Philadelphia Orchestra plays Bernstein's 'Mass' (first review)

Such has been the case, however, which brings up the curious instance of Leonard Bernstein. We think of Bernstein as an urban sophisticate, but he had serious aspirations as a devotional composer. His first major work, the Jeremiah Symphony, set sacred texts, as did his Chichester Psalms. His Third Symphony, subtitled Kaddish, explored religious themes in texts of his own. When Bernstein — who had dedicated the Kaddish Symphony to the memory of John F. Kennedy in the wake of the latter’s assassination — was asked to write a work to inaugurate the Kennedy Center in Washington, he chose for the first time to set texts from the Catholic liturgy in a work he called simply, Mass.

A litany of complaints

Mass bombed at its premiere in 1971, and, except for a few orchestral excerpts, it has been performed only rarely since. Bernstein conceived it as a lavish dramatic work that would address for a secular audience the spiritual crisis he felt had overtaken the United States in the 1960s and had put its major cultural and political institutions in jeopardy. For this, he needed a potent symbol, and what larger an authority symbol was there than God? In the Kaddish Symphony, the narrator presents a long litany of complaints against the Deity, including his seeming disappearance from the universe. That couldn’t be repeated — not in a Kennedy Center inaugural — but the failure of God’s servant, a vaguely priestly figure in Mass called the Celebrant, suggested again the trope of a Creator gone AWOL. The Celebrant begins, the stage to himself, as a self-satisfied clerical hipster who hasn’t a seeming care in the world and assumes his congregants don’t either.

This shallow premise is not improved by the obvious execution. The Celebrant’s flock, a street chorus more or less out of West Side Story, refuse his ministrations and, in a saturnalia that plays with the Dona nobis pacem of the traditional mass, reject his faith. Shocked, he has a meltdown of his own, upsetting the altar table and ripping off his vestments. What to do, though, without authority? The congregants slowly restore the altar and begin the task of rebuilding community, in which the Celebrant, now a fellow layperson, joins.

Radical? Or conservative?

Bernstein’s politics had long been considered radical, and among those he had consulted in preparing Mass was the radical priest and antiwar activist Philip Berrigan. The piece — a mass that featured the shattering of the altar table as its climax — was scarcely orthodox, and Richard Nixon was advised not to attend the premiere. The real problem of Mass, though, is the profound conservatism of its vision of the American crisis of the 1960s. Some people were no doubt worrying about God, but more were concerned about an endless war, burning cities, and an establishment unresponsive to popular outcry. The problem was not that institutions were failing and that authority was defied, but rather that both were working only too well toward ends whose consequences were just being noticed by a wider public. Popular music was addressing these questions; Leonard Bernstein, given his forum in the belly of the beast, did not.

Of course, art must simplify and personify events before it can usefully look beneath them: That is both its strength and limitation. But who is the Celebrant, really, just a guy like the rest of us who puts on and takes off his work clothes, and throws a tantrum when the product — in this case, God — is criticized? And what is signified when the community rebuilds the altar? Is it the same God who will be worshipped again or just any one that authority can manufacture when the party is over and people crave order and direction again? Nixon thought so, but more was expected of Lenny.

Dona nobis pacem pandemonium

These problems are magnified in the spectacle in Mass — what were those marchers in Brazilian carnival feathers doing going down the aisles? — and in the eclecticism of its score. Bernstein throws in a tone row at the beginning, but there is more Tin Pan Alley than Schoenberg in the music, and, although the pandemonium whipped up in the Dona nobis pacem was effectively energetic, the overall impression of the action reminded me of the Golden Calf scene in DeMille’s Ten Commandments.

What was really needed in such a project, apart from due modesty, was a unifying style such as the Britten Requiem had offered. But the flaw as well as the strength of Bernstein’s art was its desire to encompass musical theater in all its forms and dimensions, popular as well as classical. It worked well enough in West Side Story and Candide, crossover works that did achieve a distinctive style. It fails in Mass, despite incidental felicities and the obvious investment of musical craft.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the orchestra, as well as two stage ensembles, from the pit, wearing a black T-shirt and matching jeans and with a special spotlight, rather as if he were the Celebrant himself. Those of us who have watched his special cult of personality evolve over the past four years might have taken pause at this. Kevin Vortmann was the Celebrant onstage, a physically and vocally demanding role (if only by its length) that he acquitted well enough, although he could not overcome the essential fatuity of his character. The lighting and staging were, happily, not overdone. Mass was receiving a rare Philadelphia performance. It’s a curiosity, to be sure, and a token of its era. But, like Jesus Christ Superstar, I don’t think it needs to return.

For Steve Cohen's review, click here.