In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson, Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems. Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction, January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it. Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the drama too objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian quality. And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother, Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces. The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s. In general “tone” he hovers between the modern Russians and Richard Strauss. In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.