From the Press of A. P. Schmidt

Edward A. MacDowell (1860–1908) began his piano studies in New York before departing for France and Germany to train under a range of noted teachers including Joachim Raff and Carl Heymann. He caught the attention of the European public in 1882, when Franz Liszt helped to secure the performance and publication (with Breitkopf & Härtel) of his First Modern Suite, Op. 10, for piano. Following several productive years in Europe, MacDowell moved to Boston in 1888, where he soon secured his reputation as a pianist and composer in the United States. In 1896, he returned home to New York as Columbia University’s very first professor of music.

By the time that MacDowell began work on his “Keltic” Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 59, in around 1900, he had already produced a wide range of piano music including not only the three previous sonatas but also etudes, piano concertos, suites, and more. But no one had heard anything quite like the new sonata, which the composer dedicated to his colleague Edvard Grieg. “MacDowell’s genius has here found its consummate flowering,” wrote critic Lawrence Gilman in the North American Review (1904). “Nowhere else in his work are its distinguishing traits so strikingly disclosed—the breadth and reach of imagination, the magnetic vitality, the richness and fervor, the conquering poetic charm.” 

MacDowell had also found a dependable publisher in Arthur P. Schmidt, a stalwart supporter since his Boston days. So eager was Schmidt to expand his investment that in 1899 he had purchased the rights to a majority of the composer’s catalog from New York music publisher P. L. Jung, thereby cementing his role as MacDowell’s primary publisher. When Schmidt published the “Keltic” Sonata in 1901, he readily agreed to print a few lines of poetry on the dedication page:

Who minds now Keltic tales of yore,
Dark Druid rhymes that thrall,
Deirdre’s song and wizard lore
Of great Cuchullin’s fall.

For many, of course, the answer was MacDowell.

🔍 View full score at the International Music Score Library Project.