._

[Illustration: EDGAR STILLMAN KELLEY.]

While his name is known wherever American music is known in its better
aspects, yet, like many another American, his real art can be
discovered only from his manuscripts. In these he shows a very
munificence of enthusiasm, scholarship, invention, humor, and
originality.

[Illustration: Autograph of Edgar Stillman Kelley]

Kelley is as thorough an American by descent as one could ask for, his
maternal ancestors having settled in this country in 1630, his
paternal progenitors in 1640, A.D. Indeed, one of the ancestors of
his father made the dies for the pine-tree shilling, and a
great-great-grandfather fought in the Revolution.

Kelley began his terrestrial career April 14, 1857, in Wisconsin. His
father was a revenue officer; his mother a skilled musician, who
taught him the piano from his eighth year to his seventeenth, when he
went to Chicago and studied harmony and counterpoint under Clarence
Eddy, and the piano under Ledochowski. It is interesting to note that
Kelley was diverted into music from painting by hearing "Blind Tom"
play Liszt's transcription of Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream"
music. I imagine that this idiot-genius had very little other
influence of this sort in his picturesque career.

After two years in Chicago, Kelley went to Germany, where, in
Stuttgart, he studied the piano with Kruger and Speidel, organ with
Finck, composition and orchestration with Seiffritz. While in Germany,
Kelley wrote a brilliant and highly successful concert polonaise for
four hands, and a composition for strings.

In 1880 he was back in America and settled in San Francisco, with
whose musical life he was long and prominently identified as a
teacher and critic. Here he wrote his first large work, the well-known
melodramatic music to "Macbeth." A local benefactor, John Parrot, paid
the expenses of a public performance, the great success of which
persuaded McKee Rankin, the actor, to make an elaborate production of
both play and music. This ran for three weeks in San Francisco to
crowded houses, which is a remarkable record for many reasons. A
shabby New York production at an ill-chosen theatre failed to give the
work an advantageous hearing; but it has been played by orchestras
several times since, and William H. Sherwood has made transcriptions
of parts of it for piano solo.

The "Macbeth" music is of such solid value that it reaches the dignity
of a flowing comme