These candied petals are the passage from "Music for Four
Stringed Instruments" glossed in the score "un jardin plein des fleurs
naives," while this vial of gemmy green liquid is that entitled "une pre
toute emeraude." 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 "a La
Villette," and the Malaguena, 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 _decadents_, writing music at first resembling that of Faure 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.
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