I. Bernstein
Folks, a lot to write about on the Jews-are-news front, but today it’s this — one of my favorite works of all is having a birthday. Sort of. So I’m going to do some amateur musicology.
Jackie Onassis commissioned an old friend, Leonard Bernstein, for a *huge* work for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. And Bernstein delivered on a colossal scale — a work, as the title has it, for “singers, dancers, and players” called “Mass.”
Over a dozen soloists, some classical, some Broadway. Plus a choir. Plus a children’s choir. Plus a contemporary chorus. And a little rock band, and a little blues band. And an orchestra. It’s a celebration of American eclecticism from its musical polyglot, Leonard Bernstein. All based on the structure used in some of the grandest of classical choral works: the Roman Mass. Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe it. Because Bernstein didn’t just try to capture the state of American music. He also wanted to capture our spiritual life, in all its movement from faith to doubt and from there, sometimes, to reconciliation — a weather map of what it means to believe in God, to be part of a religious community, only to find that faith is not so simple after all.
And the music mirrors this movement, including its moments of darkness. And I want to look at its ugliest part, because there’s buried treasure there.
Here is a transcription of the Second Meditation for cello and orchestra, here performed by Msistislav Rostropovich. At this point in the Mass we’ve been following a symbolic Celebrant in a spiritual journey, and the going has gotten tough — 70’s cynicism, a war nobody wants, a kind of spiritual ossification among his flock — and then comes this disconnected, disjointed burst of atonality. It’s a set of variations on a sixteen-note sequence, almost a tone row but not quite, but you’d be hard put to notice the sequence in the first place, because Bernstein presents it, right at the beginning of the Meditation, not in a straightforward way but as if you’re hearing sixteen one-note extracts of sixteen different variations. The sequence shows up, barely distinguishable, in various ways, but never stated right out, until a cascading run at the very end of the piece, followed by a drum strike that could almost be a gun shot.
I’ve only seen three live performances in the forty years I’ve been in love with this piece — part of the price it pays for its *enormous* cast — and this section is the part where people shuffle their feet and look at their watches. It’s “modern music” in all its unobliging atonality.
Except —
This sixteen-note sequence shows up again later, in fact at the climax of the work. The Celebrant, spiritually deadened, unable to keep faith in the face of the onslaught of modernity, smashes the chalice. And this act of spiritual confrontation literally triggers a miracle: the spilled wine transubstantiates, although he can’t quite work out why. To the same sixteen notes he sings:
Look — isn’t that odd?
Red wine isn’t red at all.
It’s sort of brown. Brown and blue.
So this almost-a-tone-row is carrying immense symbolic weight in the composition. It represents faith *and* doubt, hunger *and* miracle.
Bernstein gives us a hint. The actual title of the number is “Second meditation, on a sequence from Beethoven.” Because that almost-a-tone-row comes from ...
II. Beethoven
It’s been said that the Ninth is a symphony that has, as its final movement, a symphony in itself.
There’s a dramatic moment in which the chorus calls out: Brüder! Brothers! And it’s all the more dramatic because of the way Beethoven prepares it. For the sixteen measures before this bi-i-ig fat major chord, Beethoven gets us lost. The chorus sings the sixteen-note sequence Bernstein lifted, in unison, and with all the instruments in unison, so that when it gets bumpy, and then more bumpy, we lose our sense of key — we don’t know where home base is anymore, it’s been shaken out of us by these strange intervals. And it exactly *because* we’re lost that the redemptive cry Brüder rings out all the more dramatically.
So this sequence is meant to feel like the darkness before dawn, a moment of dramatic contrast that makes the resolution all the more powerful.
Still, it’s a strange thing, hearing Beethoven trying on atonality for sixteen measures.
III. The Borrowing
Bernstein has chosen, as a motif to illustrate — largely — theological struggle, a bit from the most spiritually affirmative work maybe since Dante wrote Paradiso. Out of all the music of the past half millenium, it’s down to Beethoven’s Ninth.
It’s paradoxical — almost perverse. What gives?
Here I’m speculating, but I think Bernstein wanted to indicate that faith, if it’s got any substance to it and encounters the real world, is a struggle, just as it’s a struggle to maintain your ideals in a cynical world. A some toe-tapping happy-happy tune, or a snatch of “Simple Gifts” or something like that, wouldn’t be able to carry this complexity.
Because Bernstein’s main argument, I think, is one of multiplicity, just as the music he wrote for it is many-voiced and wide-ranging. That argument being: that being a person of faith means not only sunlight but dramatic reversals. Sometimes unreachable, sometimes at hand. Drought and deluge.
In an interview, he once said that the Celebrant is meant to be “that part of us that *wants* to have faith,” even if it’s not always simple or even possible.
IV. The Anniversary
And Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?
Happy anniversary to Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, which had its premier in Vienna exactly two hundred years ago today.