CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER
LEGEND records of Inez de Castro, Quern of Portugal, 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 Portugal, 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 incrustated sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath the jewelled robes and diadem of the kings of Portugal, not a living being, but a corse.
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 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 colours rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventures of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for
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