French by birth, German by training, and American by choice, Charles Loeffler was one of the most prominent and cosmopolitan musical figures of his generation. His father, Karl Valentin, an agronomist, a writer of politically sensitive poems and novels, and a dabbler in music, lived in Mulhouse, Alsace (then part of France), when Charles was born in 1861, but he moved his family to the small Russian country town of Smyela in the province of Kiev before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The boy received a violin as a gift for his eighth birthday; some lessons with a member of the Russian Imperial Orchestra followed. From 1871 to 1873, the family settled in Debreczen, Hungary, where Dr. Loeffler had been appointed to the faculty of the Royal Hungarian Agricultural College, and then moved on to Switzerland. By the age of thirteen, Charles had decided to become a professional violinist. He showed such promise that he was accepted as a student by Joseph Joachim, an intimate of Brahms and one of the half-dozen greatest virtuosos of his day, with whom he studied from 1874 to 1877 at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. However, finding himself unsympathetic to German culture (a condition exacerbated by the fact that his father spent several months in Prussian jails because of his writings criticizing the government), Loeffler continued his education in Paris, studying violin with Lambert Joseph Massart and composition with Ernest Guiraud. (Guiraud earned his footnote in music history not for his own compositions but as the deviser of the recitatives for Bizet’s Carmen and the completer of the orchestration of Offenbach’s Les Contes des Hoffmann.) Loeffler found work for a season in Paris as a violinist in the Pasdeloup Orchestra before it folded in 1879, and then joined the musical establishment of Paul von Derwies, a Russian baron whose nearly immeasurable wealth allowed him to maintain a private orchestra, an opera company, and a Slavic choir for his church services at his seasonal palaces in Nice and Lugano — three trains were required to transport the Baron and his household on their semi-annual shuttle.

When Derwies died in June 1881, Loeffler decided to try his luck in the New World, and he arrived in New York armed with a letter of recommendation from Joachim. He spent a season playing and touring with the orchestras of those great pioneers of American concert life, Leopold Damrosch and Theodore Thomas, and in the fall of 1882 joined the just-established Boston Symphony Orchestra as its assistant concertmaster. (His appointment was certainly not hin- dered by the fact that George Henschel, the baritone-cum-conductor who served as the BSO’s first music director, was an old ally of the Brahms-Joachim circle. Loeffler’s brother, Erich, a cellist, was also a member of the orchestra during those years.) Loeffler became a favorite soloist with the Boston public, appearing with the orchestra annually and giving the American premieres of works by Bruch, Saint-Saëns and Lalo. During his years with the BSO, he also pursued a parallel career as a composer (he participated in the premiere of his first orchestral work, Nights in the Ukraine, based on the Russian folk music he heard in his childhood, and seven other of his works during his tenure in Boston), and resigned his post in 1903 to devote himself to creative work. After spending a year in Paris, Loeffler bought an estate in Medfield, west of Boston, and there worked his farm, raised thoroughbred horses and composed. He remained active in the musical life of Boston, teaching, advising, serving on the boards of several music organizations, and supervising performances of his works, including the 1907 premiere of his best-known orchestral piece, A Pagan Poem, inspired by the writings of Virgil. Four years later, at the age of fifty, he married his long- time business manager, Elise Burnett Fay, and thereafter continued to compose at a measured pace for the next two decades; his last work, Evocation for female chorus and orchestra, was written in 1930 for the dedicatory concert of Severance Hall in Cleveland. Loeffler won wide respect for his contributions to the musical art, and he was recognized with membership (1908) and a Gold Medal (1920) from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an honorary doctorate from Yale (1926) and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1931), in addition to being named an Officer de l’Académie des Beaux Arts (1906) and a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur (1919).

Loeffler’s catalog of compositions is small but finely crafted: one completed opera and two others that exist only in sketches; incidental music to three plays; a dozen works for orchestra, many including a part for a solo instrument (the most unusual is La mort de Tintagiles, which calls for two violas d’amore); three dozen chamber works, most with programmatic titles; pieces for chorus; and a large number of songs. Loeffler’s refined literary taste is reflected in his choice of authors for his vocal works — Whitman, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Poe, Rossetti, Eichendorff, Yeats. His highly individual musical style, given more to French pastels than to German oils in its fluidity of rhythm and melody, opulent orchestration and sensitivity to harmonic color, has been classed as “post-Impressionist,” and encompasses such diverse influences as Medieval chant (which he studied for a year in Germany in 1909), mysticism and folksong. “Loeffler believes in tonal impressions rather than in thematic development,” wrote critic Philip Hale at the height of the composer’s career. “He has delicate sentiment, the curiosity of the hunger after nuances, the love of the macabre, the cool fire that consumes and is more deadly than fierce, panting flame....”

