The German Apprenticeship of Charles Ives

A surprisingly large number of Charles Ives's early songs—composed during his student days at Yale and in the years following his graduation in 1898—use texts in the German language. Nowadays, relatively few listeners recognize them as compositions by Ives. They draw no portraits of the American landscape, as Ives did later in his Three Places in New England; they contain none of the melodic quotations that pile together in his song "The Things Our Fathers Loved"; they raise no metaphysical issues, as Ives did in The Unanswered Question; they do not rebel against the musical language of their time, as Ives did in most of his later compositions. Instead, the songs suggest the work of a talented German composer of the late nineteenth century, a composer intimately familiar with the lieder of Brahms, Schumann, and Robert Franz, as well as the more progressive German faction led by Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Why did Ives—often described as the father of American music—write such songs, and how do they figure in his development as a composer?

Ives's German Songs

Ives composed at least eighteen German songs (see table 1). ¹ With the exception of the first one listed there, he published all of them in 114 Songs (1922), although for this collection he replaced most of the German texts with English alternatives. In all eighteen he used a German poetic text that he had found in existing and reasonably well-known songs—works composed by Edvard Grieg, Anton Rubinstein, and Franz Liszt, in addition to songs by Brahms, Schumann, Franz, and other nineteenth-century figures. The column on the left in table 1 shows the title of the song given by Ives or by one of his copyists in the musical manuscripts; in the next column are alternative titles given by Ives when the songs were published (including revised titles of those for which the original German was replaced with English texts), or titles assigned to the work by John Kirkpatrick in his edition of Ives's Forty Earlier Songs (1992).

The exact number of German songs is somewhat uncertain since manuscripts with German texts may have been lost and only later versions, in which Ives had replaced the German with English, preserved. "The Old Mother (Du alte Mutter)" (no. 1 in table 1) is an example, and it is included since several factors suggest that the music was composed to a missing German text. The texts of "Songs My Mother Taught Me" and "My Native Land" are English translations of German song texts, but the German does not appear in Ives's existing musical manuscripts and these works are therefore not listed.

The eighteen German songs are closely related to three additional songs on French texts, "Qu'il m'irait bien," "Elégie," and "Chanson de Florian," which Ives probably composed as a group after graduating from Yale; in 114 Songs he dated them all 1901. The French songs will be touched on toward the end of this article.

In general terms, Ives's German songs document a phase of his career in which he most plainly wished to conform to the prevailing Romantic aesthetic that existed in art music in America and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. His broader connection to classic musical traditions has been stressed in recent Ives scholarship. J. Peter Burkholder, for example, writes that "Ives was as much a part of the European tradition of art music as were Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Berg, and the other progressive composers of his time." ² The German songs reveal both Ives's traditional leanings and his lifelong instinct to be different, to be original.

American composers of the 1890s occasionally wrote songs on German poetic texts, reflecting the strong German Romantic presence in American musical culture of that time. Most who did so—Edward MacDowell, Ethelbert Nevin, and Charles Griffes are examples—had studied in Germany and lived for extended periods in Europe. Works in the German language suggested a certain cultivation and artistic refinement that native composers and publishers found...