Anchoring Shards of Memory
I
Among canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives—born 150 years ago this autumn—possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation. There are composers whose standing has sharply declined (the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer were once repertory staples) or risen (Sergei Rachmaninoff is no longer despised as a sentimental anomaly). There are composers whose full stature was only recognized generations after they died (Hector Berlioz’s opera The Trojans languished for a century). But Ives remains a moving target.
That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers, a figure protean and iconic, must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. Even our orchestras and instrumentalists perform him far less than they should. If it follows that the present Ives sesquicentenary is insufficiently observed, that is all the more reason to take stock.
Though Ives lived and worked in New York City, he was and remained quintessentially a product of New England. He was born in Danbury, Connecticut; he eventually settled in nearby West Redding. His dates—1874 to 1954—are misleading: his creative years began in the 1890s and mainly ended by 1926. That he was therefore a product of the late Gilded Age and early 20th century, preceding the modernist decades, is initially difficult to grasp because his music was only later discovered. The momentous (though poorly attended) New York City premiere of his Concord Piano Sonata, finished by 1919, took place in 1939; Lawrence Gilman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: “It is … the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.” Ives’s Second Symphony, finished by 1909, was first heard in 1951. The conductor was Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives “an authentic primitive—a country boy at heart,” “wandering in the grand palaces of Europe like one of Henry James’s Americans abroad, or better still like Mark Twain’s innocents abroad.” Of these two famous assessments, Gilman’s was more apt. Bernstein’s—which he repeated as late as 1987—misreads Ivesian complexities as untutored. As an undergraduate at Yale, Ives composed a song, “Feldeinsamkeit,” that bears comparison with the lieder of the German masters. He moved on from there. The “primitive” in Ives is a sometime pose.
Ives’s first reputation, congealing midway through the 20th century, was framed by modernists who pedigreed “originality.” Ives’s “experiments” in tonality and rhythm were compared to those of Arnold Schoenberg, whose music he did not know. In his landmark volume Our New Music (1941), Aaron Copland ventured: “Ives was far more originally gifted than any other member of his generation. … [He] had the vision of a true pioneer, but he could not organize his material.” (In 1968, Copland declared himself guilty of a “misapprehension,” having ultimately found in Ives “a richness of experience … unobtainable in any other way.”) Elliott Carter—compared with Copland a later, higher modernist—discovered in Ives “a lack of logic. … The esthetic is … often too naïve to express serious thoughts.” In that same 1939 assessment (which he would, like Copland, later reconsider), Carter joined a parochial debate that long usurped riper assessment: “The fuss that critics make about Ives’ innovations is … greatly exaggerated, for he has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is probably impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising form we know now.” This obsession with “Who got there first?” pigeonholed Ives as an intriguing historical oddity rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing.
Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, however, it became possible to resituate Ives not as an anomalous victim of repressive materialistic decades—a view tenaciously pursued by Frank Rossiter in Charles Ives and His America (1975)—but as a complex product of a dynamic period of American growth itself undergoing revision. (Among historians, the term “Gilded Age” no longer signifies barbarian businessmen, wealthy snobs, and corrupt politicians.) Jan Swafford’s 1996 Ives biography is a case in point. My own Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siècle (2012) relocates Ives as an intelligible product of turn-of-the-century ferment. Meanwhile, J. Peter Burkholder, today’s éminence grise among Ives scholars, has devoted decades to inquiring into the composer’s indebtedness to past musical models and materials.
Hence the opportunity at hand as we celebrate the 150th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether. With Ives ensconced in a ubiquitous fin-de-siècle moment, we can at last thrust him onto the international stage he deserves and inquire: What about Ives resonates with musical developments abroad—not as a possible harbinger of Schoenberg’s innovations, but as a precise contemporary of Gustav Mahler, the European composer he most strikingly resembles?
What is more: the American experience is today ever more crippled by a condition of pastlessness. Ives both curates the American past and is himself—no less than Herman Melville, no less than Mark Twain—an American icon. He must be remembered.
