His overture, "In the Mountains," has been much played from the manuscript by orchestras, among them the Boston Symphony. Besides a considerable amount of highly valuable contributions to American chamber-music, and two fine piano suites, he has written a great many piano pieces and songs which deserve even greater popularity than they have won, because, while not bristling with technical difficulties, they are yet of permanent worth.
I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting the fires that beam in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes. His two gavottes are to me among the best since Bach. They are an example of what it is to be academic without being only a-rattle with dry bones. He has written a Nocturne that gets farther from being a mere imitation of Chopin than almost any night-piece written since the Pole appropriated that form bodily from John Field and made it his own.
One of his most original pieces is the Capriccio of his D minor Suite, which is also unusually brilliant in color at times; and he has an Allegretto that is a scherzo of the good old whole-souled humor. Foote, in fact, is never sickly in sentiment.
Of his rather numerous songs, the older English poets, like Marlowe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Suckling, and Herrick, have given him much inspiration. The song "It Was a Lover and his Lass" is especially taking. His three songs, "When You Become a Nun, Dear," "The Road to Kew," and "Ho, Pretty Page!" written by modern poets in a half-archaic way, display a most delicious fund of subtile and ironic musical humor. "The Hawthorn Wins the Damask Rose" shows how really fine a well conducted English ballad can be. Among his sadder songs, the "Irish Folksong," "I'm Wearing Awa'," and the weird "In a Bower" are heavy with deepest pathos, while "Sweet Is True Love" is as wildly intense and as haunting in its woe as the fate of the poor Elaine, whose despair it sings. This I count one of the most appealing of modern songs.
1. It was a lover and his lass, With a hey and a ho, With a hey and a ho, and a hey, and a hey non-i-no! That o'er the green cornfield did pass, In the springtime, the springtime, The only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing hey ding a ding! Sweet lovers love the spring.