Charles Ives
This photo from around 1913 shows Ives in his "day job." He was the director of a successful insurance agency.
Background information
Birth name	Charles Edward Ives
Born	October 20, 1874(1874-10-20)
Origin	Danbury, Connecticut
Died	May 19, 1954(1954-05-19) (aged 79)
Occupations	composer, insurance agent

Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernist^[1] composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown,^[2] though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original".^[3] Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones,^[4] foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

Sources of Ives' tonal imagery are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.

[edit] Biography

Charles Ives, c. 1889

Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874,^[5] the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife Mary Parmelee. A strong influence of Charles's may have been sitting in the Danbury town square, listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. George Ives' unique music lessons were also a strong influence on Charles; George Ives took an open-minded approach to musical theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. It was from his father that Charles Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster.^[6] Ives became a church organist at the age of 14^[7] and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on 'America' .^[8]

Ives moved to New Haven in 1893, enrolling in the Hopkins School, where he captained the baseball team. In September 1894, Ives entered Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker. Here he composed in a choral style similar to his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley.^[9] On November 4, 1894, Charles's father died, a crushing blow to the young composer, but to a large degree Ives continued the musical experimentation he had begun with George Ives.

At Yale, Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of HeBoule, Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Wolf's Head Society, and sat as chairman of the Ivy Committee.^[9] He enjoyed sports at Yale and played on the varsity football team. Michael C. Murphy, his coach, once remarked that it was a "crying shame" that Charles Ives spent so much time at music as otherwise he could have been a champion sprinter.^[10] His works Calcium Light Night and Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college and sports on Ives' composition. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision.^[9]

Charles Ives, left, captain of the baseball team and pitcher for Hopkins Grammar School

He continued his work as a church organist until May 1902. In 1899, he moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond & Co., where he stayed until 1906. In 1907, upon the failure of Raymond & Co., he and his friend Julian Myrick formed their own insurance agency Ives & Co., which later became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired.^[11] During his career as an insurance executive, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning.^[12] His Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax, published in 1918, was well received. As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer. In his spare time he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey and New York City.^[9]

In 1907, Ives suffered the first of several "heart attacks" (as he and his family called them) that he had throughout his lifetime. These attacks may have been psychological in origin rather than physical. Following his recovery from the 1907 attack, Ives entered into one of the most creative periods of his life as a composer.

After marrying Harmony Twitchell in 1908,^[11] they moved into their own apartment in New York. He had a remarkably successful career in insurance, and continued to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little, writing his very last piece, the song "Sunrise", in August 1926.^[11] In 1922, Ives published his 114 Songs, which represents the breadth of his work as a composer — it includes art songs, songs he wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such as "The Majority."^[11]

According to his wife, one day in early 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes. He could compose no more, he said, "nothing sounds right."^{[citation needed]} There have been numerous theories advanced to explain the silence of his late years, which seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius, who also stopped composing at almost the same time. While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he did continue to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music.^[11] After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in 1930 he retired from his insurance business, which gave him more time to devote to his musical work, but he was unable to write any new music. During the 1940s he revised his Concord Sonata, publishing it in 1947 (an earlier version of the sonata and the accompanying prose volume, Essays Before a Sonata were privately printed in 1920).^[13]

Ives died in 1954 in New York City. His widow bequeathed the royalties from his music to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the Charles Ives Prize.^[14]

[edit] Music

[edit] Early period (before 1900)

As a youth, Charles was musically trained by his father George Ives, the bandmaster in Danbury, Connecticut. Charles played drums in his father's band at an early age, then learned to play piano and organ as his "main" instrument. He was a sought-after organist in some of the local churches as a teenager and once received a favorable newspaper review. George Ives engaged his son with challenging musical exercises such as alternative tunings and bitonal singing exercises. The elder Ives experimented with having two marching bands start at opposite ends of town playing two different songs in different keys while marching towards each other. Charles later credited his father as the seminal musical influence in his life.

Ives was formally trained in music at Yale. His First Symphony shows a grasp of the academic skills needed to write in the traditional sonata form of the late 19th century, as well as a tendency to display an individual and iconoclastic harmonic style. His father was a band leader, and like Hector Berlioz, Ives was fascinated with both outdoor music and instrumentation. His attempts to fuse these interests coupled with his devotion to Beethoven set the direction for the remainder of his musical life.

Ives published a large collection of his songs, many of which had piano parts that paralleled modern movements in Europe, including bitonality and pantonality. He was an accomplished pianist who could improvise in a variety of styles, including those then quite new. Though he is now best known for his orchestral music, he composed two string quartets and other works of chamber music. His work as an organist led him to write Variations on "America" in 1891, which he premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July. The piece takes the tune (which is the same one as is used for the national anthem of the United Kingdom) through a series of fairly standard but witty variations; it was not published until 1949. The variations differ sharply: a running line, a set of close harmonies, a march, and a polonaise; the interludes are one of the first uses of bitonality;^[15] William Schuman created an arrangement for orchestra in 1964 which was consequently transcribed for symphonic band by William E. Rhoads in 1968.

