The best musical setting of the Mass ever written is, in my opinion, Anton Bruckner’s Mass in F minor. A close second is Michael Haydn’s St. Francis Mass (I still maintain Haydn was an atheist). If I ever write a Mass, those are the examples I will emulate.
Though given that this year Easter has fallen on March 32, maybe you might be interested in a light-hearted and perhaps irreverent setting. I might have just the thing: the Mass by Leonard Bernstein.
To celebrate the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the widow Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis asked Leonard Bernstein for a grand piece of music for the occasion.
By the way, it has been remarked that the cost of the Vietnam War would have been more than enough to build a Kennedy Center in each major American city.
So Bernstein took the Catholic Mass as a scaffolding for a sort of Broadway musical about faith and doubt. The plot of the musical is, in a nutshell, that a priest is trying to say mass but some young people disrupt him with their heretical questions.
I became aware of Bernstein’s Mass thanks to the Naxos Music Library. As you might remember, Bernstein was an artist on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Now his Mass has a new Deutsche Grammophon recording conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who replaces James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera after old sexual abuse allegations made new headlines.
Like Bernstein, Levine was also a recording artist at Deutsche Grammophon, but Bernstein was always able to find age-appropriate sexual partners. And it certainly helped that he married a woman who was aware of his orientation, so there wasn’t much there to disturb the blissfully clueless.
Anyway, Nézet-Séguin’s new recording of the Bernstein Mass is with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Temple University Diamond Marching Band and Concert Choir, and too many soloists and groups to list on the front cover.
A couple of weeks ago, that recording was a featured addition on the front page of the Naxos Music Library website. Any time I see a new recording of a Mass I haven’t heard before, I try to at least give the Gloria and Credo a listen.
Right from the beginning, it is clear that this Mass is unorthodox, please forgive the pun. There’s the Kyrie, but right after that there is “A Simple Song,” which I’m not quite sure how justified it is by liturgical considerations (I think you can listen to that track for free from the Deutsche Grammophon website, but you might have to install something or other).
The Gloria, however, could almost pass for the work of a believer, though there is plenty in it to scandalize the Cecilians. Like the bongo in C. You’re not going to see that instrument in church music by Haydn or Bruckner.
The Cecilians did have plenty of objections to Bruckner, and his E minor Mass (the one without strings) was the closest he came to meeting them halfway. Bernstein, for his Mass, on the other hand, throws in a blues combo, electric guitars, the aforementioned bongo, etc.
The solo singers get more raucous and disruptive in the Credo, but there is also a problem with the celebrant’s chorus: they sing the Latin words in only quarter notes, turning them into a practically meaningless, robotic noise.
A pattern is set up of soloist taking the Latin words as starting points for rants:
Et homo factus est. And was made man. And You become a man, to pay the Earth a small social call. I tell You, sir, you never were a man at all. Why? You had the choice when to live, when to die, and then become God again. And then a plaster god like you, has the gall to tell me what to do, to become a man. … I’ll never say Credo. How can anybody say Credo? I want to say Credo...
If “Simple Song” wasn’t the breakout hit number, “World Without End” would be. That’s a take-off on the words “non erit finis”:
World without end spins endlessly on. ... Lord, don't you know it's the end of the world? Lord, don't you care if it all ends today? Sometimes I'd swear that You planned it this way... Dark are the cities, dead is the ocean, silent and sickly are the remnants of motion. World without end turns mindlessly round, never a sentry, never a sound. No one to prophesy disaster, no one to help it fall faster.
But my absolute favorite is this for one of the rock singers:
I believe in God, but does God believe in me? I'll believe in any god, if any god there be. That's a pact, shake on that, no taking back. I believe in God, but then I believe in three, I'll believe in twenty gods, if they'll believe in me. ... I believe my singing. Do you believe it too? I believe each note I sing, but is it getting through? I believe in F-sharp, I believe in G. But does it mean a thing to You, or should I change my key? How do you like A-flat? Do you believe in C?
For the change of key to A-flat major, every singer I’ve heard uses the sort of vocal fry that American Idol judges seem to like.
The rock singer doesn’t have to be a woman, like in Bernstein’s own original recording, or Pearl Sun in Nézet-Séguin’s recording. The rock singer can be a man, like in Marin Alsop’s recording, or a BBC Proms recording that is on YouTube.
In my opinion, the rock singer should be a woman, and only Pearl Sun delivers the right balance of sarcasm and innocence to this crucial song (another pun to forgive).
Years later, Bernstein wrote a Missa Brevis, in many ways far more conventional than the Mass, but still with enough characteristics to scandalize the Cecilians. Quite tellingly, the Missa Brevis has no Credo.
But if you listen from beginning to end, Bernstein’s Mass is ultimately faith-affirming. According to leonardbernstein.com:
Bernstein and [libretto co-author Stephen] Schwartz envisioned MASS not as a concert piece, but as a fully staged, dramatic pageant. They mixed sacred and secular texts, using the traditional Latin liturgical sequence as the fundamental structure and inserting tropes in contemporary English that question and challenge the prescribed service, as well as meditations that demand time for reflection. They took the Tridentine Mass, a highly-ritualized Catholic rite meant to be recited verbatim, and applied to it a very Jewish practice of debating and arguing with God. The result was a piece that powerfully communicated the confusion and cultural malaise of the early 1970s, questioning authority and advocating for peace.
In MASS, the ceremony is performed by a Celebrant accompanied by a formal choir, a boys' choir, acolytes, and musicians. His congregation of disaffected youth (the "Street Chorus") sings the tropes that challenge the formal ecclesiastic dogma of the Church. As the tension grows and the Celebrant becomes more and more vested, the cynical congregants turn to him as the healer of all their ills, violently demanding peace. In a climactic moment, overwhelmed by the burden of his authority, the Celebrant hurls the sacraments to the floor and has a complete spiritual breakdown. The catharsis creates an opening for a return to the simple, pure faith with which he had begun the ritual (expressed in the sublime "A Simple Song"). Though MASS challenges divine authority, exposing its contradictions and questioning religion's relevance to contemporary life, it ultimately serves as a reaffirmation of faith and hope for universal peace.
That description reminds me a little bit of Bruckner’s Te Deum. “Non confundar in aeternum” is fairly straightforward, but then the fugal confusion leads to an anguished diminished C-sharp seventh chord with B-flats spaced high up.
Oh no, God will actually let us be confounded to some kind of octatonic hell. Just in the nick of time, that chorus find their way back to C major, secure in the knowledge that God will indeed not let us be confounded in eternity.
Not that there was any shortage of Bruckner Te Deum recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, it is still interesting to note that Bernstein never recorded Bruckner’s Te Deum. Or any of his Masses.
As for Bernstein’s Mass, maybe it’s because I listened to Nézet-Séguin’s recording first, that’s my favorite recording. That despite the negative reviews of the performance (like one review that I can't find now) and the recording (David Hurwitz for Classics Today dismisses the audio engineering as “atrocious,” and praises Alsop’s recording as the best tribute to Bernstein).
That reminds me, tonight on NBC, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesus Christ Superstar, live. That’s no April Fool’s.
P.S. Does Latin really have no “but”? Google Translate gives me “Credo in Deum, et Deus non creditis mihi?” Or maybe it’s “et non.” No wonder people say “but” is negative. Well, Italian gives me the feel I wanted for the title of this post.