II
The essential similarity linking Ives and Mahler has long been loudly audible: both oscillate boldly between the quotidian and the sublime. And the quotidian content basically derives neither from Ives’s New York (the life insurance practice he co-founded) nor from Mahler’s Vienna (the Court Opera he commanded), but from the everyday of long ago: both composers glance heavenward one moment, and in the next remember a rural bandstand or barracks bugle. A landmark analysis, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses to the End of an Era,” was published by Robert P. Morgan in 1978. Of equal interest is Carl Schorske’s “Mahler and Ives: Populist Archaism and Musical Innovation” from 1983. Writing as a music historian, Morgan explored the high-low duality in Mahler and Ives as a musical strategy. Schorske perceived a mutual temperamental predilection. I here adduce a third perspective: Ives and Mahler as products of fin-de-siècle dislocation, engaged in exigent identity quests conditioned by the unmooring pressures of modernity.
Mahler, betwixt and between, famously declared himself “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” In his symphonies and songs, he resorted to shards of memory to supply points of anchorage. He piled on the past—motley childhood sounds and sensations traceable to his native Iglau (today’s Jihlava, in the Czech Republic), a birthplace Austrian, Bohemian, and Jewish—to buttress the present.
It bears stressing that this strategy was something not to be found in the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven lineage that Mahler passionately embraced. Hints occur in Franz Schubert’s torrid final year, 1828. In the first of his Drei Klavierstücke, the whiff of a tavern zither invades a dark landscape of the soul. Late Schubert also evokes the existential fractures of the self we associate with later times: the Andantino of the A major Piano Sonata, D. 959, succumbs to an eruptive collapse of tonal order; the song “Der Doppelgänger” narrates the horror of a man looking out a window and seeing himself on the dark street below. But Schubert was shattered (and also shuttered) by terminal illness, not by a civilizational pivot. In his essays, Richard Wagner—like Schubert, a composer for whom Mahler felt profound affinity—extrapolated an elaborate historical context for his innovations; and Wagner’s musical leitmotivs are, again, an exercise in memory. Even so, Mahler’s memory shards are singular and unprecedented—save for the contemporaneous music of a heretical American an ocean away.
There exists no evidence that Ives knew the music of Mahler (though he demonstrably knew of it). It is rumored that while in New York (1907–1911) Mahler discovered Ives’s Third Symphony in score and thought to conduct it, but no proof survives. The resemblances binding these composers are wholly coincidental. The coincidences, however, are meaningful.
Mahler’s Iglau was a German island within a Hapsburg Czech dominion. Born to an upwardly mobile Jewish household—his father ran a liquor business—Mahler spoke German from birth. He intimately knew Czech folk ensembles and the military band of the imperial garrison. He must have heard synagogue chant. Ives’s Danbury was also musical, with his father a leading figure. George Ives led patriotic band music, theater music, reels and dirges, choral music for church services and revival meetings. The Taylor Opera House hosted minstrel shows and operettas. The annual Firemen’s Parade featured as many as three dozen bands and drum corps. The Rossini Musical Soirée, the Mozart Musicale, and the Mendelssohn Musicale were women’s music clubs. All of this flooded Ives’s memory bank, alongside baseball games and circus parades.
No homespun musical medium more links Mahler and Ives than the band: winds and brass, cymbals and drums. In the finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony, an offstage contingent of trumpets, triangle, and drum strikes a military tattoo while the orchestra launches an ardent song—“isolated sounds of a barely audible music,” Mahler instructs, “carried in the wind.” A pertinent anecdote, told by his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, records Mahler’s reaction to the outdoor cacophony of a military band, men’s choral society, and multiple barrel organs. “You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s where I get it from! Even when I was quite a small child, in the woods at Iglau, this used to move me so strangely.” Ives’s delight at hearing Danbury bands playing simultaneously in different meters and keys is well known—and evoked in his Putnam’s Camp (1912–1914). This phenomenon of unruly memory shards unpredictably imposed signifies something more than an experience of auditory delight. “Move[d] me strangely,” Mahler says. He and Ives recall “scenes from childhood” of a different stamp than previous Kinderszenen.
