Lenny the Klezmer

...Eventually, the speaker is humbled...

...In a 1986 video script, Bernstein said of Wagner: "[he] was a sublime genius...so profoundly understanding of the human condition...

...Every writer of great tonal music, even Stravinsky and Copland, was almost compelled to experiment with atonal forms, just to be noticed...

...In fact, Burton believes that it was the Oxford-inflected, just slightly affected accent of Rabbi H. H. Rubenovitz at Mishkan Tefila that was the inspiration for Leonard's own curious vowels and cadences...

...It was this piece that ended the musical memorial service at Carnegie Hall following Bernstein's death in 1990...

...In it we hear not only lots of Aaron Copland and a bit of George Gershwin, but also amens and other chants from the Tisha b'Av service—the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple...

...The third movement of the Chichester Psalms is a revelation—Bernstein's revelation...

...Unfortunately, Bernstein's musical sensibility was at odds with the prevailing fashion in serious (that is, academic) music...

...Although Schoenberg eventually wrote music on Jewish themes (his Survivor from Warsaw has martyrs chanting the Sh'ma), even the heightened Holocaust awareness did not send Jewish composers to the Tanach for their operas and oratorios...

...There were plenty of Jewish kids with merchant fathers, including immigrant-merchant fathers, who were at the top of the musical world...

...After the final battle, Sam the father says to his son: I don't know what this is...

...Bernstein began composing at age 16 with a setting of the 148th Psalm, in English...

...He was disgusied at the prospect of a klezmtr [ a folk musician or Mici'e pi.Hit I iii [lie f.iiniK Iii Europe, even poor Jewish chicken-farmers, like Sam's father, looked down on the itinerant street musician...

...The Kaddish Symphony illustrates the musical dilemma this presented to Bernstein...

...For Bernstein, atonal music communicated despair, doubt and evil, while tonal music expressed hope, faith and peace...

...This five-tone row appears variously as Urah, ha-Nevel ("Awake, psaltery...

...Typically, in their lives and music, they were unreligious—like Jacques Offenbach, whose can-cans hardly betray his origins...

...i Other works mentioned in this article can be heard on: Arnold Schoenberg A Survivor from Warsaw Sony Classical S2K 44571 Ernest Bloch Sacred Service Chandos CHAN 8418 Lenny the Klezmer continued from page 45 achim gam yachad ("How good and pleasant it is for brothers [and sisters] to sit together...

...and choral settings of two Hebrew folksongs ("Simchuna" and "Re'ena...

...According to Albert Goldman,* though, even most of Elvis Presley's songs were written by a Jewish tunesmith in New York...

...In the days when popular songs came from Broadway shows, he was not only the composer of hits like "Maria," but also, and at the same time, of a serenade based on Plato's Symposium, a symphonic setting of the Kaddish and a commission for Benny Goodman's clarinet...

...Arnold Schoenberg, who had been both a Protestant and a Catholic, discovered he was still a Jew and fled to the United States to escape the Nazis...

...The Enlightenment made it not only legal to be Jewish but also to convert to Christianity...

...In contrast, the 11-year-old Burton refused at first lo have a bar mil/vah and told his scandalized family that be was an antisetnite...

...It also includes seven groups of seven sequences, giving us the "jubilee...

...When this project failed to develop, he and his librettist took a radically different path...

...Ki tov Adonai ("For God is good...

...And there is Junior, the stuttering homosexual son who is also caught up in a Wagnerian near-incest with his sister...

...This may be his naughtiest trick of all...

...Naturally, the effect this blasphemy might have on a Tel Aviv audience created some nervous anticipation before the performance...

...When the press reported ibis gossip, Sam defended himself with a Leonard-like pronouncement...

...2 (narrated by Michael Wager) Deutsche Grammophon 423 582-2 Chichester Psalms...

...Bernstein once said that everything he wrote was a "theater piece...

...They wrote a reunion opera called A Quiet Place showing what had happened to the family in Bernstein's earlier opera, Trouble in Tahiti...

...Despite a considerable number of composing cantors, the major composers, many of them Jews, were still not writing Jewish...

...More than anything, Leonard Bernstein wanted to be honored as a composer— not just as a composer of Broadway shows, but of "real" concert music...

...Others have said that everything Bernstein ever did in public was a theater piece...

...Sam was only partly right...

...Promiscuously, he wrote music in every style, from Gershwin to Schoenberg, just as he flitted from fashionable political stance to stance...

...Bernstein was apparently also schizophrenic about tonality...

...By this time, his compositional technique was more and more influenced by Wagner...

...Often, he could not resist a chance to scandalize by, for example, kissing men in public or inviting advocates of urban guerrilla warfare to his apartment or composing a symphony for performance in Tel Aviv in which the narrator attacks the integrity of God...

