Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, and died in New York on May 19, 1954. The first performance of the Symphony No. 2 took place at Carnegie Hall in New York on February 22, 1951, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. The Symphony No. 2 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, triangle (optional), and strings. Approximate performance time is thirty-seven minutes.
Charles Ives, one of America’s unique and greatest composers, gained profound inspiration from his father George Edward Ives, a prominent Danbury bandmaster. Ives’s father encouraged his son to rebel against tradition in the quest for individual expression. In addition to music, the young Charles Ives loved sports, especially football and baseball. A man who knew that Charles Ives was a musician asked the boy what he played. Charles Ives proudly responded: “shortstop.”
Ives studied music at Yale but ultimately realized that his unorthodox musical vision would preclude commercial success. With a family to support, Ives pursued a career in the insurance industry and fared exceptionally well. Nonetheless, Charles Ives’s devotion to music never waned, and he actively composed throughout a good portion of his life. As one commentator observed, Ives was “the most spectacular amateur in musical history.”
Ives composed his Symphony No. 2 in the first years of the 20th century. As with many of Ives’ works, the premiere of the Second Symphony took place decades after its completion. Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the February 22, 1951, Carnegie Hall concert. Bernstein offered to lead a rehearsal of the Symphony with only Ives in attendance. But Ives, 76 and in precarious health, could not bring himself to attend either the rehearsal or the premiere. Instead, he heard the first performance in West Redding, CT, via the New York Philharmonic’s radio national broadcast series.
According to Jan Swafford’s Charles Ives: A Life With Music (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London 1996):
In legend (Ives) heard it on the maid’s radio and did a little dance of joy afterward. In reality, he was dragged next door to the Ryders’ to hear the broadcast and, unlike similar occasions, sat quietly through the whole thing. It was one of his soft pieces, as he called them; it was also perhaps the warmest audience reception of his whole life. As cheers broke out at the end everybody in the room looked his way. Ives got up, spat in the fireplace, and walked into the kitchen without a word. Nobody could figure out if he was too disgusted or too moved to talk. Likely, it was the latter.
The Symphony No. 2 embodies Ives’ characteristic and brilliant marriage of European classical music tradition with American melodies that were so central to the composer’s early life in New England. American hymns and folk/popular tunes seamlessly join forces with allusions to Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, to name but a few. The Symphony is in five movements. The first (Andante moderato) serving as a slow-tempo introduction, references “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and the fiddle tune “Pig Town Fling.” The lively second movement (Allegro), following without pause, incorporates the abolitionist song “Wake Nicodemus,” “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and the college ditty “Where, O Where are the Verdant Freshman?”. In the expansive third movement (Adagio cantabile), Ives includes “Missionary Chant” by Charles Zeuner, John Sweney’s “Beulah Land”, and Samuel A. Ward’s “Materna” (that melody later served as the music for the Katherine Lee Bates Poem “America, the Beautiful”). The brief Lento maestoso quotes melodies from earlier movements. The finale (Allegro molto vivace) is celebratory tour-de-force. Again, melodies from prior movements return, joined by Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Long, Long Ago.” In the triumphant closing measures, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” takes center stage. The trumpets’ invocation of “Reveille” is capped by what Ives described as: “the formula for signifying the very end of the last dance of all: the players play any old note, good and loud, for the last chord.”
Program notes by Ken Meltzer
