The existence of a festival march, a concert overture, "Hector and Andromache," two comic operas, and six songs for chorus and orchestra, besides a number of part songs and piano pieces, and over one hundred songs, forty of which are published, gives proof of the restless energy of the man. The high average of scholarship is a proof of his right to serious acceptance.
A cantata for orchestra, "Lelewala," a legend of Niagara, is published for piano accompaniment. Now, Niagara is a dangerous subject for the frail skiffs of rhyme, prose, or music to launch out upon. Barrel staves may carry one through the whirlpool, but music staves cannot stand the stress. Of all the comments upon the Falls of Niagara that I have ever read, or heard of, there has been only one that seemed anything but ridiculously inappropriate; that one was the tribute of a young boy who, on standing face to face with the falls, simply exclaimed, in an awe-smothered whisper, "Well, by gosh!" But it must be admitted that these words would baffle the music-making propensities even of the composer of Händel's "Hallelujah Chorus." That learned composer, George F. Bristow, now dead, made the mistake of attempting to compass Niagara in a work for chorus and orchestra. Hadley is not exactly guilty of the same fatal attempt in his "Lelewala," for the poem is chiefly a story of love and sacrifice; but Niagara comes in as a programmatic incident, and the author of the text has fallen lamentably short of his subject in certain instances. In other moments, he has written with genuine charm, and the music has much that is worth while.
Among his published songs are to be noted the unusually good setting of Heine's "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'" and of his less often heard "Sapphire sind die Augen dein," and "Der Schmetterling ist in die Rose verliebt." A deservedly popular work is "I Plucked a Quill from Cupid's Wing." Among so many morose or school-bound composers, Hadley is especially important for the fact that he is thrilled with a sane and jubilant music.
It has been fortunate for American song that it forsook the narrow, roystering school of English ballad and took for its national model the _Lied_ of the later German school. It is true that the earlier English had its poetry-respecting music in the work of such a man as Henry Lawes, or Purcell, just as it had its composers who far preceded Bach in the key-roving idea of the "Well-tempered Clavier;" but that spirit died out of England, and found its latest avatar in such men as Robert Franz, who confessed that he had his first and fullest recognition from this country.