Loeffler, Charles Martin : Deux rapsodies : pour hautbois, alto et piano
(Charles Martin Loeffler (1861 - 1935) Deux rapsodies : po...)
Charles Martin Loeffler (1861 - 1935) Deux rapsodies : pour hautbois, alto et piano / Ch. M. Loeffler. Rhapsodies, piano, oboe, viola Score + 2 Parts, 64 pp. This is an Eastman Scores Publishing professional reprint of the work originally published by: G. Schirmer, 1905 ISMN : 979-0-087-00378-0
(On this fascinating disc of world premiere recordings, di...)
On this fascinating disc of world premiere recordings, distinguished soloists and the BBC Concert Orchestra explore the music of American composer Charles Martin Loeffler. Violinist Lorraine McAslan brilliantly rises to the music's very considerable technical demands - velvet-toned in the Une Nuit de Mai, a sumptuous musical picture of a spring night in the Ukraine, and powerfully virtuosic in the Divertissement in A minor. Prizewinning saxophonist Amy Dickson delights in the charming Divertissement Espagnol for saxophone and orchestra. The program is completed with the vivid symphonic fantasy La Villanelle du Diable.
For One Who Fell In Battle: Eight-Part Chorus For Mixed Voices, A Cappella (1911)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Psalm CXXXVII: By the Rivers of Babylon, for Four-Part Chorus of Women's Voices with Accompaniment of Organ, Harp, Two Flutes, and Violoncello Obbligato, Op. 3
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Charles Martin Loeffler: Selected Songs with Chamber Accompaniment (Recent Researches in American Music, 16)
(Inspired by the poetry of the French Symbolists, Loeffler...)
Inspired by the poetry of the French Symbolists, Loeffler's highly individual songs achieved considerable popularity during his lifetime. However, the majority of these songs, as of Loeffler's works in general, have never been previously published. The songs in the edition include settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Kahn, and Rollinat. Instrumental chamber parts sold separately.
Four Poems Set To Music For Voice And Piano, Op. 15; Volume 4
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Charles Martin Loeffler was an American violinist and composer.
Background
Charles Martin Loeffler was born on January 30, 1861 in Schöneberg bei Berlin, Germany, the son of Karl Valentin Immanuel Loeffler and Julie Charlotte Helena Schwerdtmann, both natives of Berlin. Dr. Löffler followed both literary and scientific professions. As a scientist he specialized in agricultural subjects, particularly sugar production. In addition to his scientific works, he was also the author of numerous novels and volumes of poetry, some published under the pseudonym "Tornow," the name of a small town in which he had lived as a boy. It was from his father's pen-name that Charles Martin Loeffler added the name "Tornov" to his own.
Dr. Karl Loeffler was also a skilled amateur musician and composed the music for a number of his own comedies. There were a number of children in the family, but, in addition to Charles, only two lived to maturity (Erich, who settled in America and became a 'cellist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Helen, a harpist who played with the orchestra at Frankfurt-am-Main). Dr. Loeffler died 1885. His son Martin's letters reveal that he died while a political prisoner. One of them, dated June 23, 1884, states: "He is at the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein for the remainder of his sentence. For having told the truth about certain things concerning the Prussian government, the family of Hohenzollern, and Prince Bismarck, he was sentenced some years ago."
While the composer was a young boy, his family lived in Alsace, where one of his sisters was born and which he later claimed to be the place of his own birth (due to the trauma of his father's death). Soon the family moved from Alsace to Smiela, in the province of Kiev, Russia.
These years in Russia exerted a strong influence on young Loeffler and provided the inspiration for one of his later compositions, the orchestral poem, Memories of My Childhood; Life in a Russian Village. After a number of years in Russia, the family moved to Debreczin in Hungary, where Dr. Karl Loeffler had been appointed a faculty member of the Royal Agricultural Academy. In Hungary Charles was deeply impressed by the playing and the songs of the wandering Gypsy fiddlers.
Education
At the age of eight, Charles was given violin lessons by a German musician who played in the Imperial Orchestra at St. Petersburg. He decided to become a professional musician, and in 1875 he went to Berlin, where he commenced his violin studies with Eduard Rappoldi and worked in harmony with Friedrich Kiel. Later he graduated to the classes of Joseph Joachim, who invited him to take part in performances of chamber music at his home. From Joachim, Loeffler went to Lambert Joseph Massart in Paris, where he also studied counterpoint and composition with Ernest Guiraud.
Career
Loeffler played with the Pasdeloup Orchestra. Upon Massart's recommendation, Loeffler was engaged for the private orchestra of Baron Paul von Dervies, a nobleman of prodigious wealth who owned vast estates in Russia but spent his summers at his castle near the lake of Lugano, and his winters at his villa near Nice. In addition to an orchestra of seventy picked men, the Baron maintained a mixed choir of forty-eight singers (all Bohemians), which sang Russian liturgical chants in the private chapel, and also formed the chorus for operatic performances at the villa in Nice.
