Charles Martin Loeffler and George Gershwin: A Forgotten Friendship

Abstract

Among the many who were charmed by the music and the personality of George Gershwin is a composer overlooked by Gershwin's biographersCharles Martin Loeffler. Their relationship, as this article will attempt to show, brings to light an unexpected view of Loeffler. In his time Loeffler (1861-1935) was an eminent composer, a distinguished violinist, and a proponent of modern music. Although associated almost exclusively today with French impressionism in America, Loeffler was not as limited in his tastes and creative activities as assessments of his position in American music have made him out to be. Among other things, Loeffler was an ardent supporter of American nationalism in music and of its popular music. An initial impression of Loeffler might well preclude associating him with jazz, Broadway shows, or with George Gershwin. He has been everywhere described as aristocratic, dignified, and fastidious-even austere. Although not a native of Boston, might well be called a proper Bostonian, for, according to a contemporary account, he was all that the elect of the city desired: a man of distinction, culture, cosmopolitan experience; as composer, a craftsman and stylist for the world to admire; an intellectual and a modernist, regarded with pleasing suspicion by the conservatives; a brilliant conversationalist, at ease and in place with the socially exalted, as John Sargent or Karl Muck were in place and on equal terms-really great artists, but, thank Heaven! not socially impossible!1