The Robert Browning Overture
The all-time greatest recording in American classical music history!
1.
In 1966 the flamboyantly iconoclastic conductor Leopold Stokowski coerced his American Symphony Orchestra into a New York studio to get down on tape the debut recording of the “Robert Browning Overture” by Charles Ives. The Danbury, Connecticut native composed the piece between the years 1908-1912, with a subsequent revision decades later, and had planned on it being the first of a series of "overtures" on his favorite writers that never came to fruition. The result is arguably the greatest orchestral recording in American classical music history, though this is hardly the way fans, critics, and musicologists have come to regard the matter.
The RBO is a hugely unusual work, even for a gruff iconoclast like Ives. Personally I believe it’s the most organically successful, original, and consistently inspired large-scale work by this composer. It was composed a few years before Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring” yet is, at least in its first recorded version, one of the polyrhythmic powerhouses of early modernism that no one seems to talk about. It even anticipates by decades developments such as Free Jazz and the works of Xenakis and Nancarrow.
Ives is considered by many to be America's greatest composer. And yet, to my ears and this side of the RBO, there's a half-baked quality to his longer works. His large-scale “modernist” pieces -- most notably the "Concord Sonata, " the "Fourth Symphony," and "Three Places in New England” – sound like patchwork cannibalizations of ill-matched smaller compositions, which seems to demonstrate there was something throwaway about the composer’s technique.
While Ives did successfully conceive large-scale works in a late romantic idiom -- the hugely moving, warmly hymnal, Pulitzer Prize-winning "Third Symphony" perhaps being the most outstanding example -- in his more modernist (or proto-modernist) compositions Ives, with the important exception of the RBO, was in my opinion never quite able to bring off an organically-unified longer composition (though Larry Austin comes as close as humanly possible in his performance version of Ives’s super-ambitious, but unfinished, “Universe Symphony”).
On the other hand, Ives was a pioneer working in isolation and one can not deny the freshness, brashness, and vitality of his work. And, regardless of what he tries to do, it always sounds Ivesian. If the foremost objective of the modern artist is to subsume all things to his or her own style (I’m paraphrasing Andre Malraux here), then Ives does indeed cut the mustard as an important modernist. And if, as Andrew Carnegie said, one should never be a pioneer but instead learn from his mistakes, the achievements of composers who came in Ives's wake – most notably Elliot Carter – might not have been possible but for Ives’s example.
And so what Ives has left for posterity is a fascinating, sui generis, and nonetheless somewhat slapdash oeuvre which includes symphonies, songs, orchestral miniatures and sets, marches, chamber works, solo piano pieces, and exploratory microtonal pieces which are all but unclassifiable.
Pretty impressive for someone who also happened to be a full-time insurance executive whose claim to fame in the industry is that he invented Whole Life.
2.
Charles Ives himself more or less dismissed the Robert Browning Overture. But in my opinion that's probably because it's so original and uncharacteristic of him he didn't know what to make of it, as many still don’t today.
Here's what the composer had to say in one of his autobiographical writings:
" [The Robert Browning Overture] is a kind of transition piece, keeping perhaps too much (it seems to me) to the academic, classroom habits of inversion, augmentation, etc. etc., in the development of the first theme and related themes."
In other words, Ives dismissed the RBO because it seemed too conventional and was therefore unrepresentative of his more mature works. I challenge anyone listening to the music today to call it conventional!
Ives is also notorious for dismissing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” for its formal repetitions. Yet both Rite of Spring and the RBO have an eerily similar structure, at least superficially, with ominously mysterious interludes alternating between heaven-storming cacophonies.
The "academic" nature of the RBO, which Ives glibly disavows, refers to where he showcases a movingly mysterious set of theme and variations of an almost Brucknerian sweep, and listening to the music today we might regard his self-assessment baffling. While the basic melody might be borrowed from another composer since Ives wasn't much of a melody maker himself, I think the important point is that having a British writer as subject matter seems to have forced the composer to abandon his usual reliance upon a panoply of American hymn tunes, popular songs, and spirituals, and which therefore seemed to throw him back upon on his own resources.
In other words, the main reason for the artistic success and originality of the RBO might be because it pushed Ives beyond what we might call his "Americana Comfort Zone."
Ives eventually does seem to come round, however, to seeing the work's virtues, albeit with qualifications:
"But the themes themselves, except the second main theme, were trying to catch the Browning surge into the baffling unknowables, not afraid of unknown fields, not sticking to nice main roads, and so not exactly bound up to one key or keys (or any tonality for that matter) all the time. But it seemed (I remember when finishing it) somewhat too carefully made, technically--but looking at it now, most twenty years after, it seems natural and worth copying out."
Ives is being way too modest here! The RBO is a polytonal, polyrhythmic mind-blower. Almost uniquely among his large-scale compositions it doesn't employ the "crutch" of relying on the melodies and motifs of other composers, which Ives was wont to use in other compositions almost to the point of self-parody. The "conventionality” of the work helps to endow it a with structure and coherence his other more ambitious works lack. And I don't think any other recording of the work has captured its brashness, brute force, and beguiling mysteriousness as atmospherically as Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra did back in the mid-1960s.
As twenty-plus minutes of transcendental ruminations on one of his non-American literary heroes, I truly do believe the Robert Browning Overture by Charles Ives is the Connecticut composer’s foremost modern masterpiece.