This is a short piece I wrote for the special issue of Gramophone which we published for the Leonard Bernstein festival. Maybe you've seen the issue already (they're handing it out *after* performances), maybe not.
After having finally had the opportunity to see the Mass for myself live yesterday afternoon, I'm personally coming down even more on the side of loving it despite (or maybe in part because of) its flaws. Jubilant Sykes was obviously gripped by a cold--maybe even the flu that's felled my own house this week--but I don't blame him one bit for wanting to do the performance anyway.
There are few Bernstein works that have enraged, vexed, and enchanted listeners as much as his 1971 Mass. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her late husband’s memory, Mass opened the then brand-new John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
Though Mrs. Onassis had not stipulated what form such a work would take, a piece inspired by the traditional Mass form was an obvious way for Bernstein to pay tribute to the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, even while Bernstein himself was coming from a Jewish vantage point. However, the majority of Mass’ lyrics came from Stephen Schwarz, who wrote the lyrics for Godspell; Bernstein welcomed the appearance of this second young gifted “SS”-initialed writer into his life (the first, of course, had been Stephen Sondheim, his collaborator on West Side Story). Other collaborators for this overwhelming spectacle included choreographer Alvin Ailey and his dancers, led by Judith Jamison; director Gordon Davidson, designer Oliver Smith as designer, and conductor Maurice Peress.
Fully titled Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers, Bernstein both adhered to tradition and bent it to its breaking point, both in form and content. In his ardent desire to infuse new vigor into the ancient sacred form, he injected musical theater, rock, blues, and folk music alongside electronic experimentation and Gregorian chant into Mass’ Ivesian sonic palette. (Such juxtaposition of the sacred and the contemporary secular into the Mass is actually a centuries-old tradition, going back at least use of the famed song “L’homme arme”—“The Armed Man”—in dozens of Renaissance-era Masses.)
What many first listeners found even more problematic, however, was Bernstein’s message.
Mass contains the essential kernels of the Catholic liturgical service: the Kyrie (“Lord have mercy”); the Gloria, or song of praise; the confession of faith called the Credo; the Sanctus and Benedictus, a single text that first extols the holiness of God and then describes the praise of those “who come in the name of the Lord; and finally the Agnus Dei, referring to Jesus Christ as the “Lamb of God, who comes to take away the sins of the world,” a prayer that ends with the words: “Dona nobis pacem.”
However, Bernstein interweaves tropes of despair, disillusionment, disaffection, and defiance into the Mass structure: he and co-librettist Stephen Schwarz (with the addition of one couplet from Paul Simon) brought all the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s right into the theater. The Vietnam War had left Southeast Asia in tatters and America’s self-confidence shredded. Colonialism’s aftershocks were still shaking India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as well as Algeria and other parts of the world. The dollar was plummeting, and the United States was still mourning the murders of so many of its most visionary and galvanizing leaders in the few short years before. Moreover, Catholicism itself was experiencing serious internal debates over liberation theology and other progressive movements within the Church.
Not only did Bernstein and Schwarz put all of that anger and fear into their libretto, but their Celebrant endures a transformation himself unlike in any other Mass. First simply one of the people, singing “A Simple Song” plainly on the guitar, he is as time elapses hoisted up into a near-deified position himself. At the apex of the Mass, when the Celebrant is to oversee the transubstantiation of ordinary bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, he instead hurls the wine, smashes the liturgical vessels, shatters the cross, empties the altar and dances on it; it’s a mad scene that can compete with any opera.
This shock does not end Bernstein’s Mass, but instead acts as another catalyst: the Celebrant becomes, once more, one among the many, and ultimately the responsibilities for the Mass—and for peace and reconciliation—are shared not just by the performers, but by the audience as well.
Whether or not one agreed with Mass’ premise or its shape, it carried a strong message.
