-and he has
improved them magnificently. The spaciousness of the plan, the boldness
of the drawing, the fulness and intensity of the colour scheme, engage
one's attention at the start. He has indulged almost to its extreme
limits his predilection for extended chord formations and for phrases
of heroic span--as in, for example, almost the whole of the first
movement. The pervading quality of the musical thought is of a
resistless and passionate virility. It is steeped in the barbaric and
splendid atmosphere of the sagas. There are pages of epical breadth and
power, passages of elemental vigour and ferocity--passages, again, of
an exquisite tenderness and poignancy. Of the three movements which the
work comprises, the first makes the most lasting impression, although
the second (the slow movement) has a haunting subject, which is
recalled episodically in the final movement in a passage of
unforgettable beauty and character.

With the publication, in 1901, of the "Keltic" sonata (his fourth, op.
59),[15] MacDowell achieved a conclusive demonstration of his capacity
as a creative musician of unquestionable importance. Not before had he
given so convincing an earnest of the larger aspect of his genius:
neither in the three earlier sonatas, in the "Sea Pieces," nor in the
"Indian" suite, had he attained an equal magnitude, an equal scope and
significance. Nowhere else in his work are the distinguishing traits
of his genius so strikingly disclosed--the breadth and reach of
imagination, the magnetic vitality, the richness and fervour, the
conquering poetic charm. Here you will find a beauty which is as "the
beauty of the men that take up spears and die for a name," no less
than "the beauty of the poets that take up harp and sorrow and the
wandering road"--a harp shaken with a wild and piercing music, a
sorrow that is not of to-day, but of a past when dreams were actual
and imperishable, and men lived the tales of beauty and of wonder
which now are but a discredited and fading memory.

[15] Dedicated, like the "Norse," to Grieg.

It was a fortunate, if not an inevitable, event, in view of his
temperamental affiliations with the Celtic genius, that MacDowell
should have been made aware of the suitability for musical treatment
of the ancient heroic chronicles of the Gaels, and that he should
have gone for his inspiration, in particular, to the legends
comprised in the famous Cycle of the Red Branch: that wonderful group
of epi