The Deux Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano are the 1901 reworkings of two songs Loeffler made from poems by Maurice Rollinat three years before. The first of the Rhapsodies was dedicated to the memory of Leon Pourtau, a clarinetist with the Boston Symphony from 1894 to 1898; the second was inscribed to Georges Longy, the ensemble’s renowned oboist from 1898 to 1925. Loeffler appended Rollinat’s verses to the Rhapsodies as preface:

The Pool
Full of old fish, stricken blind long ago, the pool, under a near sky rumbling with thunder, bares the splashing horror of its gloom between centuries-old rushes.

Over yonder, goblins light up more than one marsh that is black, sinister, unbear- able; but the pool is revealed in this lonely place only by the croakings of consumptive frogs.

Now the moon, piercing at this very moment, seems to look here at herself fantastically; as though, one might say, to see her spectral face, her flat nose, the strange vacuity of her teeth — a death’s-head lighted from within, about to peer into a dull mirror.

The Bagpipe
His bagpipe groaned in the woods as the wind; and never has stag at bay, nor willow, nor oar, wept as that voice wept.

Those sounds of flute and oboe seemed like the death rattle of a woman. Oh! his bagpipe, near the cross-roads of the crucifix!

He is dead. But under cold skies, as soon as night weaves her mesh, down deep in my soul, there is the nook of old fears, I always hear his bagpipe groan- ing as of yore.

Though these poems impress their bleak messages upon many passages of the Deux Rhapsodies (the viola quotes the Dies Irae — “Day of Wrath” — from the Requiem Mass in a glassy, keening sonority midway through the first one), the dominant characteristic of the music is one of sweet (perhaps bittersweet) floating mysticism, a sort of inward-looking rapture produced by Loeffler’s examination of what Carl Engel called “landscapes of the soul.”

German conductor and composer August Klughardt was born in 1847 in Cöthen, forty miles northeast of Berlin, where Johann Sebastian Bach held a position early in his career. Klughardt studied music as a youngster, and he had begun to compose by the time he made his debut as a pianist in Dessau at age seventeen. After graduating from preparatory school in 1866, he continued his music studies and began performing his compositions in Dresden. From 1867 to 1869, he held a series of jobs conducting and writing incidental music at theaters in Posen, Neustrelitz and Lübeck that garnered him sufficient notoriety to be appointed court music director at Weimar, where he formed a friendship with Franz Liszt, a predecessor in the position who had just returned to live and teach in the city. In 1873, Klughardt returned to Neustrelitz to become the theater’s music director; seven years later he was appointed its general manager. From 1882 to the end of his life twenty years later, he was director of music at the court in Dessau, where he brought the musical forces to sufficient competence to perform Wagner’s complete Ring cycle in 1892 and 1893. His prominence in German music was recognized with membership in the Berlin Academy of Arts, an honorary doctorate from the University of Erlangen, and an offer (not accepted) to direct the venerable Berlin Singakademie.

Klughardt’s compositions — four operas, two oratorios, five symphonies, concert overtures, three concertos, chamber works, songs and choral pieces — are in a 19th-century German idiom familiar from Schumann and Brahms condi- tioned by some more daring harmonic elements influenced by Liszt and Wagner. Indeed, the Schilflieder of 1872 are dedicated to Liszt “in innigster Verehrung” — “with deepest respect” — and were influenced in both their elaborate piano part and their poetic inspiration by the works of that composer. The Schilflieder were inspired by a set of five poems that Nicholas Lenau included in the sec- tion titled Sehnsucht (“Longing”) in his Gedichte: Erstes Buch (“Poems: First Book”), published in 1832. Lenau, born in Hungary in 1802, was possessed by a romantic spirit fueled by a hopeless love for the wife of a friend. In a fit of idealism in 1832, he came to America and settled in Ohio for a few months. Disappointed with the New World, he returned to Europe, where he produced an epic on the Faust legend and undertook a poetic drama based on Don Juan. Lenau left this latter work unfinished in 1844 when he lost his mind and was admitted to an asylum in the Viennese suburb of Oberdöbling, where he died six years later. (Richard Strauss’ 1888 tone poem was inspired by Lenau’s Don Juan.)

Klughardt chose not to set Lenau’s Schilflieder as traditional songs for voice and accompaniment (though Berg, Griffes, Rheinberger, Bruch, Pfitzner, Schoeck, Mendelssohn and many others have), but as a wordless piece for chamber ensemble with the texts inscribed line-by-line into the score, the music’s rhythms and phrases sometimes matching the prosody of the verses, sometimes just suggesting their sentiments. Lenau’s sequence of poems is rooted in one of the core themes of German literary Romanticism — the contempla- tion of lost love amid scenes of nature. In Schilflieder, the protagonist voices his melancholy thoughts on the banks of a pond, and Klughardt’s music evokes his shifting emotional states, the odd-numbered movements generally contemplative, the even ones tempestuous. The first movement (Langsam, träumerisch — “Slow, dreamy”) depicts the protagonist in the “depth of desolation” standing at sunset by a pond that is overhung with willows, long a traditional symbol of grief. A lashing nighttime rainstorm in the next movement (Leidenschaftlich er- regt — “Passionately excited”) mirrors his profound gloom. In Zart, in ruhiger Bewegung (“Delicate, quietly moving”), he weeps as he recalls the sound of his beloved’s voice, now “sunk into the pond without a trace.” In the fourth move- ment (Feurig — “Fiery”) he believes he sees her image in the storm’s lightning reflected in the pond’s surface. He finally finds solace in the closing movement (Sehr ruhig — “Very peaceful”), in which sweet memories of his beloved become “like a quiet evening prayer.”

