keyboard and striking stage presence.


In 1888, MacDowell and his wife Marian returned to America, settling in Boston, the center of American musical life. There he taught and composed between concert tours, writing his symphonic poems and the “Keltic,” “Norse,” “Tragica,” and “Eroica” sonatas, which invested (or warped, as MacDowell quipped) the sonata form with symphonic grandeur, as well as his wildly popular settings of “To a Wild Rose” and “To a Water Lily,” which were found on nearly every proper home’s piano.


When MacDowell again performed the Second Concerto with the Boston Symphony at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in January 1896, Columbia University President Seth Low was in the audience. Three months later, Low offered MacDowell Columbia’s first professorship of music. This meant MacDowell was practically the entire music department. He taught seven yearlong courses, each meeting two to three hours weekly, provided substantial individual instruction and individual examinations, and, without a secretary, dealt with everything else, such as purchasing desks or hiring outside lecturers. As the university’s business managers refused to believe that pianos naturally go out of tune with use and time, he even retuned the instruments himself.


When Low became New York City’s mayor in 1901, Nicholas Murray Butler succeeded him as president of Columbia. A future Republican vice-presidential nominee and winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, Butler was a ruthless careerist. When Mac-Dowell publicly clashed with him over reforming the university’s curriculum, Butler felt this challenge to his authority justified freely sharing his unsavory speculations on his opponent’s character, temperament, and intelligence with faculty and staff behind the composer’s back.


Wholly disillusioned, MacDowell resigned in September 1903.When he was knocked down by a hansom cab at Broadway and 21st Street in March 1905, MacDowell’s injuries only deepened a depression characterized by insomnia and anxiety attacks that he had endured since leaving Columbia. His hair whitened, his gait became unsteady, and he progressively declined into aphasia. Friends defrayed his medical expenses; Butler didn’t even send a get-well card. On January 23, 1908, his wife asked him, “Won’t you give me a kiss?” He puckered his lips and, looking at her for the first time in days with something like recognition, stopped breathing.


He was only 47. His fame has become as the wild rose that fades.


The New York Sun

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