[edit] Middle period (1900–1910)

Around the turn of twentieth century Ives composed his Symphony No. 2, signifying a departure from the conservative approach of his composition teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker. His first symphony is a more conventional piece since Parker had insisted that he stick to the older European style. However, the second symphony, composed after he had graduated, adopted new techniques that included musical quotations, unusual phrasing and orchestration, and even a blatantly dissonant 11-note chord ending the work. The second symphony foreshadows his later compositional style even though the piece is relatively conservative by Ives' standards.

In 1906, Ives composed what some have argued was the first radical musical work of the twentieth century, Central Park in the Dark.^[16] The piece evokes an evening comparing sounds from nearby nightclubs in Manhattan (playing the popular music of the day, ragtime, quoting "Hello! Ma Baby" and even Sousa's "Washington Post March") with the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods (played by the strings). The string harmony uses shifting chord structures that are not solely based on thirds but a combination of thirds, fourths, and fifths. Near the end of the piece the remainder of the orchestra builds up to a grand chaos ending on a dissonant chord, leaving the string section to end the piece save for a brief violin duo superimposed over the unusual chord structures.

Ives had composed two symphonies, but it is with The Unanswered Question (1906), written for the highly unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string orchestra, that he established the mature sonic world that became his signature style. The strings (located offstage) play very slow, chorale-like music throughout the piece while on several occasions the trumpet (positioned behind the audience) plays a short motif that Ives described as "the eternal question of existence".^{[citation needed]} Each time the trumpet is answered with increasingly shrill outbursts from the flutes (onstage) — apart from the last: the unanswered question. The piece is typical Ives — it juxtaposes various disparate elements, it appears to be driven by a narrative never fully revealed to the audience, and it is tremendously mysterious. It has become one of his more popular works.^[17] Leonard Bernstein borrowed its title for his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1973, noting that he always thought of the piece as a musical question, not a metaphysical one.

[edit] Mature period (1910–1923)

Starting around 1910 Ives began composing his most accomplished works including the Holiday Symphony and arguably his best-known piece, Three Places in New England.

Pieces such as The Unanswered Question were almost certainly influenced by the New England transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.^[11] These were important influences to Ives, as he acknowledged in his Piano Sonata No. 2: "Concord, Mass., 1840–60" (1909–15), which he described as an "...impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago... undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."^[18]

The sonata is possibly Ives' best-known piece for solo piano (although it should be noted that there is an optional part for flute). (A part for viola in the "Emerson" movement is not intended for a viola player — it is simply the "viola part" from the original "Emerson" Concerto sketch, which was also to be played by bassoon and tubular bells.) Rhythmically and harmonically, it is typically adventurous, and it demonstrates Ives' fondness for quotation — on several occasions the opening motto from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quoted. It also contains one of the most striking examples of Ives' experimentalism: in the second movement, he instructs the pianist to use a 14+³⁄₄ in (37 cm) piece of wood to produce a dense but generally very soft cluster chord. All these effects are combined to create one of the towering masterworks of 20th century piano literature—an unprecedented masterpiece of American music.

Perhaps the most remarkable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Fourth Symphony (1910–16). The list of forces required to perform the work alone is extraordinary. The work closely mirrors The Unanswered Question. There is no shortage of novel effects. (A tremolando is heard throughout the second movement. A fight between discordance and traditional tonal music is heard in the final movement. The piece ends quietly with just the percussion playing at a distance.) In it, Ives finally resolves all of his compositional issues and the full force of his considerable genius is heard. The final movement can be seen as an apotheosis of his work and a culmination of his musical achievement. A complete performance was not given until 1965, almost half a century after the symphony was completed, and more than a decade after Ives' death.

Ives left behind material for an unfinished Universe Symphony, which he was unable to assemble in his lifetime despite two decades of work. This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting conception of the work. There have been several attempts at completion or performing version. However, none has found its way into general performance.^[19] The symphony takes the ideas in the Symphony No. 4 to an even higher level, with complex cross-rhythms and difficult layered dissonance along with unusual instrumental combinations.

Ives' chamber works include the String Quartet No. 2, where the parts are often written at extremes of counterpoint, ranging from spiky dissonance in the movement labeled "Arguments" to transcendentally slow. This range of extremes is frequent in Ives' music — crushing blare and dissonance contrasted with lyrical quiet — and carried out by the relationship of the parts slipping in and out of phase with each other. Ives' idiom, like Mahler's, employed highly independent melodic lines. It is regarded as difficult to play because many of the typical signposts for performers are not present. This work had a clear influence on Elliott Carter's Second String Quartet, which is similarly a four-way theatrical conversation.

