Although it’s been less than thirty years since Leonard Bernstein’s 1990 death, it is already difficult to convey just what a massive, overshadowing presence he was in the American music scene, almost from the moment of his last-minute conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943. He became a one-man music industry, reaching the top of his field as a pianist, composer, conductor and teacher. Furthermore, Bernstein came of age alongside television, a medium for which he was uniquely qualified, with his expressive and even gymnastic conducting style, as well as his ability to explain music in very clear terms to viewers of all ages. His New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, broadcast on CBS television, were . Few classical musicians truly become “household names”, but Bernstein—especially through his great Broadway success with West Side Story, as well as those televised programs—was a household name for half a century.
But in examining the life and work of Leonard Bernstein, one gets the troubling (and deeply sad) feeling that the one thing that Bernstein really craved—to be seen as one of the great American composers of art music—was the only area in which he fell short. He wrote a number of symphonies, and though they were performed and fairly well received in his lifetime, it was truly as a composer of musical theater where Bernstein shone; and it is in this area that we find his lasting legacy.
And even within his “art” compositions, it is works like Mass, a fusion of difficult dissonant concert music with a Broadway/pop style, that have most endured in the public’s imagination since Bernstein’s death. In fact, two new recordings of the work—one conducted by Marin Alsop and the other one, just released, by Yannick Nézet-Séguin—have appeared in recent years. Live performances of the work, however, are comparatively rare. One reason for this is the sheer size of the performing forces required: Masswas written for symphonic choir and orchestra, but also for a “street band” of brass and percussion, a group of Broadway or rock-style singers, a boys’ choir, electronic tape (preserved here in the opening movement), and a dance troupe. It is, strictly speaking, a work of musical theater.
But a second reason is the complex theological and philosophical nature of the work has also been responsible for its relatively few performances since its 1971 premiere. Bernstein was a longtime friend of the Kennedy family, which led Jacqueline Kennedy to invite him to write a major work for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In honor of the Kennedys’ Roman Catholic heritage, Bernstein conceived of writing a Mass setting, but the result blended the Latin liturgy with modern commentary on faith and the Vietnam War in a way that many listeners found shocking. Stephen Schwartz, whose folk musical Godspell had opened off-Broadway a few months before the premiere of Mass, provided much of the text for the more soul-searching movements. Bernstein called these movements “tropes,” after the ancient practice of expanding the original text of the Mass with interpolated sections that used new musical and textual material. In the “Gloria,” however, some memorable modern lyrics were a gift from the pop singer/songwriter Paul Simon: “Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. / Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.”
Although Masswas shocking for some, four decades later it is clear that this somewhat tortured work was succinctly representative of the Zeitgeist of the turbulent 1960s. This was, after all, the era in which Bernstein hosted a group of Black Panthers at a party (later skewered by Tom Wolfe as “radical chic” in New York magazine), and in which Time magazine asked on a 1966 cover, “Is God Dead?” But Bernstein’s Mass was ultimately about faith, not doubt. With his placement of the original Hebrew text for the “Sanctus” alongside the Latin, we catch a glimpse of Bernstein’s own complex search for faith and consolation, kindled in his early years at the Mishkan Tefila synagogue in Boston’s Chestnut Hill.
Knowing that Masshad been neglected in the concert repertoire, Bernstein’s publishers commissioned choral conductor Doreen Rao to edit a selection of movements that would enable the work to find a more significant place in the choral repertoire. This edition also addresses one of the greatest disappointments for choral singers about the original version: the symphonic choir was given only the “classical” music, written in a complex and often highly dissonant musical language, while the street singers and boys’ choir got all the “fun” music. In Rao’s version, one choir sings all of the movements, earning the appreciation of choral singers everywhere.
Whether or not Bernstein wished that he could have been remembered most for his large-scale orchestral works, the fact remains that it is his musical theater music for which he is best known these days. Of these works, it is the shows from the early part of his career–On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), West Side Story (1957)–that are the basis of his continued fame. The first and third of these musicals were produced as movies, and even Wonderful Town was performed on television. Peter Pan, produced essentially as a Broadway play with some incidental music, dates from 1950. Dream with Mewas rediscovered by conductor Alexander Frey in 2000, along with several other songs that had been cut from the play because of the vocal limitations of the principals.
But like all Broadway composers, Bernstein had to contend with failures as well as great successes. Two of the shows represented on this evening’s program–Candide and 1776–fall into that category. 1776 in particular was deeply unsuccessful, surviving for only seven performances in the nation’s bicentennial year. Candide’s history is more complex and circuitous. The original 1956 production ran for only two months. The blame has always been placed on the book, which was written by playwright Lillian Hellman, after the original satirical novella by Voltaire. After much tinkering through the years, the show only gained traction with the 1976 production, which used an entirely new script by Hugh Wheeler, running on Broadway for two years that time. However, much of the original music had been cut. It is the 1982 two-act version premiered by the New York City Opera, with all of Bernstein’s music reinstated, which has now found a comfortable home in opera companies and conservatories. Glitter and Be Gay, a coloratura soprano tour de force, and Make Our Garden Groware the two most excerpted numbers from Bernstein’s score. The four choral arrangements from Candide on this program chart Candide’s life journey from the highs to the lows (and from naiveté to wisdom); in the end, he decides that working one’s own patch of dirt and living simply is the true answer to happiness. It is a delightfully tongue-in-cheek solution to one of life’s eternal questions, as proposed by Voltaire, one of history’s greatest philosophers.
– Chris Shepard, 2018