Though he would live several decades more, Charles Ives stopped composing entirely by 1927. Many have speculated as to why, but the ultimate reason for his silence remains a mystery. His last symphony was thus one of his final works. Begun around 1910, Ives labored over it for many years, refining and altering the score well into the 1920s. In many ways, his Fourth Symphony is a summation of all he had accomplished; indeed, even after a century, it remains one of the most complex pieces in the repertoire.
The musical and technical challenges of Ives’ Fourth are legendary, far outnumbering those of many more famous modernist works (even Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring seems conventional by comparison). The symphony calls for an enormous orchestra that includes two conductors, offstage ensembles, a quarter-tone piano, an ether organ (one of the lesser known inventions of Leon Theremin, usually played on an ondes martinot today), gongs, an Indian drum and chorus. The strings are divided into so many different groupings that nearly every desk has a different part. The symphony is rife with collage-like layerings of hymn tunes and popular melodies, and in certain passages the orchestra divides into groups that play completely different meters and tempos (the second conductor is typically employed for these sections). Many indications in the score are optional and left to the discretion of the conductor, ensuring that no two performances of Ives’ Symphony No. 4 are ever alike.
Ives’ manifold innovations, however, were not merely for the sake of novelty: as with much of his music, Ives’ imbued this, his most ambitious completed piece, with a spiritual mission. Like an Old Testament prophet whose message is ignored or misunderstood by his people, Ives most often faced incomprehension, ridicule and disbelief throughout his life when he presented his most original works to others. Though Ives would never hear a complete performance of his Fourth Symphony, the first two movements were premiered in 1927, and the program notes from that performance (certainly informed by and quite possibly ghost-written by Ives) explain that the work explored “the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life. This is particularly the sense of the prelude [the first movement]. The three succeeding movements are the diverse answers in which existence replies.”
Dost thou see?
The first movement “is brief, and its brooding introspective measures have a searching wistful quality. It would seem to derive from the silence of the Sabbath hour when the soul, beset and weary of earthly vexations, turns toward the Infinite, toward life and in upon itself with questions of the ultimate meaning of existence.”
The movement begins with a dramatic gesture from the depths of the string section that is answered by a cry from the violins:
Marked variously as “Vox angelica,” “distant choir” and “angelic host,” an offstage ensemble of harp and violins emerges playing fragments of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.” A solo that can be played by either a violin or cello then reaches out to the distant choir, until the real chorus enters with Ives’ own setting of the hymn “Watchman Tell Us of the Night.” The singers ask “Dost thou see? Dost though see?” above a complex yet delicate accompaniment that twinkles like the night sky.
Celestial Railroad as Highway to Hell
The second movement of Ives’ Fourth Symphony, ironically titled “Comedy,” was adapted from a piece for piano entitled The Celestial Railroad after a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s story is itself a parody of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a seventeenth-century allegorical novel in which the protagonist journeys from the City of Destruction (this world) to the Celestial City (heaven), passing through many torments along the way.
In Hawthorne’s updated version, the narrator dreams that a luxurious railroad has been constructed between the City of Destruction and the Celestial City, allowing paying passengers to bypass the tribulations of the journey on foot. One of its directors, a Mr. Smooth-it-away, invites the narrator on board. As the train pulls away from the station, two pilgrims set off on foot, and the passengers of the Celestial Railroad mock them. During the journey, Mr. Smooth-it-away explains away the horrors outside the train and the demons that seem to be operating it as the passengers revel inside. After a long stopover in Vanity Fair, a city where anything can be bought for the price of one’s conscience, the passengers discover that the Railroad does not in fact take them all the way to the Celestial City; they must take a ferry across the river of death to reach its gates. Unfortunately, the boat starts to sink, just as the foot pilgrims enter the city. The narrator then wakes up, thankful that it was all just a dream.
Ives’ musical illustration of the story is one of the most complex pieces of music ever written. While it is theoretically possible to perform it with one conductor, two are usually employed in passages that divide the orchestra into groups that play shifting tempos in different meters. The score might seem extravagant, but its effect in performance is remarkably vivid, and its powerful musical storytelling would be impossible without Ives’ innovations. The movement begins with a bleak depiction of the City of Destruction. Gradually, we hear the train pull away from the station and accelerate, its wheels grinding in the solo piano and lower strings. Suddenly, we hear the gentle strains of the hymn “In the Sweet, Bye and Bye” in the strings, which represent the pilgrims traveling on foot. The passengers on the train jeer at them, but the pilgrims continue on their way nevertheless. The ensuing cacophony, a dense wall of collage-like quotations of popular music of the early 20th century, depicts the revelry on-board the train and the horrors outside it.
At length, the train slows and the music becomes quieter as we stop for a tea party in Vanity Fair with Mr. Smooth-it-away, accompanied by a twisted parody of salon music. Ives instructs the pianist, “This is sweetie sweet stuff—violet water, pink teas in Vanity Fair social life—Chaminade, Chopin at their worst—make it sound mushy.” The train then resumes its hell-bent journey, until we glimpse the Celestial City in a brief, quiet moment before the train’s “last and horrible” scream. The Celestial City appears, represented by the hymn “Beulah Land” as a violin solo, while the icy waters of the river of death can be heard in the quarter-tone piano. Suddenly, the dream ends, and, adding a twist to Hawthorne’s story, we awaken to what the 1927 program notes describe as “the Fourth of July in Concord—brass bands, drum corps, etc. Here are old popular tunes, war songs, and the like.” It can be no mistake that this sounds remarkably like the music of the train; Ives provocatively asks us where our own civilization is headed.
How to hear it
The unusual nature of Ives’ score means that the work can only be experienced in its true form at a live performance. Each movement of this symphony will be performed as part of a different concert program on the Houston Symphony’s 2018-19 Classical Series. The Prelude will, appropriately enough, introduce Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, another work that explores existential spiritual questions, on September 13, 15 and 16. The second movement will open our Bronfman Plays Prokofiev concerts on September 21, 22 and 23 and lead into works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich that explore similar kinds of dark parody. The third movement will open our Ravel’s La valse program in January, and the finale begins Rachmaninoff’s The Bells in May. Check back later this season for more blog posts about this fascinating symphony.
—Calvin Dotsey
Get tickets and more information at houstonsymphony.org.