Reports from the Kennedy Center premiere were that after the last notes died away, the entire audience sat in silent stillness for three minutes before exploding into a half hour of applause. Nevertheless, Bernstein was confronted by staunch and sometimes vicious opposition: some critics dismissed the piece altogether –with one New York Times critic deeming it “subliterate rubbish”—while certain Catholic groups decried Mass as blasphemy and sacrilege. However, not all clerics and observant Catholics felt similarly: a year and a half later, Pope Paul VI met with Bernstein and his family, and Bernstein conducted a papal concert of Bach’s Magnificat and Chichester Psalms. Clearly, Mass couldn’t have been all that sacrilegious. (In 2000, Mass itself was also performed at the Vatican during the Church’s Jubilee celebrations.)
Even before the premiere, political Washington had a sense of what to expect of the stridently anti-war Bernstein. Nixon declined to attend; the ever-vigilant J. Edgar Hoover contacted Attorney General John Mitchell to warn him that “important government officials, perhaps even the President, are expected to attend this ceremony and it is anticipated that they will applaud the composition without recognizing the true meaning of the words.” Raising Hoover’s further ire of late had been Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s support of Father Philip Berrigan and his also ordained brother Daniel, among others, who had been arrested for allegedly plotting Henry Kissinger’s kidnapping. (Hoover also warned Mitchell, incorrectly, that Bernstein was asking Berrigan to write Mass’ text, though the composer did visit the priest at the Danbury Federal Correction Institute to solicit his advice.)
Jacqueline Kennedy—already a Bernstein friend for many years before commissioning Mass—ultimately chose not to attend the premiere for “strong personal reasons.” However, JFK’s mother Rose was the guest of honor, and many Washington heavy-hitters were in attendance, such as the late president’s last surviving brother, Senator Edward Kennedy and Kissinger himself along with a good portion of the Nixon cabal, including John Erlichman, HR Haldeman, and Charles Colson (all of whom were shortly later indicted as part of the Watergate Seven).
There were out-and-out excoriations of Mass: among them, the Times’ Harold Schonberg famously derided Mass as “a combination of superficiality and pretentiousness, and the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce”). However, many critics’ comments, both positive and negative, came laden with qualifiers on both sides. Even Howard Klein, writing about the piece after its debut recording on Columbia for the New York Times, in a supposedly pro-Mass review (paired with a Don Heckman piece called “Its Reach Exceeds Its Grasp”) wrote: “The piece is pure Bernstein, audacious, brilliant, excessive, self-indulgent, sentimental, touching, a cornucopia of genius poured out with no restraint.”
“Self-indulgent” and “sentimental”: this was hardly no-holds-barred effusion. Even for many self-identified fans of the work, Mass stands as a flawed masterpiece, and it is under the weight of all those perceptions that Mass comes back to New York this fall, to be heard anew, this time with all the burdens and knowledge of not 1971, but 2008.
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And an excerpt from a much longer Bernstein essay I wrote, also for this Gramophone special issue, this part discussing the role of spirituality in Bernstein's work:
Mass, on the other hand, is thoroughly Jewish not because the libretto ultimately does not see through and affirm the apex of the Christian liturgy—the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood—though Bernstein does have his musicians affirm the Credo, or basic statement of Christian faith (including faith in the Holy Trinity). Its Jewishness does not lie in the fact that the Celebrant is not reified in Bernstein’s imagining as a participant in Jesus Christ’s redemptive work or as the one who carries out the Eucharistic sacrifice, as Christian theology and tradition stipulate.
What makes Bernstein’s Mass so very Jewish is its unyielding (if not rigorously disciplined) search for the answers to cosmic concerns, and the refusal to be easily satisfied by inherited wisdom. The topical tropes he interwove with the traditional Mass sections is yet another Talmudic-style commentary on a given religious text; once again, Bernstein injects a very Jewish process right back into the core of Christian ritual.
The search, the questioning, and the process of learning, become profound spiritual experiences in themselves. Mass also ends as the Catholic liturgy does, with the words: “Go in peace.” For Bernstein the humanitarian, those words are a direct challenge to exist in peace, to spread peace, and to receive peace: it is a galvanizing call to action. And while certain Catholics and other Christians received Mass as an insult to their most sacred beliefs, not all shared their opinion. In an interview published in the New York Times interview just prior to Mass’ staging at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972, Bernstein shared a letter that he had received from a priest in Maryland, which read in part: “[With Mass] You achieved a Holy Saturday. I can’t remember anything like it…I thank God for you and I wish so many years for you.”
