Ives’ “Elegie”: A Yankee Take on the French Chanson
Charles Ives’ 1901 song, Elegie is haunting and hypnotic. Its gloomy and forlorn text, a setting of a poem by Louis Gallet, expresses the heartache of a narrator whose beloved is forever gone. The blue skies and birdsongs of springtime are replaced with late autumnal chill. The vocal line rises over an unrelenting rhythmic ostinato which begins to render time infinite and unmeasurable. French composer Jules Massenet wrote a song using the …