Loeffler from Dutton

[Alan Howe]

I understand that there is to be a CD of orchestral works by Loeffler among Dutton's December releases. Artists include Lorraine McAslan (violin), Amy Dickson (saxophone) with the BBCCO under Johannes Wildner.

[Wheesht]

Ooh, good - I suspect Les veillées de l'Ukraine (which was played by the same musicians on BBC Radio 3 in June and one movement of which is in the downloads section) will be among the works on that CD. Sounds like another must-have disc to me.

[minacciosa]

Dutton looks to be doing the job that Naxos American Classics has seemingly relinquished.

[Alan Howe]

Details here:
http://www.duttonvocalion.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=CDLX7313&cat=385

[chill319]

This is a must buy for me. Loeffler and his direct successor, Arthur Shepherd, are not better known simply because the level of subtlety they aspired to is not populist, even though both felt connections with American popular culture in their respective decades. Even Gershwin's less populist scores, such as the Second Rhapsody, long suffered a lesser but similar reception.

Those curious about Loeffler who have not heard his Music for Four Stringed Instruments are in for a treat. That said, his idiom has little to do with 19th-century German music and is at best peripheral to this forum.

[Alan Howe]

Well, it's very romantic. At least the music on the new CD is.

[Alan Howe]

This is extreeeeeeeeeemely toothsome. More anon.

[Alan Howe]

Une Nuit de Mai (1891) is very lovely, but the for me the highlight is the Divertissement in A minor (1894) which, as the sleevenotes suggest, is a violin concerto in all but name. And a most original work it is too - I can't think of anything like it. It starts off a bit like Taneyev's Suite de Concert, but it turns out to be a much more grateful work, with some absolutely spellbinding writing for the soloist and some colourfully orchestrated and powerful material for the orchestra (including the Dies Irae in the finale). Wonderful - and precisely the sort of music that UC was designed for...

[Gareth Vaughan]

Oh dear. I shall HAVE to buy it, I can see. I shall be in the workhouse before long!

[Alan Howe]

...join me there, Gareth. Still, the music's good!

[semloh]

I hope there'll be room for me, too.  I love Loeffler's music - warm, expansive, full of feeling, and totally seductive! I am at a loss to know why it has been so neglected. Hats off to Dutton!

[edurban]

I can think of various reasons for Loeffler's neglect, most having to do with the passing of his generation and the arrival of the modernists, the fact that he left no school or followers (that I can think of), the short-lived appeal of impressionism in its various forms (not that Loeffler was ever simply a Debussy knock-off), the deep distrust that Americans had for sensualism or the cult of beauty.  The hatchet taken to Loeffler's music by the young (30) music critic Paul Rosenfeld in 1920 was so vivid that the passage about the dead Queen of Castile used to be quoted whenever Loeffler's name came up.  People who had never heard a note of Loeffler's music, knew that it had been (rather brilliantly) compared to a be-jeweled corpse.

David

P.S. I've attached a sizeable chunk of Rosenfeld's essay:

Loeffler

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[Pg 259] 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...
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] 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....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"

[semloh]

Wow! Well, thanks for that response, Charles. Much appreciated. I will listen afresh to Loeffler, just to confirm that I detect a pulsating rather than dead body under the jewels! 

Your own explanation of his neglect might be entirely correct. By all accounts, it seems that he could be an awkward character, who had difficulty maintaining stable relationships, so followers would be easily deterred. I am interested in your comment that Americans at that time distrusted the sensual or the 'cult of beauty'. The latter was an outgrowth of the aesthetic movement - handsome knights and long-haired maidens, and all that pre-Raphealite art - that arose in Great Britain in the 1860/70s. I can't say that I had ever thought of America as being anything but enthusiastic about it, despite its penchant for down-to-earth pragmatism, but you may be quite right. I need to do some homework! 

[edurban]

Aurally, this goes against the Puritan grain: I think the visual version comes out pretty chaste (or so it has always seemed to me) in American painting and sculpture of the 80s and 90s .  Not that the Puritan tradition would have been Rosenfeld's issue...product, as he was, of a New York German-Jewish upbringing.  Btw, he also identified the source of the Loeffler 'problem'  as the composer's 'Alsatian' origin, which, as we now know, was a complete fabrication.

Then there's the music's lack of the kind of good, clear, stiffening structure that the various Reinecke/Rheinberger pupils brought back from their European studies...Rather louche compared with Chadwick, Parker, et al.

Glad to see none of this bothers us now...

Best, David

[Mark Thomas]

"Wow" indeed. What a dreadfully powerful metaphor Rosenfeld employs in the first few paragraphs of his demolition job on poor Loeffler. I have never really enjoyed anything of Loeffler's that I've heard, probably because I've never had much empathy with the whole impressionist movement in music (or art for that matter), but the perverse result for me of reading Rosenfeld's coruscating critique ("in seeking to compensate himself for his infecundity, he has fallen into the deep sea of preciosity"!!) is that I'll probably buy the Dutton release now, just to see what was worth spending so much effort on criticising!