s the transmutation of life into visible or audible
form, and which implicates Beethoven as well as Wagner, Schumann as
well as Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Debussy as well as Strauss: all those
in whom the desire for intelligible utterance coexists with, or
supersedes, the impulse toward perfected design. But if MacDowell's
method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it
the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He occupies a middle ground
between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the
sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so
frequently declined. It is impossible to conceive him attempting the
musical exposition of such themes as kindled the imagination of
Strauss when he wrought out his "Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," and
"Till Eulenspiegel"; nor has he any appreciable affinity with the
prismatic subtleties of the younger French school: so that there is
little in the accent of his musical speech to remind one of the
representative voices of modernity.

Though he has avoided shackling his music to a detailed programme, he
has never very seriously espoused the sophistical compromise which
concedes the legitimacy of programme-music provided it speaks as
potently to one who does not know the subject-matter as to one who
does. The bulk of his music no more discloses its full measure of
beauty and eloquence to one who is in ignorance of its poetic basis
than would Wagner's "Faust" overture, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and
Juliet," or Debussy's "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune." Its appeal is
conditioned upon an understanding of the basis of drama and emotional
crisis upon which the musician has built; and in much of his music he
has frankly recognized this fact, and has printed at the beginning of
such works as the "Idyls" and "Poems" after Goethe and Heine, the
"Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas, the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England
Idyls," the fragment of verse or legend or meditation which has served
as the particular stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works
he has contented himself with the suggestion of a mood or subject
embodied in his title, as, for example, in his "Woodland
Sketches,"--"To a Wild Rose," "Will o' the Wisp," "At an Old Trysting
Place," "In Autumn," "From an Indian Lodge," "To a Water-Lily," "A
Deserted Farm." That he has been tempted, however, in the direction of
the compromise to which I have alluded, is evident from the fact that
although his symphonic poem