Charles Ives : a portrait
by David Wooldridge
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Book Summary Information
Author: David WooldridgeEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1975
ISBN: 0571106870
Number of pages: 342
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Book Reviews of Charles Ives : a portrait
Book Review: Follow-Up to "A Tale of Two Readers"
Summary: 2 Stars
Thinking that the passage of a year, from Wooldridge's 1974 "From the Steeples and Mountains" to this 1975 "Charles Ives: A Portrait," might have been sufficient time for the author to have corrected a few of his more outrageous claims, I acquired this edition too. It is in fact the same book, photolithographed in the U.K. from the U.S. plates, with all claims (and errors) intact. The 1974 U.S. printing is of higher quality; it is recommended over this one for those who MUST have a copy of this book. A slighly-revised review of that 1974 U.S. edition appears below.
No, gentle reader; this is not Dickens. But it might be about giving someone the dickens for taking excessive liberties with an interesting subject. Nor is it about "...the best of times and the worst of times." But it might be said that this book once had its "best of times," and that its "Use By" date is long gone, making six-day-old cod a rather more appealing olfactory experience.
Consider two readers, separated by three decades.
Reader No. 1, an Ivesian flush with the excitement of the 1974 Ives centennial, looking for biographical material on Ives beyond the 1955 book by Henry and Sidney Cowell, acquires this book when released. He struggles with the unusual prose style, a nearly indecipherable mix of "original Wooldridge" narrative, quotations from Ives's "Memos" and other documents, and parenthetical "asides" by Wooldridge that tease but do not satisfy. Nonetheless, he perseveres and comes away with an Ives "psychobiography" that to him seems "about right"; nothing of importance appears to have been overlooked, and if Wooldridge's insights into Ives come across as idiosyncratic, well, Ives WAS idiosyncratic.
In the process, Reader No. 1 doesn't pay heed to a Wooldridge account, on pp. 150-151, about Gustav Mahler performing Ives's 3rd Symphony in Munich in the summer of 1910, nor does he rise to a tantalizing follow-up to this event, described on p. 206. He is, after all, interested in Ives, not Mahler.
Reader No. 2, a Mahlerite as well as an Ivesian with a different set of priorities, finally - nearly three decades after its publication - acquires this book. He knows it by reputation only, one based on references to it made by writers on Ives and Mahler. (These references are too numerous to elucidate, and, in any event, it is perhaps best that these writers NOT be named. A minority of them openly question the Wooldridge account; in fairness to those who did not, it's best not to mention even the doubters.)
He is well aware that Ives knew Mahler by virtue of attending Mahler-led performances by the New York Philharmonic-Society Orchestra. (Ives mentions Mahler not only in his 1931 "Memos" but in his much earlier "Essays Before a Sonata" as well.) Perhaps on factual grounds, or simply as an "article of faith," he accepts that Mahler visited Ives's copyist, leaving the establishment with an inked copy of the full score to the Ives 3rd Symphony. He is not entirely satisfied with Ives's dating of this event as being in 1911; it would have had to have been in the early months of 1911 for this transaction to be possible. As for Mahler performing it in 1911, he knows this is impossible; Mahler's failing health - beginning in late February and ending with his death in May - ensured that it didn't happen in 1911. But did it perhaps happen in 1910, per Wooldridge?
Having his newly-acquired copy of Wooldridge, he turns to pp. 150-151 and reads about the "Munich account." It is - let him not mince words - fantastical. Alarms go off, sending him back to the beginning of the book, to gain a better sense of context.
His struggle with Wooldridge's stylistic idiosyncrasies matches that of Reader No. 1. With the benefit of three additional decades of Ives scholarship, he recognizes that Wooldridge's "psychobiography" is premature, incomplete, and full of solecisms too numerous to detail; the book is "damaged goods." Most remarkable of all is that there IS no context surrounding the "Munich account"; it is a total stylistic anomaly, seemingly dropped in gratuitously. And, while it answers no questions to anyone's satisfaction, it raises many, including:
* Did Walter Damrosch do a "reading" of Ives's 3rd Symphony, against indications to the contrary?
* If this reading led to Mahler's telephoning Harmony Ives, did she record it in "Our Book" (the diary that the Iveses kept)?
* Who was the American conductor who, in 1954, conducted the Ives 3rd in the Munich Deutsches Museum performance attended by Wooldridge?
* Has anyone done a handwriting analysis of a note, allegedly left by Mahler at the Deutsches Museum in 1910, referencing the copying of parts that might have been for the Ives 3rd?
* Does the Mahler note in fact even exist?
Yes, gentle reader, you have me correctly figured as Reader No. 2. And that I have some research yet to do.
In fairness to Wooldridge, he provides a helpful overview of Ives's songs and their background. For this, I give him one additional star above the bare minimum.
As for the rest, well, you were amply warned, weren't you?
Those wishing to know about the life of Ives are recommended to read Jan Swafford's "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" or Stuart Feder's "The Life of Charles Ives". The aesthetics of his compositional process are well set out in his own "Essays Before a Sonata" and in J. Peter Burkholder's "Charles Ives and His World." Recollections by people who knew him are splendidly captured in Vivian Perlis's "Charles Ives Remembered."
And, finally, if you have your heart set on reading about Mahler's Munich performance of the work, you owe it to yourself to read Carter Scholz's title story in his "The Amount to Carry." It is hardly more fantastical than Wooldridge's account, and much better written besides.
Bob Zeidler
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