As a reader or browser approaches the end of Ives' massive collection of 114 Songs he or she finds them running in reverse chronological order, until the very last song is one written by Ives when he was thirteen (a dirge for a deceased family pet).

One benefit of seeing these youthful songs is that one realizes that Ives was not (as Leonard Bernstein characterized him when making his important contribution towards introducing the general public to Ives in the 1950s) a "primitive" or "Grandma Moses of music. Rahter he was a well trained composer in command of the technical materials of European-based classical music.

Evidence of all this skill is present here, in what is, nonetheless one of those songs whose historical value outweighs the amount of independent musical interest it has.

The original version of the song was called "Country Celestial," based on a paraphrase of a text by St. Bernard of Cluny. In both respects it is obviously a fore-runner of Ives' conservative cantata The Celestial Country, Ky 29 (1898?-1902). It is also comforting to know that Ives had an interest in this source before he started work on the cantata; in other words, his choice of text and author was not merely an imitation of Hora novissima, the successful 1892 cantata of his composition teacher at Yale (1894-1898), Horatio Parker. (John Kirkpatrick assigned it the number Kz 6a in his catalog of Ives' works.)

One of Parker's habits as a teacher was to assign texts for song setting that had already become the subject of major songs in the European art song (Lieder) tradition. Among the texts he assigned was "Du bist wie eine Blume," a poem by the arch-Romantic Heinrich Heine. The most notable song based on this text is by Robert Schumann (from Myrthen, op 25 no 24) and it had also been set by Franz Liszt, Hugo Wolf, Parker's own teacher George Whitefield Chadwick, and numerous others.

Ives found that the poem worked well with his "Country Celestial" and so adapted that song to create his own setting of the well-known poem (Kz 6b).

Then in 1898 Ives again re-did the song, this time to the words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the popular Victorian era novelist who is best known for having written as the opening line of a novel the immortal sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night." The poem Ives chose was a love poem, and a pretty conveitional one. It was this version of the song that Ives elected to include in 114 Songs, the project conceived (probably) as the major retrospective on his entire composing career.

It is, accordingly, a conventional song, but a very pretty one, showing the command and confidence of an obviously talented and skilful young composer working towards finding his individuality.



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