JAVS Fall 2024

The first four measures of the song can be seen as a gentle introduction into Loeffler’s Symbolist world (See Figure 8). To create a harmonious atmosphere, Loeffler wrote perfect fifths for the viola and a very light texture—only single eighth notes—for the piano. In addition, Loeffler bases his song in C Lydian mode, utilizing the scale in

a clever way: the characteristic note in a Lydian scale is the raised fourth degree, in this case the F sharp. Because the raised fourth degree creates three whole steps at the beginning of the scale, it creates an empty feeling devoid of a natural grounding tonality, like the ambiguity of the whole tone scale.

Figure 8. “Harmonie du Soir,” mm. 1-6. This example makes use of the following edition: Charles Martin Loeffler: Selected Songs with Chamber Accompaniment, edited by Ellen Knight. Recent Researches in American Music, vol. 16. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., 1988. Used with permission. www.areditions.com.

To convey the heartbreaking tone of the poem, Loeffler incorporates the “Dies Irae” chant in the music, quoting it three times in the viola. The “Dies Irae” chant first appears in m. 68, on the text: “The sky is sad and beautiful like a great wayside-altar.” Beginning on F-natural, Loeffler alters some intervallic relationships within a semi-tone to fit it into the harmonic structure of the music in this section. “Dies Irae” reappears in the corresponding repeated line of the poem in the following stanza. Its last appearance is at the beginning of the coda, following the final line of the poem when the desperate longing for a past lover is most explicit, thus symbolizing the finality and death of the love. The initial two entries of “Dies Irae” are marked f on the viola, and p on the piano; however, in the coda, the voice is absent when the viola plays the chant, allowing Loeffler to dramatically take the piano from ff in the previous

measure to a sudden pp . These dynamic markings are remarkably symbolic of death and loss, highlighting the transcendence of his love to the grave that Loeffler wanted people to hear in the music (Shown in Figure 9). The altered intervals in the final “Dies Irae” transmute the simple tune into the Latin chant with a more pentatonic drive than we have heard before, while we can clearly recognize G is the tonic. It is easy to tell that Loffler’s use of harmony is very novel, and no surprise that there are some similarities between Loeffler and Debussy’s music— they did study with the same teacher in Paris, after all. But Loeffler changed the harmonies swiftly and with such subtlety, perfectly illustrating the imaginary and spiritual world, the intangible emotions, and the ineffable thoughts in Symbolism.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 2, Fall 2024

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