MacDowell’s feeling in regard to Strauss, whom he considered to have developed what he called the “suggestive” (delineative) power of music at the expense of its finer potentialities, is indicated in a lecture which he prepared on the subject of “Suggestion in Music.” “’Thus Spake 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 Mozart’s sonatas are sublime; that they far transcend anything written for the harpsichord or clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we are apt to echo the saying ...  But let us look the thing straight in the face:  Mozart’s sonatas