In 1906 Mark Twain
wrote:
"Tomorrow I mean
to dictate a chapter which will get
my heirs & assigns burned alive
if they venture to print it this side
of A.D. 2006 – which I judge they won’t.
The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a
stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering
around taking notice, along with other
dead. pals."
As I write, the year
A.D. 2006 is barely a quarter of the
way through; any shock waves have yet
to break. My source is an article published
in 1947 by George Lanning, itself a
report of research by H.M. and D.C.
Partridge, and reprinted in "Aspects
of Alice" (1971, UK edition by
Victor Gollancz 1972, Penguin Edition
1974). The "stir", according
to this article, was that "Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland" and its
sequel were really the work of Mark
Twain.
Well, so far Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson’s paternity of "Lewis
Carroll" seems assured. On a slightly
less momentous scale it has now been
revealed that the long-forgotten Vera
Di Wescharle, a composer who published
at least a hundred sentimental ballads
between 1890 and 1910, achieving a discreet
success in fashionable American drawing-rooms
of the day, was none other than Charles
Edward Ives (of whose name Vera Di Wescharle
is in fact an anagram). An elder cousin
of mine who settled in America during
the Second World War recalls that ballads
by "Vera Di Wescharle" could
still easily be found in piano stools
in those days though she hasn’t seen
one around, still less heard one, for
many a long year.
More fascinating still,
the words of many of these ballads are
by – or so the printed scores say –
Mrs. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), a name
once lionised by in the best Victorian
salons on both sides of the Atlantic
but synonymous with tawdry pseudo-literary
balladry even in Ives’s day. It now
appears that Charles Ives and his wife,
Harmony Twitchell, actually wrote many
of these themselves, evidently feeling
that the long-dead lady could be no
more offended than was the even-longer-dead
Gaetano Pugnani at Kreisler’s attribution
to him of some of his own pseudo-Baroque
compositions. The interesting thing
is that, while the musical settings
by "Vera Di Wescharle" passed
into oblivion fairly swiftly, some of
these poems were uncritically accepted
into the Hemans canon and have remained
there ever since, including, it would
appear, "Prince Madoc’s Farewell",
set by our own Charles Villiers Stanford
in 1893 to music so uncharacteristically
tasteless that it would indeed be a
relief to discover that it was a prank
by Ives – no such luck, alas.
Another curious matter,
and while research into this is still
in its infancy I prefer not to mention
any names, is that it would appear that
the Ives/Twitchell team also wrote pious
texts for the Salvation Army and (just
possibly) for the Christian Science
Church of Mary Baker Eddy, raising the
possibility that some much-loved tunes
still going strong in the hymnals of
these churches may actually be spoofs
by Ives.
Well, now the secret
is out, and the interesting thing is
that at least one clue had been lying
around all these years without anyone
ever picking it up: "An Old Flame",
a setting of Ives’s own words included
in his 1922 publication of 114 songs
(and included in the 2-disc Etcetera
anthology which I have just reviewed,
sung by Roberta Alexander), is identical
– down to the title – to a "Vera
Di Wescharle" ballad, to a purported
text by Hemans, published in 1903. And
no one ever noticed!
Ives himself stated
that he had included a clutch of sentimental
ballads in his 1922 album "principally
because they are good illustrations
of a type of song the fewer of which
are composed, published or sung, the
better it is for the progress of music
generally". So does the discovery
of a whole lot more similar stuff enlarge
our knowledge of the man sometimes claimed
as America’s greatest composer?
No, I’d say; for the
purpose of "knowing" Ives,
what we have already is more than enough.
It is for the purpose of knowing ourselves
that the exercise has some point. Ives
always does challenge our perceptions
and here we have to reflect that the
same song (as is literally proved by
"An Old Flame") can appear
to us maudlin rubbish when we believe
it is by "Vera Di Wescharle",
and a profound comment on sentimental
balladry, bearing within itself the
seeds of the destruction of the genre,
when we "know" it is by Charles
Ives. True to form, Roberta Alexander
sings it simply, with an awareness of
what it is and what it is not, while
Alexandra Roberts gives it the full
drawing-room treatment, tearing passion
to tatters (and adding almost a minute
to the timing).
As a contribution to
the history of song, this disc is pretty
well negligible. As a discussion point
it is up there with everything else
Ives wrote. The performance and recordings
are more than acceptable and the booklet
essay goes fully into our present state
of knowledge about Ives and his pseudonyms.
Texts are not given, alas – and it will
be yet a-while before you can pull these
down from the Internet.
Christopher Howell
Alexandra Roberts (mezzo-soprano), Ann Street
(piano) 
