nal contours than to the dramatic or emotional needs of his text.
As an instance of his not infrequent indifference to justness of
declamatory utterance, examine his setting of "in those brown eyes,"
at the bottom of the last page of "Confidence" (op. 47), and of the
word "without" in the fourth bar of "Tyrant Love" (op. 60). I dwell
upon this point, not in any spirit of captiousness, I need scarcely
say, but because it exemplifies a fairly persistent characteristic of
MacDowell's style as a song writer.

Of that other trait to which I have referred--his not exceptional
preoccupation with a purely musical plan at the expense of dramatic
and emotional congruity--the attentive observer will not want for
examples in almost any of MacDowell's song-groups. As a single
instance, I may allege the run in eighth-notes which encumbers the
setting of the second syllable of the word "again," in the fourth bar
of "Springtide" (op. 60). Such infelicities are difficult to account
for in the work of a musician so exceedingly sensitive in matters of
poetic fitness as he. It may be that his acute sense of dramatic and
emotional values operated perfectly only when he was unhampered by the
thought of the voice.

I have dwelt upon this point because it should be noted in any candid
study of his traits as a song writer. Yet it is not a defect which
weighs heavily against him when one considers the musical quality of
his songs as a whole. Not, as a whole, equal to his piano music, they
are admirable and deeply individual; and the best of them are not
surpassed in any body of modern song-writing.

[Illustration: THE MUSIC-ROOM AT PETERSBORO]

In almost all of his songs the voice is predominant over the piano
part--although he is far, indeed, from writing mere accompaniments:
the support which he gives the voice is consistently important, for he
brings to bear upon it all his rich resources of harmonic expression.
But though he makes the voice the paramount element, he uses it, in
general, rather as a vehicle for the unconscious exposition of a
determined lyricism than as an instrument of precise emotional
utterance. When one thinks of how Hugo Wolf, for example, or Debussy,
would have treated the phrase, "to wake again the bitter joy of love,"
in "Fair Springtide," it will be felt, I think, that MacDowell's
setting leaves something to be desired on the score of emotional
verity, although the song, as a whole, is one of the loveliest and
m