[edit] Reception

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Ives' music was largely ignored during his lifetime as an active composer, but since then his reputation has greatly increased. Juilliard commemorated the 50th anniversary of Ives' death by performing his music over six days in 2004. Many of his works went unperformed for many years. His tendency to experiment and his increasing use of dissonance were not well taken by the musical establishment of the time. The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.

One of the more damning words one could use to describe music in Ives' view was "nice", and his famous remark "use your ears like men!" seemed to indicate that he did not care about his reception. On the contrary, Ives was interested in popular reception, but on his own terms.

Early supporters of his music included Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland. Cowell's periodical New Music published a substantial number of Ives' scores (with the composer's approval), but for almost 40 years Ives had few performances that he did not arrange or back, generally with Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor.^[13] After seeing a copy of Ives' self-published 114 Songs during the 1930s, Copland published a newspaper article praising the collection.

Ives began to acquire more public recognition during the 1930s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England both in the U.S. and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicolas Slonimsky and the New York Town Hall premiere of his Piano Sonata No. 2 (the Concord Sonata) by John Kirkpatrick in 1939, which led to favorable commentary in the major New York newspapers. Later, around the time of the composer's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the first extended recorded recital of Ives' songs for the obscure Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). Boatwright and Kirkpatrick recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in 1974.

His obscurity lifted a little in the 1940s, when he met Lou Harrison, a fan of his music who began to edit and promote it. Most notably Harrison conducted the premiere of the Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting (1904) in 1946.^[20] The next year, this piece won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ives gave the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up".

At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. While there he was a champion of Charles Ives' music. When meeting Ives, Hermann confessed that he had tried his hand at performing the Concord Sonata.

Remarkably, Ives, who actually avoided the radio and the phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933 to 1943 that were later issued by Columbia Records on a special LP set issued for Ives' centenary in 1974. New World Records issued 42 tracks of Ives' recordings on CD on April 1, 2006.^[21]

Recognition of Ives' music has improved. He received praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman. He won the admiration of Gustav Mahler, who said that Ives was a true musical revolutionary. Mahler talked of premiering Ives' Third Symphony with the New York Philharmonic; but, soon after, Mahler's death prevented the premiere.^{[citation needed]}

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Ives' Second Symphony in a broadcast concert by the New York Philharmonic. The Iveses heard the performance on their cook's radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the music. Bernstein continued to conduct Ives' music and made a number of recordings with the Philharmonic for Columbia Records. He even honored Ives on one of his televised youth concerts and in a special disc included with the reissue of the 1960 recording of the second symphony and the Fourth of July movement from Ives' Holiday Symphony.

Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Rafael Druian and John Simms.

Leopold Stokowski took on the Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem". The Carnegie Hall world premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra led to the first recording of the music.

Another promotor of Ives was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made a series of recordings of the composer's shorter works during the 1960s, including first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets during the 1960s.

In the present, Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives' symphonies, as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford. Ives' work is regularly programmed in Europe. Ives has also inspired pictorial artists, most notably Eduardo Paolozzi, who entitled one of his 1970s sets of prints Calcium Light Night, each print being named for an Ives piece (including Central Park in the Dark). In 1991, Connecticut's legislature designated Ives as that state's official composer.^[22]

The Scottish baritone Henry Herford began a survey of Ives' songs in 1990, but this remains incomplete, owing to the collapse of the record company involved (Unicorn-Kanchana).

Pianist-composer and Wesleyan University professor Neely Bruce has made a life's study of Ives. To date, he has staged seven parts of a concert series devoted to the complete songs of Ives.

Musicologist David Gray Porter reconstructed a piano concerto, the "Emerson" Concerto, from Ives' sketches. A recording of the work was released by Naxos Records.

[edit] Influence on twentieth-century music

A bold testament to Ives comes from the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's widow eventually found a note of his in the form of a brief poem shortly after his death (just three years before Ives himself died). The note was originally written in 1944 when Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA stating:

There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn [sic]. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.^[23]

Ives was also a great financial supporter of twentieth century music, often supporting works that were written by other composers. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries it was really his wife who wanted him to do so.^[24] Nicolas Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career."^[25]

[edit] Compositions

Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his lifetime, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions. The dates given here are sometimes best guesses. There have also been controversial speculations that Ives purposely misdated his own pieces earlier or later than actually written.

