This Day in Classical Music History (Leonard Bernstein’s Anguished ‘Kaddish' Symphony Premieres in Israel)

Dec. 10, 1963— The third—and, it turned out, last—symphony created by Leonard Bernstein had endured a long gestation period, but when it finally premiered in Tel Aviv, with the composer himself conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, recent events had given the new work even more tragic relevance than anticipated.

Taking its name from the Hebrew prayer chanted for the dead, at the graveside, on memorial occasions and at all synagogue services, The “Kaddish” Symphony reflected the composer’s ongoing crisis of faith.

But the assassination of John F. Kennedy only a few weeks “threw me for a loop,” he wrote, inspiring him to add a late dedication to “the beloved memory” of the culture-conscious President.

I'm sure that the recently released biopic Maestro, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, will contain more than enough material about the career of this multi-talented musical Renaissance man. But it would be especially interesting to see if the film deals with The Kaddish Symphony.

Finishing the symphony proved more arduous than expected for Bernstein, who had been commissioned to write it in 1955 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

Some of the difficulty derived from his wide-ranging interests (composer, pianist, conductor, and, in the form of his televised “Young People’s Concerts,” music educator for the masses), which led him to take on multiple projects and procrastinate (“To achieve great things,” he was fond of observing, “two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”)

But the main problem seemed to be settling on a text compatible with the music conception he had in his head. Three librettists were tried and found wanting.

The most prominent of these, poet Robert Lowell, turned in verses “of a certain obscurity which would not have served the purpose of immediacy which was needed in the concert hall with a piece like that,” Bernstein said in a 1967 interview with John Gruen. (“God hung the rainbow in the sky,/the sign of his contrition and our peace./He knew man’s self-dominion would increase./We need no help from providence to die.”) 

The three poems that Lowell wrote for the occasion before Bernstein halted their collaboration did not see the light of day until 1979, when they were published in the literary magazine Plowshares.

At last, Bernstein decided to write the libretto himself, and set to work in earnest on the composition in 1961. Two years later, upon hearing at the family’s country home that he’d at last completed it, his delighted wife Felicia “jumped into the swimming pool with all her clothes on," daughter Jamie told music critic David Patrick Stearns in a 2008 article for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Bernstein’s elation was short-lived, and not just because Bernstein also took on the “monstrous task” of scoring, rehearsing, preparing, revising, and translating it into Hebrew for the Tel Aviv performance. The news from Dallas on November 22 devastated him.

Kennedy’s liberalism not only paralleled Bernstein’s, but the composer and president had genuine high regard for each other. 

The President had gotten Bernstein to compose a fanfare for his inauguration. For his part, the composer thought that, “of all the political men that I have ever met, [he] was certainly the most moving and compassionate and lovable,” and kept a photo of JFK on his piano.

All of this was accentuated by shared personality traits. Graduating from Harvard within a year of each other, each was extroverted, attractive, married to a glamorous woman, and as restless in their spirituality as their ambitions.

In his autobiography, Just As I Am, the Rev. Billy Graham recalled his surprise when JFK asked short but incisive questions about the Second Coming of Christ and the world peace he would bring upon his return. 

Though Bernstein did not keep the Sabbath or observe the high Jewish holidays, he would “go from temple to temple in Manhattan and time it so he could hear the cantors that he liked,” his son Alexander told NPR's Peter Crimmins in a 2018 interview. “He knew all the rabbis. He could sing all the prayers. Could read and speak Hebrew.”

Pressed by many friends and admirers to concentrate more on composing (even after he was appointed the New York Philharmonic’s music director in 1958), Bernstein longed to create an opera about the Holocaust. He never got around to it. 

“Symphony No. 3” was probably the closest he ever came to fulfilling the ambition, and even in this case, it was a different musical form, with Wall Street Journal critic John Anderson suggesting that the 12-tone piece could just as easily be seen as “an oratorio or a monologue with music.”

As originally envisioned by Bernstein, the narrator was female—an unusual choice, given that “women are not officially supposed to say Kaddish in the old tradition,” he told an interview for Japanese TV in 1985. He wrote the part with Felicia in mind, and in fact she narrated when the symphony had its U.S. premiere in January 1964.

In the spoken-word portion that Bernstein ended up creating himself, the narrator pointedly questions at one point the justice and mercy of God:

Are You listening, Father? You know who I am:
Your image; that stubborn reflection of You
That Man has shattered, extinguished, banished.
And now he runs free—free to play
With his new-found fire, avid for death,
Voluptuous, complete and final death.
Lord God of Hosts, I call You to account!
You let this happen, Lord of Hosts!

