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 "La-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.
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