• Variations on America for organ (1892)
• The Circus Band (a march describing the Circus coming to town)
• Psalm settings (14, 42, 54, 67, 90, 135, 150) (1890s)^[26]
• String Quartet No. 1, From the Salvation Army (1897–1900)
• Symphony No. 1 in D minor (1898–1901)
• Symphony No. 2 (Ives gave dates of 1899-1902; analysis of handwriting and manuscript paper suggests 1907-1909)^[27]
• Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting (1908–10)
• Central Park in the Dark for chamber orchestra (1906, 1909)
• The Unanswered Question for chamber group (1906; rev. 1934)
• Piano Sonata No. 1 (1909–16)
• Piano Trio (c1909–10, rev. c1914–15)
• Violin Sonata No. 1 (1910–14; rev. ca. 1924)
• Violin Sonata No. 4, Children's Day at the Camp Meeting (1911–16)
• A Symphony: New England Holidays (1904–1913)
• "Robert Browning" Overture (1911–14)
• Symphony No. 4 (1912–18; rev. 1924–26)
• String Quartet No. 2 (1913–15)
• Pieces for chamber ensemble grouped as "Sets," some called Cartoons or Take-Offs or Songs Without Voices (1906–18); includes Calcium Light Night
• Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) (1910–14; rev. 1929)
• Violin Sonata No. 2 (1914–17)
• Violin Sonata No. 3 (1914–17)
• Orchestral Set No. 2 (1915–19)
• Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 (1916–19) (revised many times by Ives)
• Universe symphony (incomplete, 1915–28, worked on symphony until his death in 1954)
• 114 Songs (composed various years 1887–1921, published 1922.)
• Three Quarter Tone Piano Pieces (1923–24)
• Orchestral Set No. 3 (incomplete, 1919–26, notes added after 1934)

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Block, Geoffrey (1988). Charles Ives: a bio-bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-25404-4. 
• Burkholder, J. Peter (1995). All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05642-7. 
• Burkholder, J. Peter (1996). Charles Ives and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01164-8. 
• Cooper, Jack (1999). Three sketches for jazz orchestra inspired by Charles Ives songs (Thesis). University of Texas at Austin: UMI Publishing. OCLC 44537553. 
• Cowell, Henry; Cowell, Sidney (1969). Charles Ives and His Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OCLC 56865028. 
• Herzfeld, Gregor (2007). Zeit als Prozess und Epiphanie in der experimentellen amerikanischen Musik. Charles Ives bis La Monte Young. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 978-3-515-09033-9. 
• Johnson, Timothy (2004). Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground. Maryland: The Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-4999-2. 
• Kirkpatrick, John (1973). Charles E. Ives: Memos. London: Calder & Boyars. ISBN 0-7145-0953-1. 
• Perlis, Vivian (1974). Charles Ives Remembered: an Oral History. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80576-6. 
• Sinclair, James B. (1999). A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07601-0. 
• Sive, Helen R. (1977). Music's Connecticut Yankee: An Introduction to the Life and Music of Charles Ives. New York: Atheneum. ISBN 0-689-30561-3. 
• Swafford, Jan (1996). Charles Ives: A Life with Music The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03893-9. 
• Woolridge, David (1974). From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-48110-0. 

[edit] External links

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• Works by Charles Ives at Project Gutenberg
• The Charles Ives Society
• Charles Ives at Peermusic Classical Composer's Publisher and Bio
• Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra Tippett rehearses Putnam's Camp. A short video from 1969.
• A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives, online edition
• The Charles Ives Center for the Arts. Inc
• Art of the States: Charles Ives Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos (1924)
• "Charles Ives". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=533. Retrieved August 10, 2010. 
• Works by or about Charles Ives in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Multitasking, an episode of The Infinite Mind public radio program (Cambridge, MA, Lichtenstein Creative Media, 2005), a report on Charles Ives and his integration of multitasking into his compositions.
• Ives Vocal Marathon—performances and programs of Ives' vocal work.
• Charles Ives at Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music
• Free scores by Charles Ives at the International Music Score Library Project
• The online music review La Folia has an in-depth article on Ives' Concord Sonata
• The Charles Ives Papers at Yale University Music Library

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia. (April 2010) Don't speak French? Click here to read a machine-translated version of the French article. Click [show] on the right to review important translation instructions before translating. Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. After translating, {{Translated|fr|Robert Browning}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Robert Browning
Photogravure of Robert Browning in 1865
Born	7 May 1812 (1812-05-07) Camberwell, London, England
Died	12 December 1889(1889-12-12) (aged 77) Venice, Italy
Occupation	Poet
Notable work(s)	The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Porphyria's Lover, The Ring and the Book, Men and Women, My Last Duchess
Influences Shakespeare, Percy Shelley,
Influenced Pound, Eliot, Frost, Harold Bloom
Signature

Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.

