A Mass for Everyone, Maybe

By William Bender

RIGHT from the Sunday afternoon back in 1943 when he replaced an ailing Bruno Walter, and became one of the youngest men ever to conduct the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein has been marked with the kind of golden-boy potential that novel and film heroes so often display. By and large over the years, he has fulfilled his promise handsomely. He is without doubt the U.S.'s finest native-born conductor. As a man of music, he has always radiated a special charm and authority in making the worlds of the classics and pop complement each other. As a composer, he is above all versatile; if his Kaddish Symphony (1963) was something less than a masterpiece, his West Side Story (1957) was that and more--a turning point in the history of musical comedy. All these things combined to make Bernstein an exciting choice to write the commemorative work for the memorial opening of Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week.

It was a moment when pop culture, nourished by everything from hard rock to Prufrock, stood on a tiptoe of expectation. Could the eclectic age --borrowing everywhere from the Bible to Porgy and Bess, from Beethoven to the world of Hair, from the symbolic body and blood of Christ to sheerest humanism--shape an enduring musical tribute to human failure and aspiration, to divine inspiration and its loss?

Ironic Counterpoint. Clearly nothing less than that was Leonard Bernstein's high intention. And with Mass--subtitled "a theater piece for singers, players and dancers"--he rose to an auspicious occasion and splendid circumstances: a new national opera house, an audience ready to assume that anything that works at all is a masterpiece. A cast of 23 skilled dancers, 40 musicians onstage, 40 more in the pit, two choruses, assorted soloists, the best in lights, costumes, alarums and excursions that money could buy. The result, in some ways, was both too much and not enough. Mass is a jumble of literal and symbolic meanings, a contrived happening with pretentious overtones, a non-play about a non-Mass. In fact, what Bernstein created, perhaps unwittingly, is an upside down atomic-age Everyman in which the medieval morality play's message (man the hopeless, fleshly sinner, whose soul may yet be redeemed by Christ's Passion) degenerates into a kind of soupy, sentimental Bruederschaft.

The work takes its form from the Catholic Mass, the Kyrie eleison, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. As more or less ironic counterpoint, a populist band of sinners and dancers variously sing, intone or howl doubts and questions in a melange of musical styles and pop-lyric words by Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz, the 23-year-old creator of Godspell, the musical version of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The dramatic climax of the work is the disruption of the Mass. It also involves the spiritual shattering of a young man who begins as a simple guitarist and gradually becomes a priestly celebrant by receiving various sacred vestments--just as the church itself gradually acquired more and more trappings of ritual. Eventually, when he attempts to offer the mob Holy Communion, the symbolic body and blood of Christ, they cry out, "Dona nobis pacem [Give us peace]!" and blame God because man has not abolished war on earth: "Give us peace that we don't keep breaking."

Finally the celebrant, too, is overcome by doubt. He strips off his priestly garb, smashes the holy vessels, and dances madly on the altar like a curate on a bad LSD trip. As he lashes out and people look at him, he shouts angrily, "What are you staring at? Haven't you ever seen an accident?" But his inner state has been defined earlier when he sings: "My spirit falters on decaying altars and my illusions fail." Bernstein's own idea of Communion is achieved at the finale when the entire cast begins to exchange embraces and kisses of peace, and boy sopranos stroll into the auditorium, shake hands with the aisle sitters and whisper, "Pass it on."

Puff and Pretensions. The expressed notion that religious ritual is empty because the world still behaves as if it were pretty much the devil's province, that because man has failed on earth God has failed too is common enough. According to individual taste, one can greet it with a hosannah, a miserere nobis or a sancta simplicitas. Bernstein, after all, is an artist and entertainer, not a theologian. But even his stagecraft, his taste and his music, despite many delights and flourishes, reflect a basic confusion.

As a work of faith or art, though, Mass is catchy rather than compelling, weakest when it should be strongest--that is, at those moments when the proceedings are meant to be at their most serious. It is significant that when, at one point on opening night, the celebrant lifted his arms and intoned, "Let us lift up our hearts and pray," a handful of the spectators rose and bowed their heads. Everyone else remained seated, not sure how serious or how literal a consecration of the Kennedy Center was intended.

