“The Housatonic at Stockbridge” — Ives’s Four-Minute Masterpiece Extolling the Sublime

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes a piece of mine reading Charles Ives’s four-minute masterpiece “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Composed in the 1910s, it’s both an orchestral work and a song. No other American composition known to me so bears comparison with the famous Nature reveries of Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. My essay reads in part:

Ives was a reader, a thinker, a writer philosophic yet unpretentious. Evoking a personal memory [of his courtship, strolling the meadowland along the Housatonic River], he would not have consciously set out to evoke the sublime in Nature. He well knew Beethoven and called him “in this youthful world the best product that human beings can boast of.” Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastorale,” famously evokes the sublime in Nature in both its guises: the crashing thunder and lightning of the fourth movement “storm,” the sun-kissed vales of the finale’s “thanksgiving.” Later composers — Romantics like Berlioz in his Invocation to Nature from “The Damnation of Faust,” or Liszt in “Les préludes,” or Wagner in his Good Friday Spell from “Parsifal”– magnificently embellish this trope of existential Nature amplifying the human experience. . . .

Beginning with an unprepossessing New England stream, culminating with an oceanic surge, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” supremely embodies the sublime in Nature in all of four minutes. In American visual art, the gigantic Hudson River School canvases of Frederic Edwin Church furnish its closest equivalent. But Ives is the more capacious, more protean painter. . . . The result is a shifting, incorporeal landscape, grounded in the bass, trembling and oscillating atop. . . . Then – an ecstatic moment . . .  — the quivering ether feeds upon itself in a rush toward the majestic Atlantic; or toward the heavens and hereafter. . . .

Though some writers have compared this sonic feat with the iridescent water-music of Debussy and Ravel, Ives eschews Gallic clarity. In “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” the culminating oceanic surge is suddenly and densely cacophonous. A frame of reference surer than Debussy’s “La Mer” is the painter Ives seems most to have admired: J. M. W. Turner, whose visionary canvases translate a lifetime of close observation into impressions sublimely imprecise and suggestive. . . .

The mastery of this exercise in concise musical portraiture confutes enduring stereotypes of Ives as a hit-and-miss experimentalist. . . .

Charles Ives deserves to sit atop the American cultural pantheon alongside such kindred self-made originals as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Under-performed, insufficiently understood, he retains a double taint – that he was a gifted amateur; that his music is “difficult.” Might the present Ives Sesquicentenary Year make a difference? If so, “The Houstatonic at Stockbridge” would be an ideal point of departure.

The upcoming Ives Sesquicentenary festival at Indiana University includes the premiere of a visual rendering, by Peter Bogdanoff, of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” and its two neighboring movements in “Three Places in New England.”