Our father, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, favored to inform us concerning the time Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis known as to ask him to be the primary government director of the Kennedy Middle in Washington, which was being constructed as a memorial to her slain husband. He was so honored that he blurted out a sure — then hung up aghast. He didn’t really feel remotely suited to be government director of something.
Our mom, Felicia, known as Mrs. Onassis again to say that her husband was deeply humbled, however prompt it is perhaps extra applicable for him to, maybe, compose a bit to inaugurate the middle. That was how “Mass” got here to be written. We had been within the viewers for the primary efficiency on Sept. 8, 1971, when the work’s multifarious sounds and massive, numerous solid crammed the Kennedy Middle Opera Home with melody, spectacle and pleasure. Our father’s music has had a particular place on the Kennedy Middle ever since.
Since President Trump has asserted management over the middle, making himself chairman and purging its board and administration in favor of his loyalists, quite a few artists (although actually not all) have severed ties with the establishment in protest. Many pals and associates have urged us, the rights holders of our father’s music, to withdraw his works from a gala program on Saturday.
We requested ourselves: What would our dad do? In our hearts, we already knew the reply. He would let his music be heard.
The Kennedy Middle was created to collect and uplift all Individuals, and all of America’s guests. Our father felt precisely the identical manner about making music; he strove to embrace and unite humanity via the works he wrote and carried out.
On many events, he felt pressured to switch or curtail his personal creative exercise. Typically the strain got here from the U.S. authorities: Throughout the Purple-baiting hysteria of the Fifties, he confronted difficulties in renewing his passport, and nearly didn’t make it to Milan to conduct Maria Callas at La Scala.
Usually, he felt strain from those that wished to punish onetime oppressors. Many individuals, for instance, urged him to not carry out with orchestras in postwar Germany and Austria. In perhaps the hardest scenario of all for our father, he anguished over whether or not to carry out in Israel, whose land and folks he liked, however whose bellicose authorities at occasions gave him profound misgivings.
In each circumstance, after a lot soul-searching, our father selected to play music. He believed in music’s energy — its emotionality past phrases, its harmonic structure, elementary as DNA — to lift listeners to the next stage of discourse the place magnificence would outshine violence and hate. “We will by no means overestimate the great that comes from creative communication,” he mentioned in a speech in 1963. “After we contact each other via music, we’re touching the guts, the thoughts and the spirit, all of sudden.”
Rising up, we noticed how our father struggled to make sense of mankind’s cruelties and struggling. We may hear these struggles in his personal compositions: the narrator shaking his fist at God in his Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish,” or the boy alto’s harmless voice drowned out by the warlike snarls of the boys’s refrain in “Chichester Psalms.”
Bernstein described “Mass” because the expression of a disaster of religion in our personal society. He anguished over the disconnect between the individuals who longed for justice and authenticity, and the fraudulence of the authority figures they turned to for succor. The message of “Mass” has misplaced none of its urgency. The ultimate, hushed phrases, sung by your complete ensemble, are: “And fill with grace / All who dwell on this place. Amen.”
The Saturday efficiency on the Kennedy Middle is a fund-raiser for the Washington Nationwide Opera beneath the theme “American Rhapsody.” Two Bernstein songs are on this system. The primary is the “Tonight” quintet from “West Aspect Story,” which conveys the coiled anger of the Sharks and the Jets, mixed with Tony and Maria’s hovering melody of eager for their love to lift them safely past violence.
The second is “Make Our Backyard Develop,” the finale from the operetta/musical “Candide.” The characters, after present process a cascade of troubles, on the finish categorical humbler aspirations: baking bread, tending the earth — and caring for each other. The work’s upward-reaching melodic phrases counsel that humankind has the flexibility to higher itself, to blossom forth in literal and figurative concord.
Nowadays, battered and stung as so many people really feel by President Trump’s relentless assaults on civil rights and the Structure itself, we are able to discover consolation in our father’s music. His notes invoke the braveness to be ourselves, to specific ourselves — and to be what Individuals have at all times aspired to be: free.
So we now have elected to maintain Leonard Bernstein’s music ringing out on the Kennedy Middle within the coming seasons. Residents have some ways to specific their alarm proper now. We perceive if artists really feel one of the simplest ways for them is to refuse to look on the Kennedy Middle.
However we consider that we are able to make our personal sturdy assertion, in honor of our father, by letting individuals hear his music in that house, as an audible rebuke to Mr. Trump’s ugly insurance policies. We plan to donate no matter proceeds we obtain from upcoming Kennedy Middle performances to the American Civil Liberties Union.
As our father as soon as mentioned: “It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and thinkers, who will in the end save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the massive goals.”
Nina Bernstein Simmons, Alexander Bernstein and Jamie Bernstein are officers of the Leonard Bernstein Workplace.
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