The unanswerable Charles Ives

 

By MICHAEL CAINES

Misunderstood in its own time and occasionally the cause of controversy in more recent years, the music of Charles Ives has also had its determined champions; in last week's TLS, Carol J. Oja reviewed an account of this mixed history, Charles Ives in the Mirror, and notes that one of those champions was Leonard Bernstein. Art gains new meaning in new contexts, it's sometimes said, but the piece of music I have in mind in connection with Bernstein only emerged into public view long after Ives had revised it (before the Second World War), let alone composed the first version (before the First World War). What changed?

Well, basically, everything. . . .

Ives died in 1955. Four years later, Bernstein was touring the Soviet Union with the New York Philharmonic and The Unanswered Question. Formerly designated "A Contemplation of a Serious Matter, or The Unanswered Question", this piece could now be reinterpreted as a contemplation of what Oja calls "unresolvable Cold War tensions", with Ives's "Perennial Question of Existence" (an uneasy, octave-leaping trumpet motif) and "Fighting Answers" (the increasingly frenetic woodwind), over the piece's sustained "Silence of the Druids" (a not-so-silent battery of slowly shifting strings).

Talk about being ahead of your time – or rather, being in desperate need of other people catching up. Bernstein, on that same tour, set out to be a radical in his own way. He made the politically provocative gesture of visiting Boris Pasternak (who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the previous year, following the banning of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR and its subsequent publication abroad) and took the coda of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony drastically uptempo ("I liked it", Shostakovich said, reassuring another conductor that it would be fine for him to do likewise). That sounds like nothing to get het up about, perhaps, but concert hall regulars have always loved their proprieties. For good measure, Bernstein had also put one Muscovite critic's nose out of joint by taking the unprecedent step of addressing the audience before the performance, in order to introduce them to both Ives and The Unanswered Question, and then, given the enthusiastic response, he repeated the piece straight away.

I've linked in the second paragraph above to a recording of Bernstein conducting the piece that, relatively speaking, doesn't seem to have been played very much on YouTube; embedded at the top of this post, however, is a recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. It's a good minute slower than Bernstein's account, which I prefer, and the video has a few (helpful introductory) notes, too.

Carol Oja's piece reminds me of some other Ives champions: the Kronos Quartet, whose "They are there!" adds a layer of strings to a recording of the composer himself, making its jauntiness even more disconcerting in the process; and also Leonard Stokowski, who dared to give the Fourth Symphony its full premiere, with the American Symphony Orchestra, in 1965. Stokowski ended up performing this technically challenging work – which I'd love to see performed live some time – with two additional conductors. Here's a glimpse of two of them, hard at work trying to control the second movement (Comedy: Allegretto):

 

 

"Up to the last minute", José Serebrier was to recall of this piece, which he later conducted alone, "many of the players could not really understand what it was all about." I think that comment could stand for the many who heard Ives in his own time and found the questions his music posed then, and still poses, unanswerable.