Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music

The Forging of an American Composer

Paul Bertagnolli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780367622909
• eBook ISBN: 9781040104798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Edward MacDowell's European Piano Music is a critical study of the piano music that MacDowell composed during his European sojourn (1876–1888), steeped in reception history and with a special emphasis of programmaticism.

The book expands current knowledge of MacDowell's childhood in four of the chapters based on his previously uninvestigated sheet music collection, thereby achieving a better balance among the stages of MacDowell's life than is evident in most books of the life-and-works variety. Prolific contemporaneous music criticism, meticulously preserved in MacDowell's scrapbooks, is likewise undervalued in the MacDowell literature, but it furnishes penetrating observations about the expressive and programmatic content of numerous compositions, especially as it was revealed to critics when MacDowell performed his own works. Lastly, the book offers explanations for why MacDowell immersed himself in European culture for decades and then, at a crucial juncture in his career, embraced diverse American heritages and worked toward a conception of a pluralistic music that was American "in a creative sense."

The book's content and methodology would appeal most directly to specialists within the broad fields of musicology and music theory, particularly within American art music and its composers; nineteenth-century music; program music; reception history; and piano literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 The Sheet Music Collection of Walter and Eddie McDowell: Provenance, Contents, Cosmopolitanism
• 2 The Collection and Eddie’s Teachers: Buitrago, Desvernine, Carreño
• 3 The Sheet Music Collection’s Compositional Impact
• 4 “Untold Gold”: Taking the Juvenilia Seriously
• 5 Leaving Paris, Finding a Vocation in Germany
• 6 “Modernity” in MacDowell’s First Three Published Piano Works
• 7 The Transatlantic First Piano Concerto
• 8 Frankfurt Character Pieces: Forgotten Narratives
• 9 Wiesbaden Character Pieces: Literary and Theatrical Embodiments
• 10 The Shakespearean Second Piano Concerto
• Epilogue
• Appendix: The Sheet Music Collection’s Contents, Organized by Performing Media and Genres
• Bibliography
• Index