[edit] Early years

Browning was born in Camberwell - a district now forming part of the borough of Southwark in South London, England - the only son of Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning.^[1][2] His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year.^[3] Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee, and his Scottish wife. He had one sister, Sarianna. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts, was rumoured within the family to have had some Jamaican mixed race ancestry but there is little evidence for this. It seems to be only an anecdotal family story.^[4] Robert's father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare. Thus, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources. His mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician.^[1] His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brother's companion in his later years. His father encouraged his children's interest in literature and the arts.^[1]

By twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. After being at one or two private schools, and showing an insuperable dislike to school life, he was educated at home by a tutor via the resources of his father's extensive library.^[1] By the age of fourteen he was fluent in French, Greek, Italian and Latin. He became a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. Following the precedent of Shelley, Browning became an atheist and vegetarian, both of which he gave up later. At the age of sixteen, he studied Greek at University College London but left after his first year.^[1] His mother’s staunch evangelical faith prevented his studying at either Oxford University or Cambridge University, both then open only to members of the Church of England.^[1] He had inherited substantial musical ability through his mother, and composed arrangements of various songs. He refused a formal career and ignored his parents' remonstrations, dedicating himself to poetry. He stayed at home until the age of 34, financially dependent on his family until his marriage. His father sponsored the publication of his son's poems.^[1] Browning travelled widely, joining a British diplomatic mission to Russia in 1834, later journeying to Italy 1838 and 1844.^[1]

[edit] Middle years

Portraits of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning.

Browning's career began with the publication of the anonymous poem Pauline. The piece, which disappeared without notice, would embarrass him for the rest of his life.^[1] The long poem Paracelsus, about the renowned doctor and alchemist, had no general popularity; nevertheless, it gained the notice of Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth, and other men of letters, and gave him a reputation as a poet of distinguished promise on the London scene. Browning came to befriend Charles Dickens, John Forster, Harriet Martineau and Carlyle, as well as William Charles Macready who encouraged Browning to write the play Strafford, performed in 1837 by Macready and Helen Faucit.^[5] It was no great success but Browning was encouraged enough to try again, going on to write eight plays in all, including Pippa Passes (1841) and A Soul's Tragedy (1846). A troubled production of A Blot on the 'Scutcheon (1843) was followed by the publication of the experimental and politically radical long poem Sordello (1840), which were both met with widespread derision. Tennyson commented that he only understood the first and last lines and Carlyle noted that his wife had read the poem through and could not tell whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.^[5] His reputation would not rise again for 25 years.^[5]

In 1845, Browning met the poet Elizabeth Barrett, six years his elder, who lived as a semi-invalid in her father's house in Wimpole Street, London. They began regularly corresponding and gradually a romance developed between them, leading to their elopement on 12 September 1846.^[5] The marriage was initially secret because Elizabeth's domineering father disapproved of marriage for any of his children. Mr. Barrett disinherited Elizabeth, as he did for each of his children who married: “The Mrs. Browning of popular imagination was a sweet, innocent young woman who suffered endless cruelties at the hands of a tyrannical papa but who nonetheless had the good fortune to fall in love with a dashing and handsome poet named Robert Browning. ”^[6] At her husband's insistence, the second edition of Elizabeth’s Poems included her love sonnets. The book increased her popularity and high critical regard, cementing her position as an eminent Victorian poet. Upon William Wordsworth's death in 1850, she was a serious contender to become Poet Laureate, the position eventually going to Tennyson.

1882 caricature from Punch Magazine reading: "The Ring and Bookmaker from Red Cotton Nightcap country"

From the time of their marriage and until Elizabeth's death, the Brownings lived in Italy, residing first in Pisa, and then, within a year, finding an apartment in Florence at Casa Guidi (now a museum to their memory).^[5] Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, nicknamed "Penini" or "Pen", was born in 1849.^[5] In these years Browning was fascinated by and learned from the art and atmosphere of Italy. He would, in later life, describe Italy as his university. Browning bought a home in Asolo, in the Veneto outside Venice.^[7] As Elizabeth had inherited money of her own, the couple were reasonably comfortable in Italy, and their relationship together was happy. However, the literary assault on Browning's work did not let up and he was critically dismissed further, by patrician writers such as Charles Kingsley, for the desertion of England for foreign lands.^[5] In Florence, probably from early in 1853, Browning worked on the poems that eventually comprised his two-volume Men and Women, for which he is now well known;^[5] in 1855, however, when these were published, they made relatively little impact. It was only after his wife's death, in 1861, when he returned to England and became part of the London literary scene—albeit while paying frequent visits in Italy—that his reputation started to take off.^[5]

In 1868, after five years work, he completed and published the long blank-verse poem The Ring and the Book. Based on a convoluted murder-case from 1690s Rome, the poem is composed of twelve books, essentially ten lengthy dramatic poems narrated by the various characters in the story, showing their individual perspectives on events, bookended by an introduction and conclusion by Browning himself. Long, even by Browning's own standards (over twenty thousand lines), The Ring and the Book was the poet's most ambitious project and arguably his greatest work; it has been praised as a tour de force of dramatic poetry.^[8] Published separately in four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869, the poem was a success both commercially and critically, and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought for nearly forty years.^[8] The Robert Browning Society was formed in 1881 and his work was recognised as belonging within the British literary canon.^[8]

[edit] Last years and death

Browning after death.

