Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz by Baber Katherine;

Author:Baber, Katherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Table 4.1: Formal and Narrative Schemes in Symphony no. 2, Part 2

Although it comes rather late in the symphony and in the poem, “The Masque” better articulates conflict, as opposed to scene-setting or dialogue, than the preceding sections. “The Prologue,” “The Seven Ages,” and “The Seven Stages” are a series of introductions followed by various wanderings that lead to the critical absence mourned in “The Dirge,” the death of the “colossal Dad.” Auden scholarship generally agrees that the dirge is for Roosevelt and the spirit of the New Deal, but in a “Dirge” written in the Israel of 1948 there are any number of losses Bernstein could be mourning. The variation form Bernstein employs, enhanced by melodic concatenation and the panoply of styles, aptly portrays this journey, just as the pathos of the Brahmsian dirge captures Auden’s existential sorrow. The sudden jump in register from twelve-tone technique, which Bernstein considered the height of abstraction, to jazz introduces tension and also shifts the focus away from the European tradition to the American context. If the preceding movements bring us up to “the present” and ask “What are we to do?” or “Where are we to go?” then “The Masque” initiates the debate. “The Epilogue,” in turn, supplies no sure answers.

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