Ives at Yaddo
Synopsis
On today\u2019s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by American composer Charles Ives.
Ives\u2019 String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work \u2014 its manuscript is dated 1896, back when Ives was a 21-year old student at Yale. While Ives\u2019 first quartet was written under the watchful eye and conservatively tonal ear of the Yale music professor Horatio Parker, his second, composed between 1907 and 1913, is more often than not a wildly atonal work that would have given poor Professor Parker a heart attack.
On the first page of its score, Ives provided a kind of program. It reads: \u201cString Quartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue politics, fight, shake hands, shut up, and then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.\u201d
Judging from some musical quotations in the first movement of Ives\u2019 quartet, it seems the American Civil War was one of the political topics fought over by the four men mentioned, and Beethoven\u2019s Ode to Joy is quoted, along with Ives\u2019 perennial favorite, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.
Music Played in Today's Program
Charles Ives (1874-1954): String Quartet No. 2; Emerson Quartet; DG 435 864