effect of his
performances. "I shall never forget," recalls his wife, "the first
time he played it [the "Eroica" sonata] in Boston. We all thought he
did it wonderfully. But when I went around to the green-room door to
find him, fearing something might be wrong, as he had not come to me,
he had gone. When I got home, accompanied by two friends, there he was
almost in a corner, white, and as if he were guilty of some crime, and
he said as we came in: 'I can play better than that. But I was so
tired!' We almost wept with the pity of the unnecessary suffering,
which was yet so real and intense. In a short time he was more
himself, and naively admitted that he had played three movements well,
but had been a 'd---- fool in one.' I grew to be very used to this as
the years went on, for he could not help emphasising to himself what
he did badly, and ignoring the good."

He left few uncompleted works. There are among his manuscripts three
movements of a symphony, two movements of a suite for string
orchestra, a suite for violin and piano, some songs and piano pieces,
and a large number of sketches. He had schemes for a music-drama on an
Arthurian subject, and sketched a single act of it. He had planned
this work upon novel lines: there was to be comparatively little
singing, and much emphasis was to be laid upon the orchestral
commentary; the action was to be carried on by a combination of
pantomime and tableaux, and the scenic element was to be
conspicuous--a suggestion which he got in part from E.A. Abbey's Holy
Grail frescoes in the Boston Public Library. But he had determined to
write his own text: and the prospective labour of this, made more
formidable by his restricted leisure, finally discouraged him, and he
abandoned the project. Five years before his death he destroyed the
sketches that he had made; only a few fragments remain.

A rare and admirable man!--a man who would have been a remarkable
personality if he had not written a note of music. His faults--and he
was far from being a paragon--were never petty or contemptible: they
were truly the defects of his qualities--of his honesty, his courage,
his passionate and often reckless zeal in the promotion of what he
believed to be sound and fine in art and in life. Mr. Philip Hale,
whose long friendship with MacDowell gives him the right to speak with
peculiar authority, and whose habit is that of sobriety in speech, has
written of him in words whose justice and felic