And the same may be said of the childhood tunes that both composers decontextualize: they serve a need unknown to Mozart or Béla Bartók or countless others who notably recall songs learned early. Mahler rarely quotes songs literally—the exception proving the rule being “Frère Jacques,” transformed into a grotesque funeral march for solo double bass in his First Symphony. Typically, he culls a familiar vernacular genre, like the Alpine folk song he improvises in movement three of his Third Symphony. He launches that symphony by citing the finale of Brahms’s First, in a fortissimo passage scored for eight horns. Five movements later, he launches the Adagio finale with a theme from Beethoven’s Op. 135 String Quartet tickling his ear. In his Fourth Symphony, Mahler adopts Schubert’s innovation of a children’s paradise finale—and clinches the debt by conspicuously quoting the heavenly last movement of Schubert’s D major Piano Sonata. Many another composer would resist the notion of surreptitious borrowings; Mahler, an open book, wishes to conceal nothing.
And so it is with Ives, except that his remembered music is all pervasive. It is cited directly and indirectly, explicitly and subliminally, and serves many a purpose. He even anticipates the “messages in a bottle” that Dmitri Shostakovich would sneak into his symphonies and string quartets, quoting songs whose titles or temper instruct the knowing listener. That is: when Ives echoes Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” in the finale of his Second Symphony, we are expected to remember the words and absorb—as Ives put it in a letter to the conductor Artur Rodzinski—“sadness for the slaves.” The citation in question, sung first by a solo horn and later by a solo cello (instruments that evoke the human voice), unforgettably elevates Foster’s “Gone are the days”—words made to reverberate down long corridors of time. In fact, as J. Peter Burkholder has memorably demonstrated, Ives’s Second is “all made of tunes”; it weaves a singular American tapestry, whose every melodic scrap may be traced to another source. An inane college song—“Where, O Where Are the Verdant Freshmen?”—becomes the second movement’s lyric second subject. Much more familiar to present-day ears are “Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and—driving the final, refulgent climax—“Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Also, evoking Mahler’s practice, there are fugitive whiffs of Bach, Brahms, and Wagner. In these feisty passages, Ives is father to the parent. A snatch of Brahms’s Third Symphony provokes a polytonal disruption. An allusion to Brahms’s First is italicized by a snare drum. A striding bass line uses Bach as a straight man for slapstick.
Some of Ives’s most telling, most original borrowings occur in his tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s heroic Black Civil War regiment: “The St. Gaudens in Boston Commons.” Keying on the proud Black faces and striding Black bodies of Augustus St. Gaudens’s familiar bas-relief, this ghost dirge evinces a fog of memory suffused with weary echoes of Civil War songs, work songs, plantation songs, church songs, minstrel songs. Its obscure tonality and turbid scoring produce a patriotic mirage. Its hypnotic tread conveys stoic fortitude. An accompanying poem, a “black march” by Ives himself, references “generations of pain.”
One searches in vain for musical precedents. Franz Liszt specialized in “reminiscences.” These are personal impressions of operas by Meyerbeer, Vincenzo
Bellini, and Giuseppe Verdi for virtuoso pianists. The chosen memories are shrewdly calibrated. They seamlessly combine opportunities for keyboard display with worldly exercises in cultural inventory. For his Rigoletto reminiscence, Liszt chose a sublimely palpitating residue of the Act Three quartet, a perfumed elixir divorced from the action of the opera. Most exceptionally, Liszt experiences the final duet in Verdi’s Aida as a Wagnerian love-death; in the hands of a sorcerer pianist like Claudio Arrau, the result is a masterpiece of musical alchemy, “O terra, addio” becoming a memory at the mercy of the rememberer.
The memory shards in Mahler and Ives, in comparison, are a chronic intrusion: the rememberer at the mercy of the memory. Their occurrence is made to seem involuntary, unpremeditated, unwilled. In “The St. Gaudens in Boston Commons,” the outcome is spectral: a haunting of the present.
III
Memories unbidden, memories intermingling generate another mutual characteristic binding Mahler and Ives: impressions of collage or stream of consciousness. This is what makes their music seem to some “shapeless,” “excessive,” “cluttered.” And the streaming memory shards—the snatches of song, the glimpses of childhood—do not typically coalesce as ordered musical structures; rather, they congeal as memory swaths: tropes of personal experience embedded in the psyche.
