Date of composition: 1908-1935
Duration: 6 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 10 January 1986 at the Philharmonie Berlin, conductor: Christoph von Dohnányi
Lasting approximately five minutes, this piece leaves questions unanswered in its miniature-like brevity. The Unanswered Question is a key work of the twentieth century. here, as early as 1908, Charles Ives dared to combine several keys and layers of tempo simultaneously. His piece explores the fragility of expectation. During Ives’s lifetime, this experiment was scarcely heard; The Unanswered Question was not premiered until 1946.
It begins in deceptively calm stillness: the strings, playing in a high register, intone a chorale-like motif whose opening notes are identical to the bass line of Johann Pachelbel’s famous Canon. Ives described this extremely slow chorale as “The Silence of the Druids”. The trumpet then poses ”The Perennial Question of Existence” (Ives): a motif that cannot be assigned to any key. Each repeated question is answered by the flutes with increasing agitation and ever sharper dissonance,ignoring the strings’ tempo. Only the final question remains unanswered, fading away into nothingness. The calm of death? The riddles of human existence? What exactly Ives had in mind remains unresolved. Yet it is precisely this mystery that has made The Unanswered Question one of the most popular works of modern music today. It has also been used repeatedly in films, including Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run.