Bernstein is not Bernstein for nothing, however. Beneath its puff and serious pretensions, Mass is often a diverting and provocative entertainment. The assortment of musical styles it uses--rock beats, sweet jazz, ballads, brassy marches, hymns and vampy blues, twelve-tone rows, delicate woodwind quintets, faint echoes of Stravinsky, loud echoes of Orff--has great appeal that largely deserved to take the first-night audience by sentimental storm, as it did. Appropriately enough, Mass also proved a splendid celebration of various performing arts. Baritone Alan Titus, 25, who played the self-defrocking priest, capped a fine evening of singing and acting with a 16-minute "mad" scene that any veteran Lucia might envy. The conductor was Maurice Peress, 41, a Bernstein protege, who is music director of the Corpus Christi and Austin symphonies. Peress inspired and controlled his multimelodic forces like a general conducting split-second land, sea and air operations. The Alvin Ailey dancers were sweetly sinful, or sinuously despairing, as occasion demanded. They cavorted through some majestically evil blues during one of the show's most vibrating moments, a fine Bernstein/Schwartz parody of a Gospel sermon on the creation, which rises to a crescendo of syncopated cynicism as it satirizes man's use of religion to justify poverty and exploitation: "God said it's good to be poor . . . So if we steal from you/It's just to help you stay pure."

There is a long musical and theatrical precedent to modifying the Mass for concert purposes, and even interjecting dancers and performers into it. Saint-Saens's and Gounod's Masses often ring more true to the stage than the chancel, and Verdi's Requiem is notably operatic in style. These days, of course, just about anything can and does go, from the Congolese Missa Luba to Joe Master's Jazz Mass to Jesus Christ Superstar and that devout nun who danced by the altar during a service in California a few years back (TIME, May 17, 1968). Bernstein's conception is therefore far less innovative than it seems. Yet he deserves credit for launching a near multimedia creation on an inaugural program before official Washington, which would, no doubt, have gladly accepted a somewhat more piously familiar work.

The same is true of allusions to the Berrigan brothers ("This is the gospel I preach . . . Yea, even unto imprisonment"), the virtues of draft evasion and pacifism ("And everyone who hates his brother is a murderer"). Such signs of radicalism are now more or less conventional, not to say chic. So is Bernstein's inclusion of so many black and white players on a Washington stage and his ecumenical use of Hebrew prayers. (When it first became known that Bernstein would do the Mass, New York wits remarked: "What'll he call it? The Mitzvah Solemnis?")

Still, the new Kennedy building may evolve into the equivalent of a national center for the performing arts and exert influence on programs and standards round the country. The flair Bernstein displayed, his musical reach and richness, should loosen things up for the future and set an ambitious precedent for the serious musical stage.

Ironically, the one institutional question left unanswered by opening night was how the opera house sounded. As proved by the $3,000,000 already spent to improve Philharmonic Hall at New York City's Lincoln Center, acoustics can involve the pocketbook as much as the ear. Mass proved nothing about the opera house, since Bernstein relied heavily on amplification--body mikes for most of the soloists, hand mikes for the rock singer, floor mikes to pick up the dialogue. But as the week rolled on, it became apparent that the Kennedy Center sounded infinitely better than it looked.

With President Nixon in attendance, Conductor Antal Dorati and the National Symphony Orchestra went through a program of Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky and William Schuman that filled the center's concert hall with rich, vibrant and joyously reverberant highs, lows and middles. The opera house's acoustical turn came on Friday, with the premiere of Beatrix Cenci by Argentinian Master Alberto Ginastera. It was produced by the Opera Society of Washington. Brutal and bloody, the work runs a full gamut of orchestral and vocal sound. It proved beyond doubt that the opera house is one of the best-sounding auditoriums in the U.S.

In more ways than acoustics, Beatrix Cenci was a remarkable climax to a successful inaugural week. When it comes to piling horror on horror, Ginastera outclasses anyone now writing for the operatic stage. Beatrix Cenci can best be described as Renaissance Gothic. Based partly on history, partly on the Shelley tragedy, it tells how a young Roman noblewoman (Soprano Arlene Saunders) is seduced by her choleric, morally corrupt father. Count Francesco Cenci (Bass-Baritone Justino Diaz), then revenges herself by arranging his murder. In the end, she is found out, tortured on the rack, beheaded. Not a libretto to every composer's taste, naturally, but just the thing for the savage, harshly dissonant musical style already familiar , from Ginastera's equally grim Don Rodrigo and Bomarzo.

Vacant Eyeballs. The composer's champion in the U.S. is Julius Rudel, who has conducted both Rodrigo and Bomarzo as director of the New York City Opera. Now music director of the Kennedy Center as well, he conducted the Cenci, and was uncommonly adroit in defining the multiple layers of orchestral sound with which Ginastera's score seeks to suggest, say, the schizophrenic, as he explores the passions and fears of one of his characters. But that was nothing compared with the multiple-screen images--slides and film of doomed faces, vacant eyeballs, writhing bodies, running women--that delved into the past, present and future like a Bergman movie gone berserk.

Washington has ceased to be part of the musical provinces. . William Bender

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