Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile, that she was
dethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before her husband
and her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But her
husband caused her body to be embalmed and borne with him wherever he
went. And when finally he had vanquished the pretender, he had the
corpse decked in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne in
the great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile, and vassals and
liegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappy
queen in her lifetime.
The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de Castro on
her throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and hung with gold
and precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from men in a sort
of royal state, and surrounded by all the emblems of kingdom. And
beneath its stiff and incrusted sheath there lies, as once there lay
beneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not a
living being, but a corpse.
For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement is
unfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it.
But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become the
composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which the
late nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself.
No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the
symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not
exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists
who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.
"Je suis l'empire à la fin de la décadence."
One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and
colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of
things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of
the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and
sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their
flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and
fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost
heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and
garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from
its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose
and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le
crépuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to
the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to
appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and
ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should
undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable
milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the
"Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic and
sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang"
and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister
note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La
Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "Là-bas"; in
"Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four Stringed
Instruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who,
after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine
monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the
choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl Huysmans, the
"oblat" of La Trappe?
To a limited extent, of course, he has succeeded in fixing the color of
the symbolist movement in music. Some of his richer, dreamier songs,
some of his finer bits of polishing, his rarer drops of essence, are
indeed the musical counterpart of the goldsmith's work, the preciosity,
of a Gustave Kahn or a Stuart Merrill. But a musical Huysmans, for
instance, it was never in his power to become. For he has never
possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the
power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of
instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's
black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and
spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has
always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet,
the orchestral "Les Vieillées de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for
instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The
idiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of
the romanticists. The string quintet has even been dubbed "A Musical
'Trip Around the World in Eighty Days.'" Nor is the idiom of his later
and more representative period primarily and originally any more
characteristic. It never seems to surge quite wholly and cleanly and
fairly. The chasing to which it has evidently been subjected cannot
quite conceal its descent. The setting of "La Cloche fêlée" of
Baudelaire, for instance, is curiously Germanic and heavy, for all the
subtlety and filigree of the voice and the accompanying piano and viola.
It is a fairly flat waltz movement that in "A Pagan Poem" is chosen to
represent the sublunary aspect of Virgil's genius. And "Hora mystica"
and "Music for Four Stringed Instruments," which have a certain
stylistic unity, nevertheless reveal the composer hampered by the
Gregorian and scholastic idiom which he has sought to assimilate.
Nor has he ever had the power to express and objectify himself
completely, and achieve vital form. In performance, most of his works
shrink and dwindle. The central and sustaining structure, the cathedral
which is behind every living composition and manifests itself through
it, is in these pieces so vague and attenuated that it fades into the
background of the concert-hall, is like gray upon gray. The gems and
gold thread and filigree with which this work is sewn tarnish in the
gloom. Something is there, we perceive, something that moves and sways
and rises and ebbs fitfully in the dim light. But it is a wraithlike
thing, and undulates and falls before our eyes like flames that have
neither redness nor heat. Even the terrible bagpipe of the second
rhapsody for oboe; even the caldron of the "Pagan Poem," that
transcription of the most sensual and impassioned of Virgil's eclogues,
with its mystic, dissonant trumpets; even the blasphemies of "La
Villanelle du Diable," and the sundown fires that beat through the close
of "Hora mystica" are curiously bloodless and ghostly and unsubstantial.
Pages of sustained music occur rarely enough in his music. The lofty,
almost metaphysical, first few periods, the severe and pathetic second
movement of the "Music for Four Stringed Instruments"; certain songs
like "Le Son du cor," that have atmosphere and a delicate poetry, are
distinctly exceptional in this body of work. What chiefly lives in it
are certain poignant phrases, certain eloquent bars, a glowing, winey
bit of color here, a velvety phrase for the oboe or the clarinet, a
sharp, brassy, pricking horn-call, a dreamy, wandering melody for the
voice there. His music consists of scattered, highly polished phrases,
hard, exquisite, and cold. He is pre-eminently the _precieux_.
