level of superlative
achievements.

If there is anything in the literature of the piano since the death of
Beethoven which, for combined passion, dignity, breadth of style,
weight of momentum, and irresistible plangency of emotion, is
comparable to the four sonatas which have been considered here, I do
not know of it. And I write these words with a perfectly definite
consciousness of all that they may be held to imply.

CHAPTER VII

THE SONGS

Any one who should undertake casually to examine MacDowell's songs
_seriatim_, beginning with his earliest listed work in this form--the
"Two Old Songs," op. 9--would not improbably be struck by an apparent
lack of continuity and logic in the initial stages of his artistic
development. At first glance, MacDowell seems to have attained a
phenomenal ripeness and individuality of expression in these songs,
which head the catalogue of his published works; whereas the songs of
the following opus (11-12) are conventional and unimportant. The
explanation, which I have elsewhere intimated, is simple. The songs of
op. 11 and 12, issued in 1883, were the first of his _Lieder_ to appear
in print; the songs numbered op. 9, which would appear to antedate
them in composition and publication, were not written until a decade
later, when they were issued under an arbitrary opus number as a
matter of expediency. Their proper place in MacDowell's musical
history is, therefore, about synchronous with the mature and
characteristic "Eight Songs" of op. 47. From the five songs now
published in one volume as op. 11 and 12, the progress of MacDowell's
art as a song writer is both steady and intelligible.

He has not been especially prolific in this field, when one thinks of
Grieg's one hundred and twenty songs, and of Brahms' one hundred and
ninety-six; not to mention Schumann's two hundred and forty-eight, or
Schubert's amazing six hundred and over. MacDowell has written
forty-two songs for single voice and piano, together with a number of
ingenious and effective pieces for men's voices and for mixed chorus.

He has avowed his methods and principles as a song writer. In an
interview published a few years before his death he declared his
opinion to be that "song writing should follow declamation"--that the
composer "should declaim the poems in sounds: the attention of the
hearer should be fixed upon the central point of declamation. The
accompaniment should be merely a background for the