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EDVARD GRIEG.

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