In the remaining years of his life Browning travelled extensively. After a series of long poems published in the early 1870s, of which Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country were the best-received.^[8] The volume Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper included an attack against Browning's critics, especially the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin. According to some reports Browning became romantically involved with Lady Ashburton, but did not re-marry. In 1878, he returned to Italy for the first time in the seventeen years since Elizabeth's death, and returned there on several occasions. In 1887, Browning produced the major work of his later years, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day. It finally presented the poet speaking in his own voice, engaging in a series of dialogues with long-forgotten figures of literary, artistic, and philosophic history. The Victorian public was baffled by this, and Browning returned to the short, concise lyric for his last volume, Asolando (1889), published on the day of his death.^[8]

Browning died at his son's home Ca' Rezzonico in Venice on 12 December 1889.^[8] He was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; his grave now lies immediately adjacent to that of Alfred Tennyson.^[8]

Browning was awarded many distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Edinburgh, a life Governor of London University, and had the offer of the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow.

[edit] Browning's poetic style

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2011)

Robert Browning during his later years.

Browning is often known by some of his short poems, such as Rabbi Ben Ezra, How they brought the good News to Aix, Evelyn Hope, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Grammarian's Funeral, A Death in the Desert. Initially, Browning was not regarded as a great poet, since his subjects were often recondite and lay beyond the ken and sympathy of the great bulk of readers; and owing, partly to the subtle links connecting the ideas and partly to his often extremely condensed and rugged expression, the treatment of theme was often difficult and obscure. The keynote of his teaching is a wise and noble optimism.

Browning’s fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem. Rather than thinking out loud, the character composes a self-defence which the reader, as "juror," is challenged to see through. Browning chooses some of the most debased, extreme and even criminally psychotic characters, no doubt for the challenge of building a sympathetic case for a character who does not deserve one and to cause the reader to squirm at the temptation to acquit a character who may be a homicidal psychopath. One of his more sensational dramatic monologues is Porphyria's Lover.

The Pied Piper leads the children out of Hamelin. Illustration by Kate Greenaway to the Robert Browning version of the tale.

Yet it is by carefully reading the far more sophisticated and cultivated rhetoric of the aristocratic and civilized Duke of My Last Duchess, perhaps the most frequently cited example of the poet's dramatic monologue form, that the attentive reader discovers the most horrific example of a mind totally mad despite its eloquence in expressing itself. The duchess, we learn, was murdered not because of infidelity, not because of a lack of gratitude for her position, and not, finally, because of the simple pleasures she took in common everyday occurrences. She is reduced to an objet d'art in the Duke's collection of paintings and statues because the Duke equates his instructing her to behave like a duchess with "stooping," an action of which his megalomaniac pride is incapable. In other monologues, such as Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning takes an ostensibly unsavory or immoral character and challenges us to discover the goodness, or life-affirming qualities, that often put the speaker's contemporaneous judges to shame. In The Ring and the Book Browning writes an epic-length poem in which he justifies the ways of God to humanity through twelve extended blank verse monologues spoken by the principals in a trial about a murder. These monologues greatly influenced many later poets, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, high modernists, the latter singling out in his Cantos Browning's convoluted psychological poem Sordello about a frustrated 13-century troubadour, as the poem he must work to distance himself from. These concerns reflected Victorian society in the late 19th century.

But he remains too much the prophet-poet and descendant of Percy Shelley to settle for the conceits, puns, and verbal play of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His is a modern sensibility, all too aware of the arguments against the vulnerable position of one of his simple characters, who recites: "God's in His Heaven; All's right with the world." Browning endorses such a position because he sees an immanent deity that, far from remaining in a transcendent heaven, is indivisible from temporal process, assuring that in the fullness of theological time there is ample cause for celebrating life.