...The Protestant Gustav Mahler was reconstituted a Jew...

...Remember the dissonant tones of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the anointed, avant-garde jazz artists of the period...

...The third movement of the Chichester Psalms is among the most unabashed displays of tonal sentimentality in modern music...

...Composed in 1964-1965, just after the Kaddish Symphony and during Bernstein's sabbatical from conducting the New York Philharmonic, Chichester Psalms was commissioned by the Very Reverence Walter Hussey for the choirs of Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury cathedrals...

...Indeed, Leonard's two surrogate fathers were the preeminent composer Aaron Copland (whose father was born Kaplan) and the celebrated conductor Serge Koussevitsky, who, following in the path of many European Jews, had converted "for career reasons...

...Not only did he compose for and conduct the Israeli Philharmonic, but also the Vienna Philharmonic—where he even conducted Richard Wagner (a fierce antisemite widely purported to have been Hitler's favorite composer) and is said to have remained silent while the Viennese musicians complimented him for "not being like other Jews...

...It was once unthinkable for any composer after Tchaikovsky to repeat a long melody without changing the key or tonal center...

...By 1950, no composer of weight was allowed to create tonal music, music anchored by a single note (the key) in the musical scale...

...He taught "modern" music on his remarkable "Omnibus" television lectures (with a delivery shaped by Rabbi Rubenovitz) and he did more than anyone to publicize Ornette Coleman's eccentric saxophone...

...Bernstein, with characteristic naughtiness, accepted the commission on the condition that the piece be sung in Hebrew...

...and also a "monstrous kind of person and an irrational antisemite...

...Jubilee comes from the Hebrew word "yovel" or trumpet blast...

...By the middle of this century Jews were so over-represented among modern composers that people would simply assume, for example, that Samuel Barber was Jewish, just because of his first name...

...or Christian converts, like Felix Mendelssohn, baptized as a baby by his father, who was the son of Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century spiritual leader of German Jewry...

...This last is sung a cappella, vaporizing into a hushed Amen...

...He was a demonstrative homosexual who nevertheless married and had children...

...In the Torah, the Israelites are told to have a sabbath year every seventh year and then, after seven groups of seven years, to honor the 50th year as a 'jubilee"—beginning with the blast of the shofar on Yom Kippur...

...Leonard attended Temple Mishkan Tefila, in Boston, a Conservative ikui with ornate architecture, an operatic cantor and an organ...

...Leonard Bernstein often referred to himself as "schizophrenic...

...made his fortune through a providential, Depression-era investment in "permanent wave" machines...

...Oh, but I hear what you're saying...

...Koussevitsky urged the 22-year-old to change his name to Burns...

...With the bombast of the Kaddish Symphony behind him, he set out to write something simpler and more accessible...

...public disturbance...

...Toward the end, he especially wanted to write another opera...

...His idea was to set the work in Vienna and explore the effects of World War II and the Holocaust on current Europeans...

...Also.this last disc contains a performance of Charles Davidson's treatment of "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," a moving work by a very talented cantor-composer...

...From the earlv 1 (5th century," he intoned, "my family never made a livelihood from art, and I didn't want to break this tradition...

...And among his last works was a witty concerto for orchestra called Jubilee Games in which, among other things, he has the orchestra members chanting sheva (Hebrew for seven) while playing aleatoric (partly random) music...

...The theme of the second movement is the haftorah trupp, or cantillation, that boys and now girls study for their bar and bat mitzvah...

...And the door is open...

...He wanted to be remembered for his Kaddish Symphony, not just for "Sergeant Krupke...

...After a sweet, unfashionably lush orchestral interlude, there is a heartbreaking singing of the most humble of psalms, 131 ("God, my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty...

...It was that the classical music enterprise had been largely a church enterprise...

...He was not using the term clinically but with the Hollywood sense of "split personality...

...A Quiet Place is two hours of recrimination, accusation, remorse and bitterness...

...Leonard Bernstein the composer was hardly ever more than a piece or two away from a composition uniquely interesting to Jews...

...Avon, 1982...

...According to Leonard's younger brother, Burton...

...But it is impossible to overlook the way his reputation suffered for his "Jewishness," so much so that Bloch (who died in 1959), trying in vain to broaden his audience, did not write a Jewish piece during the last 20 years of his life...

...Leonard was an observant liuehrr through bis bar milzvah, "faultless in that department...

...It is sung, then hummed as a nigun (a melody without words) then repeated by the cello soloist, all without so much as a change of key...

...His first symphony, Jeremiah, composed in his early 20s, includes a vocal setting for Lamentations, in Hebrew...

