Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician by Allen Shawn

Author:Allen Shawn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Religious, Composers & Musicians, Individual Composer & Musician, Music
ISBN: 9780300210170
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-09-30T14:44:43.400000+00:00

His will.

In Bernstein’s work, the Kaddish text, which is traditionally recited by men, is sung three times through by the soprano solo, chorus, and boys’ choir. His treatment of the prayer, which is already both an affirmation of life and a requiem, both praise and supplication, and written in two languages, explores additional dualities. There are two soloists: one a speaker, the other a singer. The score combines the traditional prayer, in Hebrew and Aramaic, with a personal mediation upon it in English. There are both sacred and “profane” elements in the score: choral singing suggestive of Jewish cantillation, alongside jazzier, American-sounding music. There are dueling musical idioms: anguished, highly chromatic segments using twelve-tone rows, alongside tonal and modal music. There are dual resonances within Bernstein’s written text: the “father” can be viewed both as the “father of us all” and also, in places, as the composer’s own father, Samuel. Written at the height of the Cold War, the text addresses not only personal death but also planetary death and the threat of human extinction: “I want to say Kaddish. . . . I have so little time, as You well know. Is my end a minute away? An hour?” By this time, the composer was an active member of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and an advocate of disarmament. He had been alarmed by his children’s casual references to their expectation of a nuclear war that would end human life.20 And then there is the duality of God and man—man, who risks perishing if he cannot maintain the “spirit” (God) within him; God, who cannot continue to exist unless he accepts man.

Like the later Mass, Kaddish approaches religion from the vantage point of skepticism. Like The Age of Anxiety and Mass, it presents the idea of faith as something lost but still attainable. If there is a musical parallel to be drawn to the retrieval of this faith, it is in the retrieval of the diatonic scale accomplished in the score’s more tonal passages.

Skepticism is intrinsic to Judaism, which embraces the paradox of an unknowable, unfathomable God—“That which cannot be named”—to whom one can also voice doubts and make complaint. This is exemplified in the Book of Job: “Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me” (Job 10:8–10).21 With Kaddish, Bernstein risked offending the religious with his personal take on the prayer and his musical settings of it; he challenged an audience happy with his Broadway music with a dark and often acerbic work; and he courted mockery from critics and academics for his blending of twelve-tone elements with melodic, diatonic music, no matter how artfully linked they were. Bernstein entered new territory in this work, inaugurating a “later” musical period in which he attempted to grapple more frankly with serious extramusical subject matter, while creating a synthesis out of his many musical influences, including atonality. Coincident with the evolution of this phase of his work, composers as

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