“Often though I was with him—­sometimes a week at a time in Peterboro—­I never could persuade him to play for me.  I once asked Paderewski to play for me his new set of songs, and he promptly did so.  But MacDowell always was ‘out of practice,’ or had some other excuse, generally a witticism or bit of sarcasm at his own expense.  I am sorry now that I did not urge him with more persistence, for he might have yielded in the end, and I would have got a more intime idea of his playing; for after all a musical tete-a-tete like that is preferable to any public hearing.  I never heard Grieg play at a concert, but I am sure that the hour I sat near him in his Bergen home, while he played and his wife sang, gave me a better appreciation of his skill as an interpreter than I could have got in a public hall with an audience to distract his attention.  One afternoon I called on Saint-Saens at his hotel after one of his concerts in New York.  Talking about it, he sat down at the piano, ran over his Valse Canariote, and said:  ‘That’s the way I ought to have played it!’

“MacDowell was quite right in saying that he was out of practice; he generally was, his duties as professor allowing him little time for technical exercising; but once every few years he set to work and got his fingers into a condition which enabled them to follow his intentions; and those intentions, it is needless to say, were always honourable!  He never played any of those show pieces which help along a pianist, but confined himself to the best he could find.

“Usually the first half of a recital was devoted to the classical and romantic masters, the second to his own compositions.  Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, were likely to be represented, and he also did missionary work for Templeton Strong and other Americans.  His interpretation of the music of other composers was both objective and subjective; there was no distortion or exaggeration, yet one could not mistake the fact that it was MacDowell who was playing it.

“The expression, ‘he played like a composer,’ is often used to hint that the technic was not that of a virtuoso.  In this sense MacDowell did not play like a composer; his technical skill was equal to everything he played, though never obtrusive.  In another sense he did play ‘like a composer,’ especially when interpreting his own pieces; that is, he played with an insight, a subtlety of expression, which only a creative performer has at his command.  I doubt if Chopin himself could have rendered one of his pieces with more ravishing delicacy than MacDowell showed in playing his ‘To a Wild Rose.’  I doubt if Liszt could have shown a more overwhelming dramatic power than MacDowell did in playing his ‘Keltic’ sonata.  In this combination of feminine tenderness with masculine strength he was, as in his creative gift, a man of genius.  After one of his concerts I wrote in the glow of enthusiasm that I would rather hear him than any pianist in the field excepting Paderewski; that utterance I never saw reason to modify.”