Of the scrupulousness, the fastidiousness, the distinction, even, of
Loeffler's work, there can be no question. He is not one of the
music-making herd. The subtlety and originality of intention which his
compositions almost uniformly display, the unflagging effort to inclose
within each of his forms a matter rare and novel and rich, set him
forever apart, even in his essential weakness, from the academic and
conforming crew. The man who has composed these scores makes at least
the gesture of the artist, and comes to music to express a temper
original and delicate and aristocratic, disdainful of the facile and the
commonplace, a sensibility often troubled and shadowy and fantastic. He
is eminently not one of the pathetic, half-educated musicians so common
in America. He knows something of musical science; knows how a tonal
edifice should be unified; has a sense of the chemistry of the
orchestra. He appears familiar with the plainsong, and has based a
symphony and portions of a quartet on Gregorian modes. Even at a period
when the sophisticated and cultivated composer is becoming somewhat less
a rarity, his culture is remarkable, his knowledge of literature
eclectic. Gogol as well as Virgil has moved him to orchestral works.
Above all, he is one of the company of composers, to which a good number
of more gifted musicians do not belong, who are ever respectful of their
medium, and infinitely curious concerning it.
It is only that, in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity,
he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity. In seeking by main force
to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is
trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the
harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and
undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious,
over-meticulous of his diction. Because his phraseology was colorless,
he has become a stainer of phrases, a sort of musical euphuist. All his
energy, one senses, has gone into the cutting and polishing and shining
up and setting of little brightly colored bits of music, little sharp,
intense moments. One feels that they have been caressed and stroked and
smoothed and regarded a thousand times; that Loeffler has dwelt upon
them and touched them with a sort of narcissistic love. Indeed, it must
have been a great labor that was expended on the darkening and spicing
and sharpening of the style in certain of his orchestral poems; the
effort to create a new idiom based on the Gregorian modes, to which
"Hora mystica" and the recent work for string quartet bear witness, must
in itself have been large. But though in result of all the chasing and
hammering on gold, the filing and polishing, the vessel of his art has
perhaps become richer and finer, it has not become any fuller. His
second period differs from his first only in the fact that in it he has
gone from one form of uncreativity to another somewhat more dignified
and unusual. The compositions of both periods have, after all, the
selfsame lack. His destiny seems to have been inevitable.
And so, in its confused argentry and ghostliness, its crystallization
and diaphinity, his music resembles at times nothing so much as the
precious remains and specimens of an extinct planet; things transfixed
in cold eternal night, icy and phosphorescent of hue. No atmosphere
bathes them. Sap does not mount in them. Should we touch them, they
would crumble. This, might have been a flower. But now it glistens with
crystals of mica and quartz. These, are jewels. But their fires are
quenched. These candied petals are the passage from "Music for Four
Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs
naïves," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pré
toute émeraude." The petrified saurian there, whose bones have suffered
"a sea-change
Into something rich and strange"
is the Spanish rhapsody for 'cello; the string of steely beads, the
setting of the "To Helen" of Poe. And the objects that float preserved
in those little flasks are some of the popular ditties with which
Loeffler is so fond of incrusting his work. Once they were "à La
Villette," and the Malagueña, and the eighteenth-century marching song
of the Lorraine soldiery, and flourished under the windy heaven. But
when Loeffler transplanted them respectively into "La Villanelle du
Diable," into the 'cello rhapsody and into "Music for Four Stringed
Instruments," they underwent the fate that befalls everything subjected
to his exquisite and sterilizing touch.
One comes to the conclusion that perhaps the most significant and
symbolic thing in the career of Charles Martin Loeffler is his place of
residence. For this Alsatian, French in culture, temperamentally related
to the _décadents_, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré and
the Wagnerizing Frenchmen, later that of Dukas, and last that of d'Indy
and Magnard, has lived the greater portion of his life in no other city
than Boston. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing
first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the
atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained
there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost native
to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave
Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially
tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and
manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing
numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own
career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the
preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one,
the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music
seems some psychic banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis,
a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle,
at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen the Chadwicks
and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile
"American Composers."