Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 8

on time, he transformed his earlier Lamentation for soprano and orchestra (1939) into the fina- le of the newly conceived Jeremiah Symphony. Bernstein reassigned the vocal part to a mez- zo-soprano. With preliminary material for three movements complete, he began the arduous task of orchestrating the music. Three days remained before the deadline, an almost impossibly short period of time. Shir- ley Bernstein, who joined her brother in New York, described the final ordeal: “A small army of friends and I were put to work helping to get the mechanical part of the job done. I was kept busy inking in clefs and time signatures, two friends [composer David Diamond and clari- netist David Oppenheim] took turns making ink copies of the already completed orchestra- tion, another checked the copies for accuracy, and Lenny’s current girlfriend [Edys Merrill] kept us all supplied with coffee to keep us awake on this 36-hour friend-in-need task.” Lenny boarded a train to Boston with Edys, who per- sonally hand-delivered the manuscript to Kous- sevitzky’s residence two hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve. The exhausted composer re- turned to New York and slept for nearly a week. Despite this heroic effort, Bernstein failed to win the prize and shelved Jeremiah for the next two years. Koussevitzky later admitted an unfavor- able opinion of this composition by his protégé. Meanwhile, Bernstein was making a now-leg- endary ascent onto the conductor’s podium. His growing celebrity hit high gear with his New York Philharmonic debut on November 14, 1943, as a last-minute substitute for the ailing BrunoWalter. A normally surly press corps hailed his dynam- ic performance. Orchestras across the country rushed to secure Bernstein as a guest conductor. Fritz Reiner, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, was among the first in line and en- ticed his former conducting student with the op- portunity to lead the dormant Jeremiah Sympho- ny. Bernstein gave the premiere on January 28, 1944, with mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel. Critical reaction to the symphony was considerably less unanimous than to his conducting debut. The revised Lamentation concludes the sympho- ny with an agonizing vocal essay that Bernstein described as “the cry of Jeremiah, as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem, ruined, pillaged, and dis- honored after his desperate effort to save it.” This movement gathered meaning as the full horrors of Nazi eradication of the Jews became more widely known. Never one to mince words, Ber- nstein angrily exclaimed, “How can I be blind to the problems of my own people? I’d give ev- erything I have to be able to strike a death blow to Fascism.” The vocal melody contains motives from the kinnot (dirges) chanted on Tisha B’Av (Ninth Day of Ab), a fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple. Bernstein pro- grammed the Jeremiah Symphony throughout his career to emphasize the plight of the Jewish people or whenever he sought musical com- mentary on social injustices. The Masque and The Epilogue from Symphony No. 2 ( The Age of Anxiety ) Scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tenor drum, tam-tam, cymbal, temple blocks, triangle, glockenspiel, xylophone, two harps (the second is optional), pianino/celesta, strings, and solo piano New York City was a frequent backdrop for Ber- nstein’s music, portrayed as upbeat and carefree ( Fancy Free and On the Town ), energetic and hopeful ( Wonderful Town ), or gritty and violent ( West Side Story ). The less familiar Symphony No. 2 shed a different light on his adopted home, one of postwar despair, pessimism, and aimless- ness. Bernstein based the score on W.H. Aud- en’s Pulitzer Prize–winning “Baroque eclogue” The Age of Anxiety (1947). An Englishman who moved to the US in 1939 and took citizenship seven years later, Auden brought an outsider’s penetrating, critical insight to American life during the Depression and World War II. Auden introduced the reader to living exam- ples of Carl Jung’s four psychological types: the rational pairing of feeling and thinking, and the irrational coupling of intuition and sensa- tion. Quant (intuition), an aged widower and shipping officer, occupied his time during the Depression reading mythology at the public li- brary. Malin (thinking) is a Medical Intelligence Officer for the Canadian Air Force. Rosetta (feeling) is a middle-aged beauty who, amid the noise and disorder of the city, dreams of the idyllic English countryside. Emble (sensation) is a Midwesterner whose Navy uniform makes him attractive to both sexes. The moment Bernstein began reading Auden, “the music started to sing.” His symphony aimed to capture the essence of verse—“the poem and the symphony were mutually integral”—though it is unclear whether Bernstein intended a strict programmatic recreation. From the outset, he invested the symphony with an autobiographi- cal detail: its main protagonist (Malin = piano) represents the composer. Bernstein also took great pains to spin the poet’s pessimistic ending in a more positive direction. The Boston Sym- phony Orchestra, conductor Serge Koussevitz- ky, and composer as pianist gave the world pre- miere on April 8, 1949. Structurally, Symphony No. 2 ( The Age of Anx- iety ) groups the six major sections of Auden’s poem into two large parts. In Part II, The Masque revives music from “Ain’t Got No Tears Left,” a song dropped from On the Town , in a catchy jazz idiom. The Epilogue presented Bernstein with his greatest challenge. In fact, he complete- ly revised this concluding movement in 1965, more completely integrating the piano. Roset- ta, a character of Jewish faith, contemplates her heritage beginning with the Babylonian exile and climaxing with the “Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad” (Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One). Even in an “age of anxiety,” faith and hope may be restored. Socrates: Alcibiades from Serenade (after Plato’s ‘Symposium’) Scored for solo violin, strings, harp, and percussion (timpani, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, triangle, suspended cymbal, tambourine, Chinese blocks, xylophone, glockenspiel, and chimes) Great literature inspired Leonard Bernstein the composer more than any other catalyst. “It is cer- tainly not an intimate revelation,” declared his brother Burton, “to say that Lenny loved words every bit as much as he loved notes.” His liter- ary tastes ranged broadly, from the philosophi- cal essays of classic antiquity to scriptural texts, Renaissance and Baroque dramas, and contem- porary prose and poetic writings. Fellow pia- nist/composer/conductor Lukas Foss claimed that “Lenny was the most well-read composer Leonard Bernstein (1945) W.H. Auden RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 22 – JULY 28, 2019 110