Loeffler's music opens with a suggestion of the sombre and portentous scene which begins the drama; a suggestion of the gathering storm, the tossing trees, the wild and sinister night. A mood is created—a mood appropriate to the prevailing emotional atmosphere of the play; and this mood is developed in the music without particular relation to the progress of the drama until near the close, where the composer takes up the thread of the action at the point in the last act were Ygraine, waiting in agonized vigil before the keyless door of iron, hears, from behind the barrier, the despairing voice and piteous appeals of the doomed Tintagiles. Here the music becomes definitely dramatic in its expression: "There is the plaintive voice of the timorous child; there are the terrifying steps in the corridor, the steps as of many, who do not walk as other beings, yet they draw near and whisper without the guarded door." As the themes of the score were conceived in accordance with the spirit of the play, it may be pointed out, on the authority of the composer, that there are musical symbols for certain of its principal characters and events. Thus a forbidding and threatening phrase which occurs persistently throughout (its first appearance is near the beginning, where it is declaimed, forte, by double-basses, 'cellos, bassoons, and bass clarinet, against string tremolos and agitated runs in the higher wood-wind) typifies the Dread Queen, the Queen of Darkness and of Terror—or, not to put too fine a point upon it, the idea of predestined and over-shadowing death: for, as it has been observed of another of Maeterlinck's plays, "the symbol floats like a flag" in this drama. The plaintive and dolorous tones of the viola d'amore may be said to voice the pathos of those who are foredoomed—typified in the play by the child Tintagiles. The culminating and concluding scene of the tragedy has its counterpart in the climax of the symphonic poem: an anguished crescendo ascent of the strings and wood-wind, allegro frenetico, punctuated by gasping ejaculations of trumpets and cornets, is suddenly cut short, as it were, in mid-air, while above a roll of the drums and the sinister vibration of the gong the theme of the Evil Queen—the theme of Death—is proclaimed fortissimo by violins, English horn, and clarinet. Then begins an epilogue which has no actual equivalent in the drama—which transcends yet fulfils it. The ending of the play is grievous and terrible in the extreme, but the ending of the tone-poem, while it is conceived in a mood of deep and piercing sadness, is at once elegiac and tender: violins and horns intone, molto dolente, a poignant phrase most acutely harmonized; 'cellos and double-basses recall the Death theme; the 'cellos alone sing an expressive phrase which bears a striking resemblance to a melodic idea in the composer's song, Les Paons, [93] and this introduces a cantabile passage, of intense and vivid sweetness (likewise suggestive of Les Paons), for strings, brass, wood-wind, and harp. The music dies away with long-sustained chords, piano, in the trombones, trumpets, horns, and higher wood-wind.
"POEM" ["LA BONNE CHANSON">[: Op. 8
In 1901 Loeffler wrote, as a companion piece to his Villanelle du Diable (see the following pages), an "aubade" for orchestra inspired by Paul Verlaine's ecstatic lines addressed to his bride, Mathilde Mauté, and printed in the volume of poems entitled La Bonne Chanson.[94] Loeffler's paraphrase was originally entitled Avant que tu ne t'en ailles, after the opening line of the poem; later this was changed to La Bonne Chanson; the title finally chosen by the composer is the French of that given above—Poème.
Verlaine's poem, in English prose, is as follows:
"Before you fade and disappear, pale morning-star—a thousand quails call in the thyme—
"Turn towards the poet, whose eyes brim with love—the lark mounts skyward with the day—
"Turn your face which the dawn drowns in its blue—what joy among ripe wheat-fields!—
"Make my thought shine yonder—far off, O so far!—The dew shines brightly on the hay—
"In the sweet dream wherein my love still sleeping stirs—Quick! be quick! for, lo, the golden sun!" [95]
Loeffler's tonal translation of Verlaine's poem is in spirit a rhapsody, in form "a fantastic kind of thème varié" (theme with variations), as he describes it, "the theme appearing even in canonic form and in inversion."[96] The music opens with a passage suggestive of the opening verse of the poem: harp, glockenspiel,[97] and strings evoke the thought of the early dawn, the fading and disappearing star. The strings sing the principal theme. After an allegro passage (some will find here the thought of the ascending lark), there is a return to the serener mood of the opening; antique cymbals hint at the sparkle of the dew on the hay. The music keeps pace with the mounting eagerness and desire of the poet-lover; the excitement grows, reaching its climax in an effulgent outburst of the full orchestra, announcing the rising sun.
"THE DEVIL'S VILLANELLE," SYMPHONIC FANTASIA: Op. 9
La Villanelle du Diable, d'après un poème de M. Rollinat, Fantasie symphonique, pour grand orchestre et orgue, was composed in 1901. Its subject is Maurice Rollinat's[98] strange poem, La Villanelle du Diable. A "villanelle" (in the sense in which the term is used by Rollinat) is an old verse-form in which a couplet is followed by a refrain. In Rollinat's poem there are two alternating refrains, or burdens, which are united at the end.