Charles Martin Loeffler was a household name in his time, but you’ve likely never heard of him today.
In fact, he was the most performed composer of his time — around the turn of the 20th century — both in America and in Europe. The German-born composer and violinist was very self-critical, though, and withheld most of his music from publication, revising it over and over.
He lied when he came to the United States, telling people he was French. And that might be one of the reasons he’s been hard to pin down in classical music history and isn’t very well known today, according to Graeme Steele Johnson.
Johnson is a clarinetist who often writes program notes for chamber music festivals around the country. A few years ago, he came across a mention of an octet written by Loeffler. One, it turns out, had not been performed in more than 125 years.
Now, you can hear it performed for the first time since, in Phoenix on Friday at the Phoenix Chamber Music Festival at Central United Methodist Church. The Show spoke with Johnson about how it came to be.
Full conversation
GRAEME STEELE JOHNSON: This was in the early days of the pandemic, when many of my own performances had dried up as concerts were being canceled all over. So I, I had turned my attention to writing program notes, which I do for various festivals around the country. And so I was writing for a festival that had yet to cancel their summer season, and they had programmed another piece of Loeffler’s, his two rhapsodies for OBO Viola piano.
So I was just doing some background research on the composer, and just kind of stumbled upon a listing of the octet like in a catalog of his works. And so the unusual instrumentation caught my eye, first of all because it is unusual, this sort of colorful and unique blend of winds, strings and harp, but also because it involves two clarinet parts. And as a clarinetist, I was like, huh. Wonder what that sounds like. It also very nearly resembles an octet arrangement I wrote a few years ago of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune, a very beloved orchestral piece that I arranged for flute, clarinet, harp, string quartet and bass. The Loeffler octet is two clarinets, harp, string quartet and bass, so almost exactly the same.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s odd. Because that's not a normal combination for an octet?
JOHNSON: Right. It’s very unusual, but it's a combination that I find really just beautiful and tambourly varied. This combination of wind strings and harp kind of opens up all sorts of interesting textural possibilities. So anyway, at first I was like, oh, this could be a nice companion piece to my arrangement, my … arrangement. So I looked for sheet music, I looked for a recording. Couldn't find either of those. And that's when I started to think, oh, maybe this is not a thing.
GILGER: So you tracked it down, and it took some time, it looks like?
JOHNSON: Yeah, I have, I ultimately found the manuscript, again, just listed, not, not the manuscript itself, but listed in the online archives of the Library of Congress. So that was exciting, but it didn't really tell me anything about the piece. And again, this was at this point, this was April 2020, so the library was shuttered due to the pandemic, so it took a long time for me to actually get my hands on the piece. It wasn't until January of 2021, the following year, that someone at the library was able to scan it for me.
So until then, I was kind of sitting on this with no idea, you know, how long it is, certainly no idea what it sounds like, what kind of state the manuscript is in, like, would it even be legible? And so when it finally showed up in my inbox, you know, nine or so months later, it turned out to be a 75-page manuscript, which was, that's, that's pretty substantial in musical minutes. That amounted to about 30 minutes of music over the course of three movements.
GILGER: My goodness. And it was, like, really heavily revised? It sounds like, like it took you a long time to wade through this.
JOHNSON: Oh, yeah. You know, as was typical of Loeffler’s process, it was. Heavily revised in, you know, different colors of pen and pencil, indicating, you know, several rounds. And the revisions ranged from like little things like changes of notes, or, you know, rhythm like kind of micro details, all the way to, in many cases, he would compose, like an entire page of music, and then draw a line through it, indicating to skip over. So that was interesting because, you know, it's like, it brings up a question of authenticity. Is it more authentic to go with the original version of the piece or the latest version of the piece?
GILGER: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Like, tell us about this sort of difficult process of figuring out how to play this, how it should sound?
JOHNSON: Yeah, for performing musicians, it was almost a completely new experience. The piece is 127 years old. So you know, with with music written in the 19th century, we are accustomed to having, having a long standing tradition, interpretive tradition, to refer to, for you know, via recording or performance, something that is like well established in the sort of collective conscious of of how to make sense of written music.
GILGER: Yeah.
JOHNSON: Or when we're working with new music, we can communicate directly with the composer, but this is kind of in between. It's like new old music, so we don't have either of that direction, but in the absence of that interpretive blueprint, actually, that kind of opened up a totally new experience and a lot of new territory to discover.
GILGER: What did you discover in that? Like, what are some of the favorite moments for you of putting this together and figuring it out?
JOHNSON: I mean, just simple stuff, like, how fast the piece goes, how fast each movement goes. It's just like, these are not conversations that we ever really have to have. It's rare that you'll find someone playing a piece that has been recorded 1,000 times and the interpretation is completely out of left field, like they're just playing a wildly different tempo. But in this case, we had no precedent. So it was sort of like everything was up for debate.
GILGER: You referred to it as musical archeology.
JOHNSON: Totally, and I mean, that was a lot of that was kind of on the front end for me, just like trying to get the piece into a state that it could even be played through before we even had to confront those issues of like interpretation.
GILGER: What do you think, have you thought about what Loeffler might have thought about, what you've done with this?
JOHNSON: Well, that's a funny question. He loved to put on this front that he was indifferent to the opinion of critics, but as it turns out, he was, he was actually very sensitive to criticism, and especially as a composer, writing in kind of a like French style, at a time when musical America was basically an outpost of German culture, Loeffler pretty much stood alone in in the style of music he was creating, and as a result, faced a lot of criticism.
And there are many cases in his music where you can see places where he made specific revisions to his music in response to specific criticism he received. So all that to say that I hope he would appreciate this kind of revival that his music is getting a renewed attention to his name and his music and the impact he had kind of on the dawn of American music. And I also think for more than just Loeffler, it's an important reminder that our kind of musical frame of reference today, like we're sort of fed this idea that time is the arbiter of musical taste, so that if music is good, it will survive. Or if any art you know is good, the art, essentially the art we know today is has survived the test of time and kind of filtered out the bad stuff, yeah.
But this project has been a good reminder for me that there's so many other factors that play into that, and that kind of shape the version of history that we know today, and that history is just a, is one version of the events. And so I hope, I hope that reinvigorating them isn't with these unknown histories and unknown unheard sounds, prompts us to revisit, you know, the question of why, why it is we know what we know today.
