The reputation of composer Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) was founded primarily on his later works, which were premiered after his return to the United States in fall 1888 following 12 years in Europe. The Piano Concerto No. 2 (Op. 23) was introduced in March 1889 and quickly entered the standard repertoire through dozens of performances by the composer, by his friend and mentor Teresa Carreño, and by subsequent pianists as diverse as the arch-modernist Leo Ornstein and the Texan virtuoso Van Cliburn. His Orchestral Suite No. 2 (“Indian”) was the country’s most successful response to Antonín Dvořák’s challenge to US composers in the 1890s. His four piano sonatas were the first major works in this genre written by an American composer, and generations of amateur pianists were raised on MacDowell’s sets of character pieces on American subjects, including Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces, Fireside Tales, and New England Idyls. It is a truism of Americanist music historiography that MacDowell was the first US composer of art music to achieve a bona fide international reputation.

Paul Bertagnolli’s new book on the composer’s early piano compositions, written in Europe before he became famous, expands our knowledge of his life and works by examining these little-known works in greater depth and more expansive context than any previous researcher. The subtitle of the book explains his goal succinctly: ‘The Forging of an American Composer’. Bertagnolli’s thesis is that the European works, though cosmopolitan in musical style and programmatic content, contained the seeds that would later blossom into MacDowell’s mature American style. Rather than dismissing these works as juvenilia or immature stepping stones toward more important achievements, Bertagnolli lovingly and painstakingly examines their sources and motivations, turning an analytical microscope on the finer points of a body of repertoire that has often been viewed biographically as the dues that MacDowell had to pay to gain entrée into the competitive American market of the late nineteenth century.

The first three chapters, comprising seventy-one pages in total, analyse four volumes of miscellaneous sheet music preserved in the New York Public Library. Bound by MacDowell’s mother Frances and donated years later by his older brother Walter, the set ostensibly contains the music that the two brothers studied as children in lower Manhattan. Bertagnolli lists the complete contents of the collection in an appendix and draws a series of conclusions about Edward’s childhood studies with his Latin American teachers Juan Buitrago (ca. 1834–1914), Paul Desvernine (1823–1910), and Teresa Carreño (1853–1917). He examines the works for clues as to what Edward knew when he departed for Europe at the age of 15. This analysis then informs his subsequent discussion of the compositions that Edward wrote in France and Germany. The author establishes his methodology by looking on the one hand at issues of piano technique, but more importantly at compositional style, positing that years before he took his first composition lesson, MacDowell’s style was being formed by the works that he played in his piano lessons.

Bertagnolli’s thorough analysis of the contents of this sheet music collection is founded primarily on topic theory as pioneered by Leonard Ratner and expanded by later theorists.Footnote ¹ This methodology is fundamental to understanding eighteenth-century works, but Bertagnolli joins Janice Dickensheets, Kofi Agawu, and other recent theorists in arguing for its relevance in nineteenth-century analysis as well.Footnote ² He identifies a compendium of musical topics and technical patterns that were the common practice of the early to mid-nineteenth century and would emerge later in the composer’s own compositions. His contention is that this collection of piano study materials holds the key to understanding MacDowell’s most foundational influences.

As intriguing as this thesis may be, it raised several questions for me. First, my own examination of the volumes in NYPL left me with the impression that the sheet music they contained did not show many signs of having been used. Bertagnolli notes that Edward did not enter his signature anywhere in the collection, and that fewer than a quarter of the pieces have any fingerings marked on the scores (p. 3). The pages are crisp and lack the telltale signs of frequent page turns that would indicate well-used scores. Second, although there are 113 different compositions in the collection, none of the pieces that MacDowell is known to have played in student recitals in New York are to be found. It appears that his principal efforts went into learning works that were not included in this collection. I therefore hesitate to assume that the young student internalized the music in this collection very thoroughly.

Chapter 4 is entitled ‘“Untold Gold”: Taking the Juvenilia Seriously’. True to his promise, the author examines the unpublished works that MacDowell wrote between his arrival in Paris in spring 1876 and his arrival in Frankfurt in summer 1879 in greater depth than any previous scholar. He clarifies the chronology of MacDowell’s compositional efforts through careful examination of the surviving manuscript drafts, tracing the young composer’s progress toward the mastery that would later make his works stylistically distinctive. This chapter revisits topic theory in earnest, drawing parallels between the topics found in the NYPL sheet music collection and the topics that MacDowell chose to explore in his earliest works. More importantly, Bertagnolli foreshadows the composer’s later compositional proclivities by teasing out the significance of narration and programmatic imagery in Cauchemar (later renamed A Ghost Story). This unpublished piece, which survives in several manuscript versions, contains a handwritten programme in the right margin and a profusion of interlinear verbal notes à la Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Explicit programmatic content of this sort would be crucial to the composer’s mature compositions, and Bertagnolli’s careful examination of these works demonstrates the value of taking the juvenilia seriously.