In his anguished and angry wrestling with the Almighty, Bernstein was squarely in a Jewish tradition running from The Book of Job to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He found such existential matters even more urgent at this point in the 20^th century: While the Holocaust had involved the annihilation of the Jews, the atomic bomb raised the specter of nuclear annihilation of all humanity.

While the narrator spiritually wrestles with God for much of the 40-minute performance, Bernstein continued to wrestle with the text. “I made it over communicative….Even I am embarrassed when I hear the record here and there.” Eventually he rewrote it so that the narrator could be either male or female.

Even with all this rearranging and especially tightening, Bernstein seems to have been ambivalent about this work, explaining its movement from atonality to tonality as being paralleled by the narrator’s journey towards resolution with God.

In effect, The Kaddish Symphony represented the first in a spiritual musical trilogy springing from the violence and dislocation of the Sixties. 

Two years later, he wrote Chichester Psalms in a more life-affirming vein, and MASS—the first work performed at the opening of the JFK Center for the Performing Arts in 1971—with its eclectic mix of musical genres, challenged American values as well as, again, God.

As time went on, Bernstein came to better terms with this composition that had so unnerved him. You can see it in this YouTube clip of a 1985 performance in Japan, commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

Just before the piece begins in earnest, you can see Bernstein with eyes closed and hands clasped, almost surely in prayer—perhaps for a good performance at this show, perhaps for the better world this composition called for, or maybe for both.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Stephen Schwartz and Leonard Bernstein, on ‘When My Courage Crumbles’)

“When my courage crumbles,
When I feel confused and frail,
When my spirit falters on decaying altars
And my illusions fail --
I go on right then.
I go on again.”—American lyricist Stephen Schwartz and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), “I Go On,” from Mass (1971)
 
More than many people, Leonard Bernstein, for all his worldly success and acclaim, must have felt “confused and frail” in his private life. But I can’t think offhand of another American musical figure who excelled in so many ways: composer, conductor, pianist, educator, author.
 
All of that makes me anxious to see the upcoming biopic Maestro about him starring Bradley Cooper. I’m not going to get into the controversy surrounding the actor’s use of a prosthetic nose to simulate his subject. (In "The Well-Tempered Ear," blogger Jacob Stockinger has a thought or two on the subject.)
 
But, if the whole hullabaloo exposes more viewers to his life’s work (yes, including the much-debated Mass), all to the good.

Quote of the Day (Leonard Bernstein, on Why Conducting Is ‘The Closest Thing I Know to Love’)

“The conductor must not only make his orchestra play, he must make them want to play. He must exalt them. Lift them. Start their adrenaline pouring. Either by pleading or demanding or raging — it doesn’t matter. It is not so much imposing his will on them like a dictator. It is more like projecting his feelings around them so that they reach the last man in the second violin section. And when this happens—when one hundred men share his feelings, exactly, simultaneously, responding as one to each rise and fall of the music, to each point of arrival and departure, to each little inner pulse—then there is a human identity of feeling that has no equal elsewhere. It is the closest thing I know to love itself.” —American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), The Joy of Music (1959)

Flashback, April 1949: Bernstein Adapts Auden Poem Into Symphony

Less than two years after reading it in manuscript, Leonard Bernstein’s “symphony” of W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Anxiety was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky, with the composer as piano soloist, on April 8, 1949.

Given that Auden’s book-length narrative poem has sharply divided critics, it is not surprising that Bernstein’s version has, too. They have noticed that, despite calling this “Symphony No. 2,” Bernstein dispensed with the four movements traditionally associated with the musical form. In fact, it was more like a tone poem, with its six subsections mirroring Auden’s text.

Bernstein was drawn to the poet’s work because of a parallel religious yearning. The radicalism of Auden’s young manhood had, by the end of his first decade in America, been supplanted by a preoccupation with Christianity. Throughout his career, Bernstein’s spiritual instincts would also find expression in his work, from his first large-scale orchestral work, Jeremiah (1944) to  his piece inaugurating the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing arts, Mass (1971). At the same time, few of his other works depicted so openly “the separateness that becomes Oneness under alcohol and/or libidinal urges” that he shared with the alienated Auden quartet of three men and one woman who come together in a New York dive. Courting actress-pianist Felicia Montealegre, he believed it still possible he could forsake same-sex attraction; three decades later, no longer able to do so, he would leave his wife for another man and descend into guilt over the marriage's breakup.

