Charles Ives often entertained his friends with take-offs (piano illustrations of events of their day) and had a deft ear with which to satirize the safe, conventional popular music of the day. This song is such a satire. Ives published it in his 114 Songs and prefaced it with a long quote from Leigh Hunt's Rhyme and Reason, which argued that some poetry was so commonplace that all one had to hear was the rhymes to "get" it. Hunt titled a poem he wrote as example simply Love Song. It goes "Grove, Rove; Night, Delight; Heart, Impart..." and so forth.

Ives set these to a sentimental melody that immediately evokes the atmosphere of Victorian parlor songs. As for the title, he wrote "...when attached to music, it becomes a "Mocreau de Coeur"—a "Romanzo di Central Park," or an "Intermezzo Table d'hote."

It is a delightful send-up—and not, by the way, thematically related to Ives' orchestral piece Central Park in the Dark. Ives added a note to the score when he published it in 114 Songs: "Some twenty years ago [i.e., pretty much when the song was written] an eminent and sure-minded critic of music in New York told a young man that _______ was one of our great composers; what he meant by ‘our' is not recorded, nor is it remembered that this profound statement was qualified by the word ‘living'—probably not, as this arbiter of tears and emotions is quite enthusiastic over his enthusiasms. The above collection of notes and heartbeats would show, but does so very inadequately, the influence, on the youthful mind, of the master in question." John Kirkpatrick, Ives' student and cataloguer, later found a note in a book leaf that revealed the "great composer" as "Victor Herbert!-lily-white hands and diamonds!"







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