A well-known story: Young Gustav fled to escape his quarreling parents and heard on the street a barrel organ playing the children’s tune “Ach, du Lieber Augustin.” When Mahler conferred with Sigmund Freud in 1910, Freud inferred from this anecdote that the conjunction of “light amusement” with “high tragedy” was fixed in Mahler’s mind. In his symphonies, Mahler does not quote “Ach, du Lieber Augustin.” But neither does he escape the dark ripples of a foreboding home environment ruled by a tyrannical father. And there was death—of 10 of his siblings; of his adored first child, Maria Anna, nicknamed Putzi. In Manhattan in 1908, working in bed, he was transfixed by a funeral procession on the street below, a massive cortege flanked by bareheaded throngs. A fireman had drowned in the flooded basement of a burning store. The thudding bass drum heralding the finale of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony is said to remember this event.
Tunes signaling light amusement equally signal a morbid susceptibility that shadows Mahler’s musical moods. If his culled shards of memory are often biting, satirical, or insinuating, a signature memory swath is funereal: public rituals of mourning written into the dirges of his symphonies. Not only are there funeral march movements in the First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies; the funeral mode may also intrude at any moment—as when the clarion fortissimo opening of the sanguine Third instantly dissipates to the wailing winds and searing trumpet cries of a pianissimo processional: a stream of consciousness non sequitur.
If Mahler’s memories are frequently ominous, Ives’s are often consoling. A pertinent memory swath, distinctive to Ives, is of sounds heard over water. In the 1920 booklet Essays Before a Sonata, he fixes on a passage in Thoreau evoking “a melody, as it were, imported into the wilderness”:
At a distance over the woods, the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum as if the pine-needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. … A vibration of the universal lyre. … Just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to the eye by the azure tint it imparts.
“A horn over a lake,” Ives continues, “gives a quality of sound and feeling that is hard to produce in any other way.” In “Thoreau,” the final movement of his Concord Piano Sonata, he pictures the writer sitting in his sun-drenched doorway, “rapt in reverie.” “His meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell,” windswept over Walden Pond. An optional part for solo flute, performed offstage, evokes Thoreau playing his flute from afar.
Ives’s fundamental memory was of his father, with whom he lovingly and fervently identified, and who died during his freshman year at Yale. “Father died just at the time I needed him most,” he would recall. He also testified to daily communion with his deceased parent. The song “Remembrance” (1921), less than a minute long, sets words by the composer:
A sound of a distant horn
O’er shadowed lake is born
my father’s song.
The exquisite piano accompaniment, marked pianissimo and “with both pedals” (that is, softly smeared), is a polytonal wash—as of water and mist. Memory beckons: a siren song.
It was Harmony, Ives’s wife as of 1908, who most filled the parental void. Her first love letter reads: “I never wrote a love letter and I don’t know how. If I don’t mail this today you won’t get mail until Monday and I can’t wait that long to have you see in my writing what you’ve seen these perfect days in my face—that I love you, and love you, and love you and no numbers of times of saying it can ever tell it. But believe it and that I am yours always and utterly—every bit of me.” Harmony, too, inspired a song over the water. Ives recalled its provenance:
The “Housatonic at Stockbridge” was suggested by a Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge, the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember. Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” paints this scene beautifully.
Johnson’s poem—verses as provincial as Ives’s setting is elemental—reads (as excerpted by Ives),
Contented river! In thy dreamy realm
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm:
Thou beautiful!
From ev’ry dreamy hill
What eye but wanders with thee at thy will …
Ah! there’s a restive ripple,
And the swift red leaves
September’s firstlings faster drift;
Wouldst thou away, dear stream?
Come, whisper near!
I also of much resting have a fear:
Let me tomorrow thy companion be,
By fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!
