Emerson Concerto (1998)

The Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra (S. 22), also referred to by Ives as "Emerson Concerto," is part of Ives's "Set of Overtures: Men of Literature" which Ives sought to complete (including the completed Robert Browning Overture, the well-developed draft of Emerson Overture, the partially sketched Matthew Arnold Overture, and the projected or lost Alcott Overture, Walt Whitman Overture, Whittier Overture, and Henry Ward Beecher Overture). Ives sketched the Emerson Overture/Concerto in 1910-11. At one point there was another piano concerto similarly composed as a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but that concerto became a movement of Ives's "Concord" Sonata and then the second movement of Symphony No. 4.

In his Essay Before a Sonata, Ives wrote about his conception of Emerson, the philosopher: "Emerson is...America's deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities...perceiving from this inward source alone that 'every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series'...We see him--a mountain-guide so intensely on the lookout for the trail of his star that he has no time to stop and retrace his footprints." 

Biographer Jan Swafford writes: "Here Ives hints at the meaning, atmosphere, and method of the Emerson pieces. All of them are craggy, dissonant, searching...The dramatic layout of the [Emerson Concerto] recalls "heroic" nineteenth-century concerto; the soloist represents Emerson, the orchestra the world confronting him.

This is a radical work, the most dissonant language Ives ever created. Emerson, the essayist, is challenging and Ives felt this musical representation must be so, but there is also beauty here inspired by Emerson, the poet.

Ives left nearly two dozen pages of musical manuscripts for this work, some of it fully scored. David G. Porter did a masterful job of pulling together a performable edition.

- James Sinclair