Reading of Jan Swafford's biography Charles Ives, A Life with Music is convincing in its conclusion that between 1898 (when he graduated from Yale University) and 1902 (when he resigned his final post as a professional church organist after failing to get a position on the Yale music faculty) Ives likely held open the prospect of making a living as a professional musician and composer.

He continued his earlier practice of setting German texts as songs, which he had begun as a music student. (He had taken German as a mandatory subject at Yale and, in common with most student composers, received assignments to set texts that had been made into songs by earlier composers.)

This poem was not originally German. It is a Danish poem by Christian Winther called "Laengsal." It was translated into German by Edmund Lobedanz in 1841. In that year the Norwegian composer Halfdan Kjerulf (1815 - 1868) wrote the first of his two settings of the poem. It is likely that Ives took his text from the published edition of Kjerulf's version.

Ives' song is an entirely conventional Lied with a graceful lyric line and rippling piano accompaniment. He wrote only one stanza of the poem under the voice part, but also wrote in a repeat mark, making it certain that he intended at least two stanzas to be sung. Accordingly, Ives' editor John Kirkpatrick included all three stanzas in the published version.

In 1902, Ives wrote, over the staff, the words to an entirely different poem, "Rosenzweig," by Alexander von Fielitz (1860 - 1930), which Kirkpatrick also published and cataloged as Kz 63b.

He added a third set of words to it, of his own composition, called the result "Allegro" (which Kirkpatrick cataloged as Kz 63c), and eventually published that version as song No. 95 of his 114 Songs.

© All Music Guide