42 ("In a Haunted Forest," "Summer Idyll," "The Shepherdess' Song," "Forest Spirits"), and in the later and far more important "Indian" suite for orchestra ("Legend," "Love Song," "In War-time," "Dirge," "Village Festival").
[8] That MacDowell came later to realise the disadvantages, no less than the inconsistency, of writing programme-music based upon a detailed and definite programme and then withholding the programme, is indicated by this passage from a lecture on Beethoven which he delivered at Columbia: "If it [Beethoven's music] is absolute music, according to the accepted meaning of the term, either it must be beautiful music in itself,--that is, composed of beautiful sounds,--or its excuse for _not_ being beautiful must rest upon its power of expressing emotions and ideas that demand other than merely beautiful tones for their utterance.

Music, for instance, that would give us the emotion--if I may call it that--of a series of exploding bombshells could hardly be called 'absolute music'; yet that is exactly what the opening of the last movement of the so-called 'Moonlight' Sonata meant to Miss Thackeray, who speaks of it in her story, 'Beauty and the Beast.'...

If this is abstract music, it is bad.

We know, however, that Beethoven had some poetic idea in his mind as he wrote this; but as he never gave the clew to the world, the music has been swallowed as 'absolute music' by the modern formalists"-- a comment which would apply almost word for word, with a change of names and titles, to a certain tumultuous and "unbeautiful" passage in MacDowell's "Lancelot and Elaine." This passage is intended to express the rage and jealousy of Guinevere; but MacDowell has given no indication of this fact in his score, and only occasionally does the information find its way into the programme-books.

Yet in his own copy of the score he wrote a complete and detailed key to the significance of the music at every point.