...Although it contains as much atonal music as any 20th-century piece, it uses dissonance and disharmony theatrically, to create the effects of fear and despair...

...and Hineh ma-a tov ("How good it is...

...Even Bernstein's Chichester Psalms was commissioned by a syndicate of Anglican churches...

...Until the 1790s, it was virtually illegal for a prominent European—and all great composers and conductors were, of course, European—to be a Jew...

...The wonderful exception was the Swiss-American Ernest Bloch, a ' powerful and innovative composer who set much of the Jewisih litjurgy to music {avodat hakodesh, the Sacred Service...

...At mid-century, the composing elite was contemptuous of music in a "key" or music with triad harmonies (chords containing the first, third and fifth note in the traditional eight-note scale...

...These psalms are a simple and modest affair," he said, "tonal and tuneful and somewhat square, certain to sicken a stout John Cage with its tonics and triads in B-flat major...

...I don't understand it at all...

...He wanted the critics to take him as seriously as Copland...

...And, knowing the man, it is hard not to think of it as a spiritual declaration, an act of contrition (teshuvah) for the adolescent heresies of the Kaddish Symphony...

...The adolescent naughtiness that begins the third movement does not, incidentally, prevail...

...Indeed, his Jewish works are the mileposts in his composing career...

...The great Jewish composers of the 19th century, with minor exceptions like Jacques Halevy, did not compose music with Jewish themes or texts...

...It wasn't just that being a Protestant made one more socially acceptable...

...His third and last symphony contains an English narration and choral settings of the Kaddish, for which the symphony is named...

...In the 20th century, it was Hitler, ironically, who decided that these converted composers were Jews after all, whether or not they wished to be...

...Bernstein was also drawn to Wagner's preoccupation with the themes of paternal tyranny and sibling incest, which run throughout his libretti...

...At other times, this theme is transmuted into the melodies for the 23rd and 131st Psalms as well...

...taunted by the narrator...

...To do it twice, as Bernstein did, was an act of deliberate musical rebellion or, more correctly, a deliberate reference to synagogue music— where melodies are routinely repeated without modulation...

...They fall into each other's arms and hug until the end of the opera, at which point Lenny the klezmer has the chorus sing the word he set to music most often: Amen...

...In this piece, more than any other, Bernstein surrenders to the humbling force of tonality, the irresistible power of God in the triads, the provenance of harmony...

...But apparently Israel's most Orthodox elements were not interested in "classical" music and there was none of the expected (hoped for...

...He both loved and despised his father...

...In the same year (1950) he composed his first opera, Trouble in Tahiti, he also wrote a choral setting for the Yigdal (a poetic prayer based on Maimonides' 13 principles of Jewish faith...

...Sometimes he wanted to be a composer who conducts, other times a conductor who composes...

...Bernstein composed for another 20 years after the Chichester Psalms—although not much in the next five years...

...The first recording with an alknale chorus is: Chichester Psalms The American Boychoir/The American Symphony Orchestra James Litton Conductor MusicMasters 7049-2-C I recommend that you acquire one of the Bernstein versions of the Chichester Psalms, as well as this last one...

...Much later he told a reporter, "Remember, there was no Leonard Bernstein then...

...When voting Leonard hegan to earn his school expenses by playing the piano in dance hands...

...both Leonard and Sam Bernstein developed a similar way of embellishing the facts of their family history...

...Elvis (McGraw Hill, 1981...

...Masses, Christmas and Easter festivals, coronations and consecrations—music with Christian texts—were an attractive source of commissions and patrons...

...Sony has recently released all these performances, including the longer version of the Kaddish with Felicia Montealegre (Bernstein's wife) narrating, in one three-disc anthology: Leonard Bernstein: A Portrait Bernstein Conducts Bernstein The Symphonies Sony Music SM3K-4716 Other definitive recordings are: Symphonies Nos...

...Chichester Psalms was written in the very center of Bernstein's composing career...

...Although there is no one recognizably Jewish among the characters in these operas, and although Easter and Christmas figure in the setting, there is nevertheless the father, Sam, a tyrannical businessman who, in the earlier opera, fought constantly with the now-deceased mother of the later opera and who continues to terrorize his grown children...

...1 & 2 Jeremiah and The Age of Anxiety Deutsche Grammophon 415 964-2 Symphony No 3 "Kaddish" ; Dybbuk Suite No...

...For Arias & Barcaroles, a collection of art songs written when he was 70 years old, one of the songs uses a Yiddish text...

...In the Broadway community, where Bernstein achieved the success he valued least, there were too many immigrant and first-generation American Jews to count, including George Gershwin, Mark Blitzstein and Kurt Weill, who composed both for theater and concert hall...

