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LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918–90)
Symphony No. (“Jeremiah”)
Scored for two utes and piccolo, two oboes and En-
glish horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bas-
soons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum,
snare drum, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, wood
block, piano, strings, and mezzo-soprano soloist
Leonard Bernstein was still a relatively unknown
musician—an assistant to Russian conductor
Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, a part-time
music copyist (under the pseudonym Lenny
Amber; “Bernstein” is German for “amber”), pi-
ano accompanist and soloist, and an occasional
jazz club performer—when he composed the
“Jeremiah” Symphony in
.
e young mu-
sician had heard of a composition competition
sponsored by the New England Conservatory.
His mentor Koussevitzky was chairman of the
jury, and Bernstein felt reasonably optimistic
about his chances at winning. Unfortunately, the
December submission deadline was literally
days away.
Brimming with energy, Bernstein sketched the
rst movement and a scherzo for his rst sym-
phony in days. Running short on time, he
transformed his earlier
Lamentation
for soprano
and orchestra ( ) into the nale of the new-
ly conceived “Jeremiah” Symphony. Bernstein
reassigned the vocal part to a mezzo-soprano.
With preliminary material for three movements
complete, he began the arduous task of orches-
trating the music.
ree days remained before the deadline; an
almost impossibly short period of time. Shirley
Bernstein, who joined her brother in New York,
described the nal 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 clarinetist Da-
vid Oppenheim] took turns making ink copies
of the already completed orchestration, anoth-
er checked the copies for accuracy, and Lenny’s
current girlfriend [Edys Merrill] kept us all sup-
plied with co ee to keep us awake on this -
hour friend-in-need task.”
is rag-tag team miraculously completed the
score, although too near the deadline to mail
the manuscript. Lenny boarded a train to Bos-
ton with Edys, who personally hand-delivered
the manuscript to Koussevitzky’s residence two
hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
e
exhausted composer returned to New York and
slept for nearly a week. Despite this heroic col-
lective e ort, Bernstein failed to win the prize.
Koussevitzky later admitted an unfavorable
opinion of this composition by his protégé. Ber-
nstein shelved the “Jeremiah” Symphony for the
next two years.
In the meantime, he had made a now-legend-
ary ascent onto the conductor’s podium. Artur
Rodziński, the newly installed music director
of the New York Philharmonic, summoned
the young man in August
to his summer
residence, White Goat Farm, with an entic-
ing proposal: the assistant conductor position
with the orchestra. Bernstein later fostered an
embellished version of their meeting in which
Rodziński allegedly stated, “I have gone through
all the conductors I know of in my mind, and
I nally asked God whom I should take, and
God said, ‘Take Bernstein.’ ” Further, Bernstein
insisted that Rodzinski made his o er on Au-
gust —Lenny’s th birthday.
Arthur Judson, the founding head of Columbia
Artist Management, contracted Bernstein with-
in a month and mounted a media blitz. Before
long, major media in the United States contact-
ed this American wunderkind for interviews.
His growing celebrity hit high gear with his New
York Philharmonic debut on November ,
,
as a last-minute substitute for the ailing Bruno
Walter. A normally surly press corps hailed his
dynamic performance.
e Bernstein legend
was born.
Orchestras across the country rushed to secure
Bernstein as a guest conductor. Fritz Reiner,
music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Or-
chestra and Bernstein’s conducting instructor
at the Curtis Institute of Music, was among the
rst in line. Reiner enticed his former student
with the opportunity of conducting his dormant
“Jeremiah” Symphony, and Bernstein agreed to a
date in January
. Rodziński attempted to re-
call his popular assistant to New York, but Ber-
nstein honored the commitment to Pittsburgh,
leading the premiere with mezzo-soprano Jen-
nie Tourel on January .
Critical reaction to the symphony was consider-
ably less unanimous than to his conducting de-
but. Warren Story Smith published an extremely
positive review in the
Boston Post
: “To quote
Schumann’s famous salutation to Chopin: ‘Hats
o , gentlemen, a genius!’ ”
e irascible Virgil
omson, on the other hand, wrote more crit-
ically of Bernstein’s compositional technique.
Nonetheless, the “Jeremiah” Symphony received
the Music Critics’ Circle Award for
.
Bernstein once commented, “ e work I have
been writing all my life is about the struggle
that is born of the crisis of our century, a crisis
of faith.”
is spiritual preoccupation is easily
explainable because of two potent in uences on
the composer: his father Samuel, a successful
businessman and the son of a Hasidic scholar
(also the dedicatee of the symphony), and the
composer Gustav Mahler, whose own sym-
phonies probed spiritual issues. For Bernstein,
“ e faith or peace that is found at the end of
‘Jeremiah’ is really more a kind of comfort, not
a solution. Comfort is one way of achieving
peace, but it does not achieve the sense of a new
beginning.”
e composer acknowledged only a modest
debt to Hebrew music in his symphony, but
Bernstein’s personal assistant Jack Gottlieb has
traced direct, though perhaps unconscious,
echoes of several Hebrew chants.
e opening
theme in
Prophecy
is derived from two liturgi-
cal cadences: a traditional Amen sung during
the
ree Festivals of Passover, Shavuot (Feast
of Weeks), and Sukkot (Festival of Tabernacles),
and another cadence used during the Amidah
prayers in the High Holy Days. Bernstein ex-
plained that this tormented movement “aims
only to parallel in feeling the intensity of the
prophet’s pleas with his people.”
Profanation
is the symphony’s scherzo, designed
“to give a general sense of the destruction and
chaos brought on by the pagan corruption with-
in the priesthood and the people.” Bernstein dis-
played his ingenious sense of orchestral color, an
attribute praised by Virgil omson, and trade-
mark rhythmic verve in this dance-inspired
movement. Gottlieb discovered a formula used
during the chanting of the Bible, speci cally the
Ha ara (conclusion) on Shabbat (the Sabbath).
e revised
Lamentation
concludes the sympho-
ny with an agonizing vocal essay that Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein (1945)
Serge Koussevitzky (photograph by Boris Lipnitzky)
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