Schilflieder (“Songs of the Reeds”) Text: Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850)

I
Over there the sun is setting, weary day sinks into sleep,
and the willows hang down low to the pond, so calm, so deep.

And my love is lost forever,
flow, oh tears, which no one heeds, sad the wind through willows rustles, weaving through the shivering reeds.

In the depth of desolation
you shine brightly from afar,
while through reeds and rushes brightly shines the gentle evening star.

II
Waning light, the clouds are scurrying and the rain falls like a stone,
and the noisy winds cry sadly:
“Pond, where has your starlight flown?”

Seeking for the light, extinguished in the depth, whipped by the storm. Never more your love will smile on my heart’s profoundest gloom.

III
Oft on secret forest paths
I creep in the evening glow to the lonely banks of rushes, darling girl, and think of you.
When the shrubs begin to darken the reeds tell of mysteries deep, and a plaintive, whispering voice tells me I must weep, must weep.

And I fancy I can hear
the gentle music of your voice while your charming song is sinking into the pond without a trace.

IV
The sun has gone down; black clouds are drifting, sultry and anxious
all the winds are fleeing!

Furiously across the sky pallid lightning sears and her transient image in the pond appears.

In the stormy light
I seem to see your form and your loosened hair blowing in the storm!

V
Motionless upon the pond
lies the moonlight’s gentle glow, weaving her pallid roses
into the reed’s green wreath below.

Stags, roving on the hills, look up into the night, sometimes the dreaming birds stir in the depths of the reeds.

I drop my tearful gaze;
my soul is pierced to the core by sweet memories of you, like a quiet evening prayer.

Composer and pianist Daixuan Ai is among the youngest of the remark- able generation of musicians who are revolutionizing artistic styles and cultural awareness by drawing on their native Asian heritage as well as their American training and experience. Daixuan was born in China in 1998 and came to the United States as an International Student at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio to study composition with Clint Needham and Jonathan Sokol and piano with Sungeun Kim. In 2018, she was selected to participate in the BW Summer Scholar program, where she wrote an orchestra piece titled My Father’s Tale based on her study of orchestration and research on traditional Chinese Culture; it was premiered by the BW Symphony Orchestra during the 2019 Ovation Festival, conducted by Soo Han. Also in 2019, Daixuan was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Fresh Inc Music Festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she worked with noted composers Dan Visconti, Derek Bermel and Julia Adolphe; her piano quartet Fugue and Noises was premiered at the festival.

The Owl, commissioned by the Kenosha Community Foundation for the Boston-based flute-clarinet-violin-cello quartet Hub New Music, was first heard in October 2019. In July 2019, Daixuan studied at the European American Musical Alliance Institute in Paris, which carries on Nadia Boulanger’s teaching methods and vision, and through its online institute the following year; her String Quartet No. I (movement III) was performed at La Schola Cantorum during her time in Paris. Daixuan Ai is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she studies composition with David Dzubay and piano with Emile Naoumoff.

Daixuan Ai wrote of her Trio for Oboe (doubling English horn), Viola and Piano, “When I was asked to write a piece for CityMusic Cleveland’s 2021-2022 ‘Justice, Equality, Hope’ Chamber Music Series, I had just studied Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The Symphony expresses Beethoven’s desire for equality and democracy, as he was very much inspired by the French Revolution. Repeated notes are used as a central motif throughout the Symphony, symbolizing the idea that ‘all men are equal.’ The first movement of my Trio opens with relentless repeated notes played by viola and oboe. A melodic theme ensues, played by all the members of the trio and also full of repeated notes, as an homage to the Ninth Symphony. The first movement represents the past through its musical style, as I found it relevant to recognize that ‘equality for all’ is something for which we as humankind have always been fighting. What’s new about our fight for equality is the people that are included in the ‘all.’

“The second movement stylistically represents the present, juxtaposing the piano and viola pizzicato chasing each other in an urgent manner and the English horn playing solo passages freely and with great sadness. This juxtaposition is what I often feel when hearing news that’s related to racial and gender equal- ity: there are changes that make us feel like we are moving toward a brighter future, yet there are tragedies that make us realize that we’re far from finished. The movement reaches a climactic point in which the music is dance-like and celebratory, but it does not feel like a place of security because of the constant dissonances and irregular phrasing. This ‘celebration’ does not last long and comes to an abrupt, unsatisfying end. An oboe solo emerges. It recalls the English horn’s earlier lamenting melodies, but now it’s colored with the sound of both major and minor modes, as if it’s not sure which mode it will end up in. The future is uncertain, and it doesn’t seem like equality and justice win every time, but there are still moments of victory that deserve celebration.”