...Sam was filled with dread...

...Even in his Mass, which is a mixture of solemn music with Bernstein-style jazz (which is not jazz) and Bernstein-style rock (which is not rock), the climactic moment of the Sanctus finds the chorus erupting into a Hebrew passage from the Amidah...

...krai Is i Ii Fro Sam Bernstein early on thought his talented son would have beett better off in the beauty-supplies business...

...Despite Sam's Orthodox preferences, be had moved his allegiance from the Orthodox Crawford Sireet Synagogue to Mishkan Tefila when, according to his younger son, he began to think of himself as "a tycoon...

...And because of this willfulness, we now have some of the most moving settings ever written for the Hebrew psalms...

...Even Stephen Sondheim, brought in to write the lyrics for West Side Story when Leonard lost the job, was only 12 years younger than Leonard...

...Aside from Ernest Bloch (see box), Bernstein has composed more Jewish/Hebrew music than any other major composer...

...He wrote mainly songs and collections of short pieces, a failed Broadway score, and several works with Jewish themes: a ballet of The Dybbuk, Halil (literally flute, for an Israeli flutist who died in battle) and Jubilee Games...

...Over the vears...

...During his sabbatical as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1964-1965 he wrote the Chichester Psalms, which, though commissioned by a group of Anglican cathedrals, is built on the Hebrew text of six psalms...

...John Cage, a pioneer in random sounds, electronics and extended silences, was among the most iconoclastic composers in the mid-20th century...

...The third movement of that symphony, the Kaddish Symphony, which contains a long narration on whether God has kept the covenant with Israel, begins with the heresy: "Magnified and sanctified be the great name of Man...

...Thanks to the influence of Wagner, whose tonal centers (keys) move endlessly through the score, and Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal tone-rows prevent tonal centers from existing, tonal music was not respectable anymore...

...Leonard Bernstein's compositions are often unabashedly Jewish and include some of the most imaginative settings of Hebrew texts ever written...

...This is all the more remarkable considering that, when Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918, Jewish conductors and composers had existed only for about 100 years...

...Shortly after the 25-year-old Bernstein stormed the music world with his famous last-minute substitution for ailing maestro Bruno Walter, he told the fawning press that his father had opposed bis musical career (true) and had never paid a cent toward his instruction (not true...

...Songfest Deutsche Grammophon 415 965-2 Jubilee Games Deutsche Grammophon 429 231-2 Bernstein/Stephen Wadsworth AC/uietP/ace Deutsche Grammophon 419 761-2 The Chichester Psalms continue to be recorded by various artists...

...And yet, amidst his settings of the Torah and Prophets, we also find his Mass...

...It is a well-recorded performance and if s fascinating to compare the sounds of the all-male and mixed choruses...

...There has been no shortage of Jews in any aspect of American music— except, perhaps, Nashville...

...I hear you...

...He was a promiscuous lover of nearly everything new, with a somewhat embarrassed attachment for the old and ancient...

...43 Nowadays, his famous lionizing of the Black Panthers seems more silly than objectionable...

...Instead of using haflorah trupp and familiar Jewish melodies (as in the Jeremiah Symphony), Bernstein begins with a five-note motif and, like Wagner, transforms it into countless phrases, themes and melodies...

...This in a time when tonal music—indeed, any fully-scored music for traditional instruments—was usually despised by the critics, even when the music was jazz...

...And, after offering this melody three times, without modulation or development, he allows the Chichester Psalms to culminate in, of all things, the first verse of Psalm 133, the verse best known to Jews of every age and denomination: Hineh ma tov umana'im, shevet continued on page 80 Leonard Bernstein recorded his symphonies twice, once for Columbia Records (now Sony Music) and once for Deutsche Grammophon...

...Young Leonard is purported to have said, "I'll succeed as a Bernstein or not at all...

...Although audiences have always loved this piece, Bernstein, underrating its sophistication, apologized for it...

...There are other litde-heard works of Jewish interest: a setting of the Hashkivenu (literally "cause us to lie down,'" a prayer recited by observant Jews before retiring) for synagogue choir and cantor...

...But when he absented himself from the bustle of his New York Philharmonic duties, when he slowed down enough to devote himself to composing, the result was the most humble, tonal and sentimental piece he ever wrote: Chichester Psalms...

...In effect, he uses atonal music as it is used in the soundtracks of suspense and adventure movies—to create a tension that will eventually be resolved with tonality...

...Indeed, it was one of many examples of an adolescent streak of naughtiness that occasionally overtook him...

...the music becomes radiant and optimistic and the narrator realizes that Man and God must continuously re-create each other, an idea not incompatible with Mordecai Kaplan's "transnatural God...