Charles Martin Loeffler wrote the music for about forty vocal works, roughly half of which are French. A specialist of symbolist poetry, he set to music Gustave Kahn’s Palais Nomades. Among his other favourites were

Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Laforgne or Maeterlinck. Loeffler was attracted like the poets by the exotic, the extraordinary, and moods of langorous melancholy or enchantment. His are not narrative works that tell a story, but rather evoke atmospheres and images, such as Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), La cloche fêlée (‘the Cracked Bell’). His music is Symbolist in its intensity of color, nuances, emotional expression and atmosphere. At heart, Loeffler was a mystic (he insistently reiterates ‘Dies Irae’ in his scores), a dreamer, and a visionary.

The nine melodies with viola (this was unusual, although used by Brahms), interpreting texts by Baudelaire and Verlaine, were written in 1893-4, and published in 1903. Some were firstly performed in 1897 in Boston (with Loeffler at the viola), and others in 1900.

The four based on poems by G. Kahn probably date from the same decade. In all these musical translations of poetic works an outstanding fusion prevails between the atmosphere of the text and the music, each one a haven of beauty, evoking atmospheres that are in turn charming (the Sérénade ), voluptuous or dramatic, with a refinement rarely attained elsewhere