Koussevitzky, Bernstein’s mentor, commissioned The Age of Anxiety, and Bernstein dedicated the work to him. It appears, however, that yet another, unidentified friend championed the potential of the Auden poem to the composer, who, over the course of two years, worked on it in places as diverse as Taos, Philadelphia, Richmond, Mass., and Tel-Aviv, before completing it in New York City, only three weeks before its premiere. It was all in service to, in his words, "one of the most shattering examples of pure virtuosity in the history of English poetry."

It was also one of the most difficult poems that Auden ever wrote. No lines vibrated with the kind of memorable emotion expressed in In Memory of WB Yeats," "September 1st, 1939,” or the longer For the Time Being. The four speakers of the poem are not only indistinguishable from each other; more important, their voices are indistinguishable from Auden’s.

The latter proved a detriment to a work that, because of its dialogue form, aspires to theater. Auden had already collaborated with friend Christopher Isherwood on several plays in the 1930s (The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6), and, with his lover, Chester Kallman, he would go on to write the libretto for The Rake’s Progress in 1953. But the passion that seemed to arise naturally from his shorter poems became muted and confused when he wrote more self-consciously for the theater.

Few such problems afflicted Bernstein. The supreme triumph of his long, varied career was, many would say, West Side Story, but it was not his only foray into musical theater. Candide, as well as On the Town and Wonderful Town have become staples of the form, and even the late, troubled opera A Quiet Place has received more respectful attention in recent years. Even in an orchestral work such as this, that quality emerges. “If the charge of ‘theatricality’ in a symphonic work is a valid one, I am willing to plead guilty,” he wrote in a subsequent program note on this composition. “I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.”

Jerome Robbins created a ballet version of The Age of Anxiety, but Auden abominated it. In fact, Bernstein’s piece, in all its passion and varied tones, is a more successful work not only than the ballet piece but also than Auden’s original, some critics have said.

Sadly, affinities existed between Auden and Bernstein in other ways. Auden was notorious for going back and revising much of his earlier work, frequently not to his advantage. Bernstein suffered from the same creative affliction, and one work he unfortunately decided to tinker with was The Age of Anxiety. His revision in the 1960s added little if any value to this work.

Many critics saw in the poet and composer another failing: a late-career falloff from the extraordinary promise of their youths. In each case, the charge was a bit exaggerated, even unfair. It is particularly so in the case of Bernstein, who was not only a brilliant composer but, in his later decades, a conductor, soloist, and music educator. (See, for instance, my prior post on his inspiring work as “master music teacher for the television age,” on the CBS arts-and-entertainment show Omnibus.)

This Day in Classical Music History (Goodman, Bernstein Debut Poulenc’s Posthumous ‘Clarinet Sonata’)

April 10, 1963—The debut of Francis Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata turned into an unanticipated memorial at Carnegie Hall. With the 63-year-old French composer dying of a massive heart attack only four months before, Leonard Bernstein replaced him at the piano, accompanying featured soloist Benny Goodman.

Twenty-five years before, Goodman’s performance at Carnegie had been a brassy, joyous affair that gave the imprimatur of New York’s most serious musical venue to big-band jazz. In contrast, his appearance in the Poulenc piece took on a somber tone.

In terms of personality, Poulenc and the "King of Swing" could not have differed more. The American, for all the joy his music gave the Greatest Generation, was such a taskmaster that years later, musicians who once played for him spoke of what a martinet he could be. Poulenc, far more of an easygoing eccentric, also displayed far more duality: "something of the monk and something of the rascal," according to music critic Claude Rostand. Never entirely able to sublimate his homosexual orientation, he also was a devout Roman Catholic who wrote an opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), that stands a fair chance of becoming a staple of modern musical theater—even though it features no romance or melodrama, only an order of nuns martyred during the French Revolution.

In terms of music, however, Poulenc and Goodman evinced a similar crossover sensibility. From early in his career, Poulenc composed witty, jazz-inflected pieces as well as the melodic, Romantic-influenced works for which he was better known. By the 1960s, with bebop pushing to the side his own big-band sound, Goodman increasingly widened his musical perspective to take in classical works. In the next two decades, he would perform classical works with his daughters acccompanying him on the piano and cello, and he died in 1986 while playing a Brahms sonata on his clarinet in his New York home.

Goodman had commissioned this piece from Poulenc, and it turned out to be one of the last (if not the last) works the Frenchman wrote before his untimely death. Bernstein, another musician with crossover tendencies (Poulenc deeply admired his West Side Story), was honored to step in for his friend.

For a fine assessment of Poulenc’s career (the piece that got me interested in him in the first place), this one by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal is the place to start. This YouTube clip, a performance by Anton Dressler on the clarinet and John Novacek at the piano, also gives a fine sense of Goodman’s fortune in commissioning this sterling late-career work.

