The South Wind was originally composed in about 1899 as a setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Die Lotosblume’, but as Ives noted in
114 Songs he felt ‘the setting was unsatisfactory, and other words were written for it’. This was a new poem by Harmony Twichell, soon to become Ives’s wife, and the re-casting took place in 1908. Nevertheless
114 Songs prints the two texts as alternatives. Gravely expansive, this is one of Ives’s finest homages to the spirit of post-Brahmsian Romanticism.
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2008