[edit] History of sound recording

At a dinner party on 7 April 1889, at the home of Browning's friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, an Edison cylinder phonograph recording was made on a white wax cylinder by Edison's British representative, George Gouraud. In the recording, which still exists, Browning recites part of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" (and can be heard apologizing when he forgets the words).^[9] When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone's voice "had been heard from beyond the grave."^[10][11]

[edit] Complete list of works

• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
• Paracelsus (1835)
• Strafford (play) (1837)
• Sordello (1840)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles (play) (1842)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
  • "Porphyria's Lover"
  • "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"
  • "My Last Duchess"
  • "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
  • "Count Gismond"
  • "Johannes Agricola in Meditation"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. IV: The Return of the Druses (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. V: A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (play) (1843)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VI: Colombe's Birthday (play) (1844)
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VII: Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)
  • "The Laboratory"
  • "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
  • "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church"
  • "The Lost Leader"
  • "Home Thoughts from Abroad"
• Bells and Pomegranates No. VIII: Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (plays) (1846)
• Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
• Men and Women (1855)
  • "Love Among the Ruins"
  • "The Last Ride Together"
  • "A Toccata of Galuppi's"
  • "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
  • "Fra Lippo Lippi"
  • "Andrea Del Sarto"
  • "The Patriot/ An Old Story"
  • "A Grammarian's Funeral"
  • "An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician"
• Dramatis Personae (1864)
  • "Caliban upon Setebos"
  • "Rabbi Ben Ezra"
• The Ring and the Book (1868-9)
• Balaustion's Adventure (1871)
• Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)
• Fifine at the Fair (1872)
• Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and Towers (1873)
• Aristophanes' Apology (1875)
• The Inn Album (1875)
• Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper (1876)
• The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)

Memorial plaque: "In Loving Memory of Louisa A. M. McGrigor Commandant V.A.D. Cornwall 22. Who died on service, March 31, 1917. Erected by her fellow workers in the British Red Cross Society, Women Unionist Association, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Friends."
Followed by a quote from Robert Browning's Epilogue to Asolando.
One who never turned her back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted. wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake

• La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)
• Dramatic Idylls (1879)
• Dramatic Idylls: Second Series (1880)
• Jocoseria (1883)
• Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)
• Parleyings with Certain People of Importance In Their Day (1887)
• Asolando (1889)
  • Prospice

[edit] Legacy and cultural references

In 1930 the story of Browning and his wife Elizabeth was made into a play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolph Besier. The play was a success and brought popular fame to the couple in the United States. The role of Elizabeth became a signature role for the actress Katharine Cornell. It was twice adapted into film.

The basis of Terence Rattigan's 1948 play is a pupil making a parting present to his teacher of an inscribed copy of what is referred to as The Browning Version (Robert Browning's translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus).

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Anonymous (1873). Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day. Illustrated by Waddy, Frederick. London: Tinsley Brothers. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cartoon_portraits_and_biographical_sketches_of_men_of_the_day/Robert_Browning. Retrieved 2010-12-28. 
• Chesterton, G.K. Robert Browning (Macmillan, 1903)
• DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning handbook. 2nd. Ed. (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955)
• Drew, Philip. The poetry of Robert Browning: A critical introduction. (Methuen, 1970)
• Finlayson, Iain. Browning: A Private Life. (HarperCollins, 2004)
• Garrett, Martin ed., Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning: Interviews and Recollections. (Macmillan, 2000)
• Garrett, Martin. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. (British Library Writers' Lives). (British Library, 2001)
• Hudson, Gertrude Reese. Robert Browning's literary life from first work to masterpiece. (Texas, 1992)
• Karlin, Daniel. The courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. (Oxford, 1985)
• Kelley, Philip et al. (Eds.) The Brownings' correspondence. 19 vols. to date. (Wedgestone, 1984-) (Complete letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning to 1853.)
• Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald (eds.) Robert Browning: the Critical Heritage. (Routledge, 1995)
• Markus, Julia. Dared and Done: the Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (Bloomsbury, 1995)
• Maynard, John. Browning's youth. (Harvard Univ. Press, 1977)
• Ryals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: a Critical Biography. (Blackwell, 1993)
• Woolford, John and Karlin, Daniel. Robert Browning. (Longman, 1996)

[edit] External links

poetry portal

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Browning

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Browning

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Robert Browning

• Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry Archive
• Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile and poems at Poets.org
• The Brownings: A Research Guide (Baylor University)
• The Browning Society
• Works by Robert Browning at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Robert Browning in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Robert Browning in e-book
• An analysis of "Home Thoughts, From Abroad"
• Browning archive at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
• Works by Robert Browning, from the Internet Archive
• The British Library - Robert Browning read by Robert Hardy and Greg Wise Hear audio recordings of Browning's poetry with accompanying biography and discussion