In 1910, Ives set “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” as a symphonic work, the third of his Three Places in New England. Remembering his courtship, Ives begins with a layered rendering of the river: steady in the low bass, trembling atop. The “distant singing from the church” is a tune as enraptured as its source, the hymn “Dorrnance,” is plain. Then—an ecstatic moment—the “restive ripple” redoubles in a rush toward the Atlantic. The ending, a five-second pianississimo sonic residue, contradicts caricatures of Ives the naif; no American composer was ever more immune to cliché. In sum, Ives’s memory song about courtship and marriage is equally a transcendental nature song, in which the becalming wife and eruptive husband are the Housatonic’s dreamy realm and restive ripples.
Ives told a story that further contextualizes “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” and more. He had a habit, going back to his teens, of setting poems already famously set. His version of “Feldeinsamkeit,” among the most sublime of all Brahms’s songs, was under scrutiny by his Yale composition teacher, Horatio Parker, when George Chadwick turned up reeking of beer. Parker was objecting to the mobile harmonic raptures of Ives’s ersatz lied. Chadwick, New England’s saltiest “official” composer, winked at Parker and quipped: “That’s as good a song as you could write.” He also said: “It’s different from Brahms, as in the piano part and the harmony it takes a more difficult and almost opposite [approach], for the active tranquility of the outdoor beauty of nature is harder to express than just quietude.” As the source of this anecdote is Ives himself, perhaps “active tranquility” paraphrases rather than quotes. What matters is that the observation is precisely apt—and not only for “Feldeinsamkeit,” with its whispered, gently bristling “wrong notes” in the piano. It characterizes Ives’s nature pieces to come, in which a restless quiescence, aquiver with elemental living matter, conveys both serenity and an internal thrust and power. It is the “restive ripple” that drives the Housatonic to the Atlantic—and that could suddenly drive Charles Ives to his couch, as observed in his retirement, collapsed and panting.
Ives wrote: “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression … of great muddiness. … The mud may be a form of sincerity.” He endorsed the “mud and scum” that Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled in his poem “Music”: “There alway, alway something sings.” “Feldeinsamkeit,” “Remembrance,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “Thoreau,” and other outdoor reveries are in Ives invariably discordant, however faintly. The water, the ether are never wholly limpid; harmonic and textural impurities abound. Ives’s visions of river and meadow, woods and mountaintop are layered with Emersonian mud and scum: particles of sound; particles of memory.
It speaks volumes that Ives’s favorite painter was J. M. W. Turner, whose obscurely layered landscapes resist clarity. Of the “shadow lines” Ives often adds to his crowded textures, Jan Swafford writes in his exceptional Ives biography that they “suggest other realities, parallel memories, the subconscious. They murmur sometimes inaudibly … but float up now and then like a phantom presence within the music. Always they suggest something beneath the surface, beyond the immediate time and place.”
IV
In Mahler’s Vienna, the leading painter was Gustav Klimt, who comparably practiced a psychological realism stressing desire and anxiety, neurosis and transcendence. His mural Philosophy (1900) shows a tangle of naked bodies floating aimlessly: an aqueous cosmos inhabited by torpid humanity. As in other Klimt paintings, the liquefied medium suggests a stratum of primal subjectivity, an unconscious world of instinct: a stream of consciousness. The gently irregular harp tones punctuating the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony similarly suggest particles adrift in an amniotic medium. In Mahler’s Ninth, harp tones articulate the slow motion of both outer movements; the seemingly random forward motion of this music in fact generates structure in the relative absence of the sonata forms that Mahler more commonly deployed. And so for Mahler, “water” is not—as in Ives—“nature.” Rather, nature is the rarefied Alpine meadows Mahler signifies (in two of his symphonies) with the distant clamor of cowbells. And, like his water music, Mahler’s mountain mode distills harmony and texture; it abjures mud and scum.
Ives, too, maps mountain summits, peaking with the tingling closing pages of his Second String Quartet and Fourth Symphony (the same music, redeployed). This is not the thin, rarefied air Mahler breathes aloft, but something muddy with hidden possibilities. Ives pertinently writes of Emerson: “As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them along the ground first.” More fundamentally: like Mahler, Ives discovers the transcendental in outdoor tramps and reveries. Like Mahler’s, his is a religious personality rejecting dogma, seeking and finding the divine in nature, and so silencing his demons and surmounting worldly travail.
