Charles Martin Loeffler

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Charles Martin Loeffler (January 30, 1861 - May 19, 1935) was a German-born American composer. Throughout his career Loeffler claimed to have been born in Mulhouse, Alsace and almost all music encyclopedias give this fabricated information. In his lifetime articles were published dissecting his "typically Alsatian" temperament. In fact, as his biographer Ellen Knight has established, he was German-indeed a Prussian, and a Berliner on both sides of his family, born Martin Karl Löffler in Schöneberg near Berlin. He turned against Germany when the Prussian authorities imprisoned his father, an agricultural chemist and author of Republican ideals. (Loeffler senior wrote journalism under the name 'Tornov' or 'Tornow', and his son sometimes used this as one of his middle names.) Loeffler was only about 12 when his father was imprisoned; he spent the rest of his life in prison, dying of a stroke before he was due to be released.