Aaron Robinson
Robinson's 1949 Bowman Gum baseball card
Catcher
Born: June 23, 1915(1915-06-23) Lancaster, South Carolina
Died: March 9, 1966(1966-03-09) (aged 50) Lancaster, South Carolina
Batted: Left	Threw: Right
MLB debut
May 6, 1943 for the New York Yankees
Last MLB appearance
September 28, 1951 for the Boston Red Sox
Career statistics
Batting average	.260
Home runs	61
Runs batted in	272
Teams
New York Yankees (1943–1947) Chicago White Sox (1948) Detroit Tigers (1949–1951) Boston Red Sox (1951)
Career highlights and awards
All-Star selection (1947) World Series champion (1947)

Aaron Andrew Robinson (June 23, 1915 in Lancaster, South Carolina – March 9, 1966 in Lancaster, South Carolina), was an American professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as a catcher from 1943 to 1951 for the Chicago White Sox, the Detroit Tigers, the New York Yankees, and the Boston Red Sox.^[1] Robinson's tenure with the Yankees spanned the gap between the careers of Yankee Hall of Fame catchers Bill Dickey (1928–1946) and Yogi Berra (1946–1963).^[2][3]

[edit] Major League career

Robinson made his major league debut for the New York Yankees on May 6, 1943, playing in only one game before leaving to serve in the United States Coast Guard for the remainder of World War II.^[4][5] When the war ended in 1945, Robinson returned to the Yankees, appearing in 50 games.^[1] He took over as the Yankees' starting catcher in 1946 with promising results, posting a .297 batting average along with 16 home runs and 64 runs batted in.^[1] He also finished third among American League catchers with 25 baserunners caught stealing, and fourth in assists with 50.^[6] Robinson finished 16th in the American League Most Valuable Player Award voting.^[7]

Robinson began the 1947 season as the Yankees starting catcher, and was named as a reserve player for the American League in the 1947 All-Star Game.^[8] However, as the season progressed, Yogi Berra began to take over as the starting catcher.^[3] Robinson ended the year with a .270 batting average in 82 games, with 5 home runs and 36 runs batted in, as the Yankees went on to win the American League pennant.^[1] In the 1947 World Series, Robinson appeared in three games and started in Games 5 and 7, getting 2 hits in 10 at bats, as the Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in a seven-game series.^[9][10][11]

Having a surplus of catchers in 1948 with Berra, Sherm Lollar and Gus Niarhos, the Yankees decided to trade Robinson along with Fred Bradley and Bill Wight to the Chicago White Sox for Eddie Lopat in February of that year.^[12] He played in 98 games for the White Sox, but his offensive statistics continued to decline, hitting for a .252 batting average.^[1] After only one season with the White Sox, Robinson was traded to the Detroit Tigers for Billy Pierce in November 1948.^[12]

Robinson became the Tigers starting catcher in 1949 and 1950, providing solid defense, however his batting continued to decline.^[1] During a pennant race late in the 1950 season, Robinson was involved in a critical play during a game against the Cleveland Indians on September 24.^[13] The Tigers had been in first place for most of the season and, had just fallen to second place behind the Yankees with one week left in the season.^[14] Heavy smoke from a Canadian forest fire forced the Tigers to turn on the lights in Tiger Stadium in a Sunday afternoon game. With the score tied 1-1, Bob Lemon opened the tenth inning with a triple, and two intentional walks followed. With the bases loaded and one out, Luke Easter grounded out to Tigers' first baseman Don Kolloway, who then tagged first base. Because of the haze, Robinson did not see Kolloway remove the force after fielding the ball. Thinking he only had to step on home plate to force out Lemon, he failed to apply a tag, thus allowing Lemon to score the winning run.^[15] The Tigers fell two and a half games behind the Yankees in the standings with one week left in the season, and weren't able to recover before the season ended.^[14]

By the time Robinson was acquired by the Boston Red Sox in 1951, he was hitting for just a .207 batting average.^[16] Robinson retired at the end of the 1951 season.^[1]

[edit] Career statistics

In an 8 year career, Robinson played in 610 games, accumulating 478 hits in 1839 at bats for a .260 career batting average along with 61 home runs and 272 runs batted in.^[1] Robinson was a fine defensive catcher, ending his career with a .990 fielding percentage.^[1] In 1953 only, the 'Aaron Robinson, MacGregor G176' catcher's mitt was produced.^[4] The 1948 trade between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox involving Robinson and Pierce has been cited as one of the more lopsided trades in baseball history, as Robinson had retired from baseball by 1951, whereas Pierce had a lengthy, productive career with the White Sox.^[17][18]

[edit] Managing career

After retiring as a player, Robinson became a manager in the minor leagues, managing the Fayetteville Highlanders to the 1954 Carolina League championship.^[19][20] He later managed the Winston-Salem Twins and, won another title with the Shelby Colonels, winning the 1961 Western Carolina League championship despite having a losing record.^[19]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Biography portal

• Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference
• Aaron Robinson at Find a Grave