And Ives and Mahler were composers with sundry demons to silence: demons, I am suggesting, that may be the ultimate source of the urgency of remembrance they experienced. Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed as “weightlessness” the prevalent erosion of personal identity bred by the decline of religion, and by the anomie and enforced passivity of modern urban life. It is a condition we readily associate with fin-de-siècle Vienna—Mahler’s wife, Alma, being a prominent example of the city’s “neurasthenics,” victims of “nervous prostration.” But neurasthenia was also rampant among American women of the same era. Many points of dissimilarity may be adduced in juxtaposing Vienna and New York in the decades before World War I: the Americans remained buoyed by gusts of moral uplift long passé abroad; the Viennese avidly succumbed to currents of aesthetic decadence stigmatized in the New World. But the psychic stress of modernity was experienced in common. Ives and Mahler were powerfully buffeted by this seismic change.
Consider the magnitude of Mahler’s dislocation as an assimilated Jew from Bohemia. The polyglot Hapsburg Empire was increasingly gripped by ethnic and political pressures. Jews enjoyed new social and physical mobility—and in sending Gustav to Vienna to study music, the ascendant Mahlers were ascending further. Even so, to take over the Court Opera 22 years later, Mahler had to convert to Catholicism (toward which he was not unsympathetic). Culturally, he identified as German. He married into a privileged precinct of non-Jewish society with anti-Semitic tendencies: unlike the city’s composers and writers, its visual artists—Alma’s milieu—were not Jews. His Jewish friends felt abandoned and betrayed. Meanwhile, the musician in Mahler was persecuted by overtly anti-Semitic critics who questioned his very pedigree. Add to this the death of his first daughter in 1907, the concurrent diagnosis of a diseased heart, and the consequent pressures on a marriage already incongruously and incompletely fused.
If Mahler in important ways remained an outsider in Vienna, Ives was ever more a stranger to the 20th century. In retirement, he spurned owning a radio or phonograph. He disliked using the telephone. He would flaunt his cane and curse overhead airplanes. He had in 1920 elaborately proposed a direct democracy amendment; decades later, disillusioned, he spurned newspapers and distanced himself from world events. He visited Danbury and found it too much changed; he moaned aloud, burying his head in his hands. His health, always erratic, declined. His recurrent cardiac symptoms and nervous collapses were classically neurasthenic. He also suffered from diabetes. And he stopped composing—the music would not come. These symptoms may suggest irrational submission to his father’s world (and Ives wanted to “see father again”). But they also signal a principled rejection of what life had become. The “Alcotts” movement of his Concord Sonata records the domestic pleasures and spiritual fortitude of a famous New England family, about which Ives wrote prophetically in 1920:
Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves—much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty.
No previous composer had been as subject to a rupture of past and present. For Mahler and Ives both, the fin-de-siècle was a momentous synapse, a state of sustained creative tension and flux. Subject to gusts of nostalgia, they could not go back—Ives’s Danbury, Mahler’s Iglau were no more. At the same time, both clung to Germanic ideals of uplift. “A symphony must be a world,” Mahler said; more, his symphonies aspire to redeem the world. Ives’s Fourth Symphony is comparably a world surging toward redemption. Mahler’s incomprehension of the new music of Schoenberg—not just its means, but its purposes—was chronic. Ives rejected Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky as unwholesome.
The creative act, however understood, is therapeutic: a conversation with the self. For Mahler, for Ives, shards of memory proved an exigent mooring ingredient. And both secured a final mooring. Mahler said, “My time will come”—and meant it. His stunning death mask radiates fruition. Ives equally knew who he was and what he had done. In a 1942 birthday tribute, his daughter Edith wrote,
Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately—fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living that you believe in. … You have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return;—and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don’t refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy …
Charles Ives died of a stroke in the company of his wife and daughter. According to the pianist John Kirkpatrick, who had premiered the Concord Sonata:
Edith told afterwards how the three of them held hands quietly—that it was a time of the kind of luminous serenity that animates his greatest music; he seemed as if transfigured. It was an intimate communion of unspoken awareness she could never have imagined, a serenity resolving all the tensions of his life that somehow persisted intact after he had quietly stopped breathing.
