Ives dates this song to 1902 when he published it in his collection of 114 Songs. But it is well established that his dates are "top-of-the-head" items, where he relied on a generally strong memory rather than trying to find a written record of what he had done when. Even recourse to the original music of a song is not useful, for Ives, when he had a musical idea, usually wrote it down on an unused section of a single sheet of score paper, regardless of what else was on it.

What makes the attribution to 1902 doubtful is that most of Ives' songs in German were written for his music professor, Horatio Parker, when Ives was an undergraduate at Yale College. "Ilmenau" (its first line: "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh!") is a poem by the great German poet Goethe. Parker assigned classic German poems, particularly that that had already been set by the great German Lieder composers such as Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, for his students to try. Comparison of their efforts with the results achieved by these masters constituted an exercise that often was illuminating. (In these pre-phonograph days, when Lieder recitals were rare commodities in American towns, it was likely the students had never heard or seen the classic songs.)

The music is highly conventional, even conservative for its time. For the most part it is entirely diatonic, in the key of E. There is no accidental in the introduction of the first two lines of the text. There is one unexpected rhythmic jolt: A single measure of 2/4 inserted into the flowing 3/4 time near the end of the song.

The song is very attractive, though far from being a great or very individual work. It is in a slow tempo and shows that Ives was gifted in constructing appealing melodic lines.

When Ives published it in 114 Songs he included an English translation under the German original and credited the translation to "H.T.I." This would be Harmony Twichell Ives, his wife. It is possible that the 1902 date comes from a time when he made a new copy of the song with Harmony's translation or at least wrote it in to the original manuscript. In 1902, their marriage was six years in the future, and there was as yet no romance between them, but he already knew Harmony through her brother, his roommate Dave Twichell.

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