Скачать или смотреть Charles Martin Loeffler ‒ La mort de Tintagiles, Op.6

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861 - 1935), La mort de Tintagiles, Op.6, a symphonic poem for orchestra and viola d'amore (1900)

Performed by Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, John Nelson cond.

This is an unusually beautiful late Romantic piece written by a composer with an exceptionally subtle ear for orchestration. With haunting melodies and a rich harmonic language based on German practice of the late 1800s, it avoids the heaviness of Wagnerism and the hyper-emotional chromaticism of the turn of the century by adopting a French sensibility, including aspects of Debussy's "Impressionism." In fact, like Debussy, Loeffler was more drawn to the artistic and literary movement of Symbolism than to Impressionist art as an inspiration and the inspiration for this twenty-five minute tone poem was a play by the arch-Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, most famous for his play Pelléas et Mélisande, which gripped composers of the time as diverse as Debussy, Schoenberg, and Sibelius.

Maeterlinck's story is a tale of horror set in the same sort of twilight other world as Pelléas. Its title character is a frail youth, the crown prince of his kingdom. (Emotionally, Loeffler identified this doomed hero with his brother Rafael, who had died suddenly in 1895 at the age of fifteen, inspiring this composition. The piece is not a description of the plot of the play, but a reflection of the emotional progress of the drama. Musically, its most striking feature is the use of a pair of the antique instrument the viola d'amore to represent Tintagiles and his sister Ygraine. Loeffler considered it "the only instrument capable of expresisng the spirit and mood of the doomed." Though little known, this is an astonishingly powerful and excellent piece by an unusually original and unique composer.