Loeffler's first contract with the Baron was dated February 22, 1879, and called for a salary of 190 francs a month. In 1880 he was given a new contract, to extend to October 16, 1881, with a salary of 300 francs a month. This contract, however, was not allowed to run its full length, for the death of the Baron caused the orchestra to be disbanded. Upon the cancelation of his contract with the late Baron, Loeffler decided to try his fortunes in America. He sailed from Le Havre on the French liner, La Canada, and landed in New York in July 1881. He brought with him a letter of introduction from Joachim to Leopold Damrosch, and during the winter of 1881-1882 he played in all of Damrosch's concerts in New York, Brooklyn, Newark, and other nearby cities. He was also engaged for the orchestra of the Norcross Opera Company. In addition, he was a member of the orchestra of 300 which Theodore Thomas assembled for the mammoth music festival at the Seventh Regiment Armory, New York, May 2-6, 1882.
In the spring of 1882 Loeffler came to the attention of Henry Lee Higginson, the international banker who founded, and for many years supported, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Higginson invited Loeffler to join the orchestra and signed a contract with him, dated April 10, 1882, providing for a salary of thirty-five dollars a week for a season of twenty-six weeks beginning the following fall. Loeffler was assigned a place beside the concertmaster (at that time Bernhard Listemann, and later Franz Kneisel), and except for a tour as a member of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in the spring of 1883, he devoted his major attention to the Boston Symphony for the next two decades.
In 1887 he became an American citizen. Of a naturally frugal disposition, Loeffler was able to amass considerable means during his years with the Boston Symphony, and in 1903 he decided to retire from the orchestra, and to live at his farm in Medfield, Massachusetts, where, aside from some teaching, he could devote himself entirely to composition. There he lived the life of a partial recluse. A few privileged friends were welcomed for evenings of chamber music, and very occasionally he would conduct his pupils in recitals for charity at the village church. He was sometimes seen, also, at the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, where a number of his works received their first performance. He died at Medfield of a heart ailment, and dying without issue, he willed the bulk of his estate to the French Academy and the Paris Conservatoire. His widow survived him by less than a year and bequeathed his autographs, manuscripts, and letters to the Library of Congress.
Although Loeffler's musical idiom was so Gallic in spirit that it can hardly be considered American in its character, it represents something that was exceedingly rare at a time when the best American composers, with the exception of MacDowell, were largely academic. He had composed a number of songs while he played in the orchestra of Baron von Dervies, but he published practically nothing until he had finished his career as violinist, in 1903. A number of his works had been performed by the Boston Symphony, but the composer had kept them all in manuscript.
His first published orchestral works were the dramatic poem, La Mort de Tintagiles (opus 6, after Maeterlinck), and La Villanelle du Diable (opus 9), a symphonic fantasy based on a poem by Rollinat. These were issued in 1905, though both were composed at an earlier date. In 1907 the Boston Symphony introduced in its final form the work that has proved the most widely performed of Loeffler's works--the Pagan Poem (opus 14), based on the eighth Eclogue of Virgil. This was first composed in 1901, in a form for piano, two flutes, oboe, clarinet, English horn, two horns, three trumpets, viola, and double bass. Later the composer rearranged the score for two pianos and three trumpets, and it was played by that combination at the home of Mrs. Gardner in 1903. Subsequently Loeffler expanded the work to symphonic proportions, for piano and large orchestra, and that became its permanent form.
The symphony, Hora Mystica, was composed for the Litchfield County Music Festival of 1916, held in Norfolk, Connecticut For its first chamber-music festival, in 1925, the Library of Congress, under the provisions of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, commissioned a setting of St. Francis's "Canticle of the Sun, " which Loeffler entitled Canticum Fratris Solis. The work is scored for solo voice and chamber orchestra and makes use of old church modes and liturgical motives. Another commission from Mrs. Coolidge resulted in a Partita for violin and piano. In 1930 the Juilliard Foundation published Evocation, for orchestra, women's chorus, and speaking voice, which received its first performance in Cleveland, by the Cleveland Orchestra, on February 5, 1931.
Included also among his published works are five "Irish Fantasies" for voice and orchestra (1922); "By the Rivers of Babylon" (opus 3), a setting of Psalm CXXXVII, for women's voices, with accompaniment of organ, harp, two flutes, and 'cello obbligato (1907); "For One Who Fell in Battle, " eight-part chorus for mixed voices, a capella (1911); "Beat! Beat! Drums!" (Drum Taps, A Soldier's March Song), for unison male chorus, with orchestra accompaniment (1917); and a Quintet in One Movement for three violins, viola, and 'cello (1938). He also published a number of songs and a technical work, Violin Studies for the Development of the Left Hand (1936).
Loeffler was an independent thinker, artistically a hermit, and his sparkling and colorful scores were polished to a refinement which approached perfection, but which never dimmed their brilliance. Spiritually, he was somewhat of a mystic; a deep student of medieval culture and thought, and thoroughly absorbed in Gregorian plainsong and the church modes of the Middle Ages.
Connections
On December 8, 1910, Loeffler was married to Elise Burnett Fay, whom he had first met in Boston in 1882.