After a brief chapter discussing MacDowell’s reasons for leaving Paris, his fitful attempts to find a suitable piano teacher in Germany, and the fateful significance of his decision to cast his lot with Joachim Raff and by extension the New German School, Bertagnolli turns to the mature compositions that MacDowell wrote during his ten years in Germany. This is the heart of the book, and over the next five chapters, each of the piano works (including solo, four-hand, and concerto compositions) that MacDowell wrote while resident in Germany from 1879 to 1888 is described in detail. The discussions address questions of style, technique, composition history, and reception, drawing on a prodigious variety of source materials. In addition to the extensive collection of over 20,000 primary documents in the Edward and Marian MacDowell Collection in the Library of Congress, Bertagnolli has assembled a truly remarkable assortment of hundreds of reviews. These reviews allow him to explore in depth the immediate critical responses to these works as well as the evolving opinions in later years.

Chapter 6 examines MacDowell’s “modernity” through the composition, performance history, and reception of three works closely associated with the New German School of Raff and Liszt: Erste moderne Suite, Op. 10; Prélude et fugue, Op. 13; and Zweite moderne Suite, Op. 14. In each of these multi-movement pieces, MacDowell engages with modernist techniques and aesthetics while maintaining a firm cosmopolitan content. All three sets were written under the guidance of Joachim Raff, and indeed MacDowell’s suites are indebted to his teacher’s own works in the genre. The first suite was famously endorsed by Liszt for performance at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in Zurich in July 1882. This performance, which occurred shortly after Raff’s death of a heart attack, was a career-making success for the young composer/pianist, whose playing of his composition solidified his connection to the aesthetics of this organization. Bertagnolli examines these works in light of this aesthetic framework, finding ample evidence of cyclical form, modernist harmony, and literary connections. Paradoxically, the critical response shows that the suites were praised both by German critics for their connection to European modernism and by American critics for their commitment to cosmopolitanism.

MacDowell’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15, is the subject of Chapter 7. The first of his two piano concertos continued his engagement with New German aesthetics while also allowing him to explore the demands of a genre that balanced his skill as a virtuoso pianist with his developing control of orchestral writing. Bertagnolli devotes more time to the performance history of this work because the composer’s struggles to have it performed and published were crucial to his professional development. He ran into numerous roadblocks and in fact could not obtain a European performance before relocating to the United States. Fortunately, the interest sparked in America by his growing successes prompted several American pianists to programme it in the United States before his return. The work’s adoption by his friend and mentor Teresa Carreño eventually paved the way for wider acceptance.

Chapters 8 and 9 are devoted to the character pieces that MacDowell wrote in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. The numerous works in this broad category of Romantic piano solo music were so important to his developing style that his first Boston recital in November 1888 consisted entirely of these short and evocative character pieces. Some of the critics found this to be an unusual programming choice, but Bertagnolli notes that ‘Boston critics accordingly identified in MacDowell’s early character pieces the stylistic traits that would epitomize his later works and the genre that would ultimately dominate his oeuvre’ (p. 220). As he explored the character piece while living in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, he developed several characteristic traits that built on the example of Schumann but also honed his own individual style.

Bertagnolli identifies several traits of MacDowell’s German character pieces that transferred seamlessly to his later American works. MacDowell increasingly adopted the practice of printing a short epigraph or poem under the titles of his short works. These give the player and listeners a context for the programmatic content, even if a programme would not otherwise be evident. The literary sources from which he drew are widely varied and cosmopolitan. His Frankfurt and Wiesbaden works contain no explicitly American connotations, but his ability to create evocative depictions grew during this stage of his compositional development. Regarding the Six Poems after Heinrich Heine, Op. 31, which concludes with a setting of the tragic Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, Bertagnolli writes:

The author identifies foreshadowing of MacDowell’s later works in several instances, but he draws particular attention to the first Wald-Idyll, Op. 19 no. 1. In its evocation of forest stillness, Bertagnolli finds a connection between his love for the woods outside Wiesbaden and his later devotion to his property in Peterborough, New Hampshire. This piece is not specific to time or place, but the author hears it as a precursor to the Woodland Sketches, Op. 51, making the case that, ‘in MacDowell’s European piano music, Wald-Idyllen (Forest Idylls) mark a juncture that anticipates the forging of his later American works’ (p. 231).

The final major chapter is devoted to MacDowell’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 23, which was composed in Germany but withheld from performance until he returned to the United States and could introduce it himself. This work was crucial to his establishment as a major artist, with the composer at the piano in the first four high-profile performances. Critics were intrigued, and in some cases disturbed, by the equal roles that MacDowell accorded to soloist and orchestra, creating what Bertagnolli describes as ‘a much different, much more successful integration of the performing forces in op. 23 than he had in op. 15’ (p. 376). Bertagnolli explores the performance and reception history of the concerto in depth, but his primary interest lies in the hidden programmatic content of the work. Tracing the origins of the thematic material in MacDowell’s sketches and drafts, Bertagnolli finds pervasive use of themes associated with Shakespearian plays that MacDowell had attended during his honeymoon in London. This content is presented in the narrative style that would become so important to MacDowell’s mature expression. The resulting work was not explicitly promoted as programmatic, but this background helps to explain some of the innovative formal choices that the composer made in crafting the work. It also ties this most abstract of MacDowell’s works to the evolving narrative style of his character pieces.

In summary, Paul Bertagnolli has done a remarkable service to MacDowell scholarship with this book. He explores in unprecedented depth a group of works that have previously been downplayed in favour of the composer’s later, more famous compositions. The care that he has devoted to these works allows us new insights into the development of MacDowell’s unique compositional style, and it also argues convincingly that these works should be performed and appreciated once again.