And you, the wife of a highly gifted artist, will not and must not lose hope! In similar cases, happily, one often witnesses a seemingly inexplicable recovery.

If it can give MacDowell a moment's cheer, say to him that he has in distant Norway a warm and understanding friend who feels for him, and wishes from his heart that for him, as for you, better times may soon come.
With best greeting to you both, Your respectful 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.