st
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
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, temp