ir cries
and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius
will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive,
it cannot be.

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 a la fin de la decadence."

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
garis