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.
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