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 décadents, writing music at first resembling that of Fauré 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. Coming originally to America for the purpose of playing first violin in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has found the atmosphere of the New England capital so pleasant that he has remained there practically ever since. He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air. And his own career, on the spiritual plane, seems just such an exchange, the preference of a shadowy and frigid place to a blazing and quivering one, the exchange of the eternal Paris for the eternal Boston. His music seems the result of just such a banishment. His art is indeed, in the last analysis, a flight from the group of his kinsmen into, if not exactly the circle, at least the dangerous vicinity of those amiable gentlemen, the Chadwicks and the Converses and all the other highly respectable and sterile "American Composers."