A last necessary topic is a footnote: New York City. Rather astonishingly, Mahler and Ives resided in Manhattan at the same moment—and their frustrations have contributed to misimpressions that endure. Pre–World War I New York was a world musical capital. More: the late Gilded Age maps the peak decades of American classical music. In Manhattan, the dominant figures were the composer Antonín Dvořák, directing the National Conservatory of Music (1892–1895), and the conductor Anton Seidl, leading the Metropolitan Opera (1885–1891) and New York Philharmonic (1891–1898). As New World cultural leaders, they tirelessly endeavored to jumpstart an American canon of symphonies and operas. Seidl, who had once been Wagner’s amanuensis, was also high priest of a Wagnerism movement that flavored intellectual discourse nationally and “cured” many a neurasthenic. Dvořák himself acquired an American style to point the way. Seidl’s protégés included Victor Herbert, whose Second Cello Concerto (a delightful work still performed) inspired Dvořák (still in New York) to write the most popular of all cello concertos. Slightly later, in the wake of Seidl’s early death, the Met eclipsed venerable European companies showcasing a “Golden Age” of operatic art. Oscar Hammerstein, an impresario of genius, concurrently fielded the Manhattan Opera Company, which was every bit as impressive as the Met. Then, in 1908, Arturo Toscanini arrived to galvanize New York opera all over again.
Though indisputably a great conductor, Mahler was a minor player in this musical surge. At the Met, beginning in 1908, he introduced two novelties: a stylized Secessionist staging of Fidelio by Vienna’s Alfred Roller, and a new style of Mozart performance stressing intimacy and ensemble. The Toscanini juggernaut forced him out, however, and these innovations were forgotten. He wound up leading the New York Philharmonic—and introducing what had already confounded Vienna: his own symphonies, and retouched versions of symphonies by Beethoven and other masters. As at the Met, he was ahead of his time. More crucially, he failed to advance music by Americans. Though he has typically been portrayed as a casualty of New York’s ostensible innocence, he was plausibly judged a failure by those who remembered Dvořák and Seidl.
Ives’s full-time New York City years are 1898 to 1912. As he attended symphonic concerts, he unquestionably heard Mahler conduct. He was aware of Dvořák’s recipe for American composers, relying on African-American and Native American sources—and critiqued it. His Yale professor Horatio Parker had previously taught at Dvořák’s National Conservatory. When Charles and Harmony attended a 1905 Hartford performance of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, their courtship turned a corner; they called it “La Vita Nuova.” The slow movement of Ives’s own First Symphony pays homage to Dvořák’s Largo. But Ives was alienated by musical New York. He grew tired of European masterworks. He equally ignored the city’s musical bad boys: Edgard Varèse and Leo Ornstein. He was impatient for a different species of radical change—and would have felt no differently anywhere else. Arnold Schoenberg’s impatience with musical Vienna is a pertinent cross-reference.
During the interwar decades, Aaron Copland—remembering visits to Mexico, where composers “direct[ed] the musical affairs of the nation”—complained that American composers labored “in a vacuum.” He did not realize (few did) that not so long before, New York’s musical leaders and patrons—including Germans, Italians, and Jews who by no means represented the social elite—jostled vigorously for precedence. Or that in Boston, Henry Higginson had invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony, built Symphony Hall, and made his orchestra the city’s cultural hub and bellwether. It would be obtuse to deny that Ives, however disgruntled, fed off the agenda and energies of musical New York in its heyday. No more than Mahler was he the victim of a musical backwater. There was no “vacuum.”
The larger picture here is of fin-de-siècle cultural ferment. It did not only occur in Vienna, Paris, and London. That Ives, like Mahler, relied on memory as a catalyst no more impugns New York than Mahler’s memory shards impugn Vienna. Both cities were musical metropolises that variously stranded and empowered experimentation. Rooted in the past, seeking the future, pursuing strenuous dual lives in business and art, Ives embodied dissonances—paradoxes and contradictions—that fired his genius even as they strained body and soul. Insisting on the goodness of mankind, unable to relinquish his ideals, he ultimately withdrew from the 20th century with a tenacity that calibrated the existential abyss into which he would otherwise have plunged.