This Day in Theater History (‘Wonderful Town’ Opens After Not-So-Wonderful Creation)

Feb. 25, 1953—Most Broadway playgoers who saw the sunny musical comedy Wonderful Town, which premiered on this date at the Winter Garden Theatre, had no idea that in actuality, the lives of its two main characters—young, single sisters out to conquer New York—had been blighted by tragedy, nor that the production they were watching had been marked by more than the usual amount of ego-tripping, backstabbing, betrayal and hysteria present in any collaborative creative production.

But don’t take my word for it—just listen to director George Abbott, a veteran of six decades of theater wars, who noted: “There was more hysterical debate, more acrimony, more tension and more screaming connected with this play than with any other show I was ever involved with."

The setting of the musical, New York in the Depression, does not sound like much fun, but Ruth McKenney spun her adventures in the big city into comic gold in the form of My Sister Eileen, a collection of sketches from The New Yorker, in 1938. At that point, success beckoned for both Ruth and the title character. Two years after the book’s appearance, Eileen had left the East Coast for Hollywood as an executive assistant to Walt Disney, and Ruth was awaiting an event that would boost her sales even further: a Broadway comedy based on the last two chapters of her book, involving life in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her madcap beautiful sister.

Not much seemed to go right for Ruth afterwards:

*Four days before the opening, Eileen’s husband, novelist Nathanael West (Day of the Locusts), a terrible driver, ran a stop sign. The resulting collision killed both him and Eileen. The comedy premiered as scheduled on Broadway, but Ruth understandably was in no mood to attend.

*Ruth and her husband, Richard Bransten (professional name: George Minton), both Communists, were driven out of the party--though they still had to endure the blacklisting of the McCarthy Era.

*On Ruth’s 44^th birthday in 1955, Richard committed suicide.

*Ruth died in 1972 at age 60, with 10 books to her credit but none as successful as My Sister Eileen. 

(For a fine description of the life of Ruth, see Scott Johnson's Powerline blog post here.)

The 1940 comedy, by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields (brother of famed lyricist Dorothy Fields), became a big hit, then was adapted into a film two years later starring Rosalind Russell. In 1950, Chodorov and Fields approached Abbott about adapting the work into a musical, with Russell again in the role of the sharp-witted older sister of a bombshell. Despite initial misgivings, Abbott’s initial resistance was worn down, much to his later regret.

The two men called on to create the score, composer Leroy Anderson and lyricist Arnold Horwitt, worked slowly, and what they had in hand didn’t please Russell or Abbott. With the start of rehearsals looming, Betty Comden and Adolph Green—a team known for working fast, and under tough taskmasters, at that (they had survived Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain)—were called in. Comden and Green overcame the rather half-hearted resistance of their friend, Leonard Bernstein, to handle the music while they worked on the lyrics.

True to form, Comden and Green, with help from Bernstein, whipped several numbers together in only a month. Chodorov and Fields were furious: What had happened to their warm, rather sentimental material? (The sharply satiric songs that were Comden and Green’s stock in trade may have also reminded them a bit too much of the most highly praised bits from the 1940 show, widely rumored to have been concocted by director-playwright George S. Kaufman.) It didn’t help that Jerome Robbins, the man that Abbott called on to fix lingering problems with the show, ended up informing on Chodorov as a Communist.

Matters came to a head in the show’s out-of-town New Haven performances prior to its Broadway opening. Ingenue Edie Adams, suspecting that she would be scapegoated for the production’s failures, told the production team that it was impossible to deal with contradictory notes about her performance from so many different people. Chodorov and Fields darkly warned that without moving the show back to their original concept, it faced disaster. Russell, not trained as a singer, stressed out by the rising tension all around her, lost her voice right after the New Haven opening.

In the end, when the show got to the Winter Garden Theatre, the frothy atmosphere onstage—typified by the funny song “Ohio” and the infectious “Conga”—won over critics and audiences. The tensions between the show’s old and new creative teams were never really smoothed over, but Wonderful Town won five Tonys (including Best Musical and, for Russell, Best Actress in a Musical), on its way to 559 performances.

A half-century after its premiere, a revival of Wonderful Town was staged. Like the original critics and audiences, I, too, was bowled over by the show’s spirit of fun and wit—testimony to the work of Comden and Green. Yet even in this case, for a show with such a problematic history, there couldn’t help but be some troubles. Donna Murphy, taking over Russell’s lead role, proved a dazzling all-purpose talent—not just acting (Russell’s forte), but also singing and dancing up a storm. But she had to take so many absences during the show’s nearly 500-performance run that, it is said, her chances for another Tony Award were badly damaged.