The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.”
Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the advent of nuclear weapons, the 20th century became the ultimate “century of death.” In Bernstein’s words, “never before has mankind been confronted by the problem of surviving global death…total death…the extinction of the whole race.”
For Bernstein, two works, both of which were composed in 1908, encapsulate “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is both a farewell and a prophecy. Its terrifying and valiant struggle to hold onto an evaporating tonal center ends in wistful acceptance. In Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, tonality and atonality occur simultaneously. The work’s dramatic dialogue occurs against the backdrop of an eternally consonant cosmic expanse.
Working in virtual isolation and anonymity in New England, Charles Ives was the ultimate maverick and experimentalist. He described The Unanswered Question as “a cosmic landscape,” centering around humanity’s “perennial question of existence.”
The work unfolds as a sonic collage made up of three disparate elements. The triadic consonance of a string chorale evokes “The Silence of the Druids,” and flows through the piece as a timeless, eternal presence. According to Ives, it is the solitary trumpet which asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” in a serene and patiently repeated call. A woodwind quartet represents a gaggle of “Fighting Answerers.” Unsuccessful in their attempts to provide an answer, they become increasingly frustrated and dissonant, and eventually give up. In the final moments, we are left with the question, and the strings’ pure G major triad fades into eternity.
Although Ives set out a program, we could imagine this cosmic dialogue slightly differently. What if the woodwinds are the exasperated questioners who reject and misunderstand the trumpet’s eternal statement?
Charles Ives was deeply influenced by transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. Ives may have been influenced by Emerson’s 1841 poem, The Sphinx:
Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Always it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply.
Five Great Recordings
- Ives: The Unanswered Question, Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic (1964 recording) Amazon
- Michael Tilson Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
- Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
- Gerhard Samuel and the Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra
- James Sinclair and the Northern Sinfonia
Featured Image: the iconic Earthrise image, captured by Apollo astronauts in 1968, photograph by NASA