ke Zarathustra,'" he wrote, "may be considered the apotheosis of
this power of suggestion in tonal colour, and in it I believe we can
see the tendency I allude to [the tendency "to elevate what should be
a means of adding power and intensity to musical speech, to the
importance of musical speech itself"]. It stuns by its glorious
magnificence of tonal texture. The suggestion, at the beginning, of
the rising sun, is a mighty example of the overwhelming power of
tone-colour. The upward sweep of the music to the highest regions of
light has something splendrous about it; and yet I remember once
hearing in London a song sung in the street at night that seemed to me
to contain a truer germ of music."--From which it will be seen that
there were limits to the aesthetic sympathy of even so liberal and
divining an appreciator as MacDowell.

The modern Frenchmen he knew scarcely at all. Some of d'Indy's earlier
music he had heard and admired: but that he would have cared for such
a score as Debussy's "La Mer" I very much doubt. I remember his
amusement over what he called the "queerness" of a sonata by the
Belgian Lekeu for violin and piano, which he had read or heard. It is
likely that he would have found little to attract him in the more
characteristic music of d'Indy, Debussy, and Ravel; his instincts and
temperament led him into a wholly different region of expression. He
was a prophet of modernity; but it was a modernity that he alone
exemplifies: it has no exact parallel.

Concerning the classics he had his own views. Of Bach he wrote that he
believed him to have accomplished his work as "one of the world's
mightiest tone-poets not by means of the contrapuntal methods of his
day, but in spite of them. The laws of canon and fugue are based upon
as prosaic a foundation as those of the Rondo and Sonata Form, and I
find it impossible to imagine their ever having been a spur, an
incentive, to poetic musical speech."

Of Mozart he wrote: "It is impossible to forget the fact that in his
piano works he was first and foremost a piano virtuoso, a child
prodigy: of whom filigree work (we cannot call this Orientalism, for
it was more or less of German pattern, traced from the _fioriture_ of
the Italian opera singer) was expected by the public for which his
sonatas were written.... We need freshness and sincerity in forming
our judgments of art.... If we read on one page of some history (every
history of music has such a page) that M