V
Gustav Mahler, multifarious, is ever discovered anew. For Schoenberg, he signified a fresh sonic template, replacing the recessed cathedral sonority of the Romantics with a kaleidoscopic tapestry of individual voices. For Leonard Bernstein, citing the evaporative ending of the Ninth Symphony, Mahler was a prophet of 20th-century doom, “telling something too dreadful to hear.” Obviously, these perspectives tell us as much about Schoenberg and Bernstein, their needs and circumstances, as they do about Mahler. Today’s Mahler, I would say, is a remedial custodian of cultural memory, whose shards of recollection furnish ballast in times less doom-laden than lethally shallow. In this role, he could hardly be more pertinent.
And Charles Ives even more so: he both curates the American past and is himself a necessary link. As he wrote in the Epilogue to Essays Before a Sonata: “America is not too young to have its divinities, and its place-legends.” No other American composer connects more explicitly with the New England Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. No other resonates so mightily with the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville. Both Melville and Ives eschewed finishing school in Europe—the treasures and literary traditions of Italy and France, the conservatories of Vienna and Berlin. Concomitantly, both embraced a democratic ethos. Melville’s schooling was obtained on the South Seas among sailors of every race and stripe. Ives insisted that his second vocation—selling life insurance—enhanced his musical vocation. “Get into the lives of the people!” he thundered. Melville’s masterpieces are proudly unkempt. So it is with Ives: a frontier trait. If Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno are peak American achievements in large and smaller forms, so are Ives’s 50-minute Concord Piano Sonata and four-minute “Housatonic at Stockbridge.” And an early Ives composition, his Second Symphony, parallels Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; fearlessly mining American vernacular speech and song, they are kindred landmarks in appropriating the European novel and symphony. In short, the pantheon of the self-created, “unfinished” American genius—the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, also of Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner—is Ives’s rightful home. And yet he remains less known, less widely appreciated.
If Nietzsche, processing decades of bewildering flux, diagnosed a condition of “weightlessness,” today’s affliction is pastlessness. Our world of social media and mounting, ever-multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera. And the cause is global: technological. Looking at the big picture, positing a “new theory of modernity,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls the governing dynamic “social acceleration.” He surveys evaporating family structures, vanishing political and religious ties severed by the rocketing velocity of change. He evokes alienated “masses excluded from the processes of acceleration and growth” who will “take a stand against the acceleration society.” He predicts an “unbridled onward rush into an abyss.” It is a veritably Ivesian perspective, a trajectory hurtling toward memory’s cancelation. Processing the lapse in cultural memory evident all around us, we should fear losing touch with the arts—with civilization—as a renewable reservoir.
Leonard Bernstein’s recovery of Ives’s Second Symphony in the 1950s—widely reported and acclaimed—should have secured Ives a firm foothold in the American symphonic repertoire. Bernstein broadcast and recorded Ives. He espoused Ives on national television. He took Ives abroad. He laid the groundwork, but it never happened. Incredibly, tellingly, the present Ives sesquicentenary is mainly being celebrated abroad. In the United States, it will be commemorated most ambitiously not by any orchestra or music director, but by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, which in October hosts nine days of cross-disciplinary exploration supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Who else—what institutions of education and performance—will remember Charles Ives in the years to come? It is not an idle question. It is now 78 years since the composer Lou Harrison unforgettably wrote,
I suspect that the works of Ives are a great city, with public and private places for all, and myriad sights in all directions. … In the not-too-distant future it may be that we will enter this city and find each in his own way his proper home address, letters from the neighbors, and indeed all of a life, for who else has built a place big enough for us, or seen to it that all were equally and justly represented? Such is the work of Ives, and if we here, in the United States, are still really homeless of the mind, it is not because men have not spent their hearts and spirit building that home … but simply because we refuse to move in.
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