Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein and his Mass

Few composers capture their time and become the iconic voice of their age. Leonard Bernstein found his "voice" in the early 1940s and projected the sound of urban and urbane America from the period of World War II to the anti-war movements of the 1970s and the restoration of freedom in Europe, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism.

Writing for small ensembles, symphony orchestras, Broadway, film and opera houses, Leonard Bernstein projected a simple message of understanding and hope employing both complex and simple forms and styles - yet always sounding like "Bernstein," a voice best known in his score to West Side Story.

Exploring his output, one finds the famous and obscure — works that both are reflective of their times and somehow also preserve and encapsulate them. Everywhere one hears his internal struggle to sound inevitable as the tumultuous era of the second half of the 20th century unfolded itself. He is as once linked with the music of Benjamin Britten and Dimitri Shostakovich, as well as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.

While his music finds its spiritual home in his world view, his music speaks with a New York accent, even though he was born in Massachusetts. His love affair with Europe and his sensitivity to his Russian and Jewish roots are never far from his lyrical expressivity, with its fragile sense of optimism, its loneliness, its humor and its demand for acceptance. All of this is wrapped in the rhythmic propulsion of a great American urban landscape. He has left us an aural image of his time and place and, at the same time, an eternal voice of humanity.

By John Mauceri

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The Mass

MASS was created for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on September 8, 1971. It was directed by Gordon Davidson with additional texts by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz, sets by Oliver Smith, costumes by Frank Thompson, and choreography by Alvin Ailey.

MASS's exploration of a crisis of faith, along with the connection to President Kennedy, echoes Bernstein's Third Symphony, Kaddish. In 1963, Bernstein was in the throes of orchestrating the final movement of Kaddish, when the news came of Kennedy's assassination. Unhappily, fate dictated the dedication: "To the be-loved memory of John F. Kennedy."

Bernstein wrote this symphony using the Hebrew prayer often associated with mourning ("Kaddish"), but the Kaddish prayer never once mentions the word "death." On the contrary, it celebrates "life." Like MASS, Kaddish evokes a universal sense of anguish over hope and faith, as well as the particularly Jewish practice of occasionally addressing God in confrontational terms, through its narrator who speaks the text written in English by Bernstein.
Bernstein had always been intrigued and awed by the Roman Catholic Mass, finding it (in Latin) moving, mysterious, and eminently theatrical. The original piece follows the liturgy exactly, but it is juxtaposed against frequent interruptions and commentaries by the Celebrant and the congregation, much like a running debate. There is stylistic juxtaposition as well, with the Latin text heard electronically through speakers or sung by the chorus, and the interruptions sung in various popular styles including blues and rock-and-roll. On the narrative level, the hour-and-a-half-long piece relates the drama of a Celebrant whose faith is simple and pure at first, but gradually becomes unsustainable under the weight of human misery, corruption, and the trappings of his own power.

Written at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the work's cultural importance became intertwined with its political significance in Richard Nixon's Washington. The President did not attend the opening, but did send staff to rehearsals, who reported back that there were possibly "coded messages" in the Latin text! While the work is certainly anti-war and calls on "you people of power" to do what is right, it is not overtly political. It is unquestionably religious.

The original MASS is an enormous piece. It calls for a large pit orchestra, two choruses plus a boy's choir, a Broadway-sized cast (with ballet company), marching band and a rock band. It may seem ironic that such multitudes are marshaled for a work that celebrates a man's "Simple Song": his love and faith in God. But in the end, that simplicity is shown to be all the more powerful because of it.

Nina Bernstein