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chapter 10 Symbols of Faith in the Music of Leonard Bernstein Mi alone is only me. But mi with sol, Me with soul. . . . Means a song is beginning to grow, Take wing, and rise up singing From me and my soul Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! From bernstein’s Mass C areer decisions in music may have been blessed by some fathers—and apparently that was the case with cantor-fathers—but relationships between other pere-fils pairs were considerably more strained when such determinations came to the fore. As previously noted, this was not unique to Jewish fathers. Throughout musical history there has been paternal encouragement (viz., the Mozarts) as well as discouragement (viz., the Glucks). George Chadwick (1854-1931), a composer who grew up in Leonard Bernstein’s hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, actually was disowned by his father for his musical aspirations . One suspects that such an aversion to a life in music was “manly” opposition to what was then perceived to be “unmanly” ambition in American society. In the case of Russian-Jewish fathers from a shtetl background, having had little contact with city life, they viewed musicians with disdain. Inside their tightly knit communities, klezmer musicians played lowly roles in a highly structured socioeconomic system. Since such performers functioned as if they were vagabonds, a shtetl father understandably was not thrilled if his son decided to become a musician . He saw no security in such aspirations, and would have preferred his offspring to concentrate on “scholarly” studies. On American shores that attitude continued. Tunesmiths like Arthur Schwartz, Harold Arlen, Sammy Cahn, Mack David, and his brother Hal had a formidable time convincing their fathers they did not wish to be lawyers or doctors. Irving Berlin and Eddie Cantor, before they could get married to their respective brides, had to endure the wrath of their future fathers-in-law; and when Al Jolson blackened his face, his relatives thought he had done the same to his reputation. Martin Charnin’s father, in fact, was a singer who sang at the Metropolitan Opera; but he found Broadway musicals so distasteful that he would have nothing more to do with Ezio Pinza when Pinza, late in his career, starred in South Pacific. When Charnin’s son landed a role in the original production of West Side Story (as Big Deal, one of the Jets) he told his father he was “going downtown to look for a job in . . . advertising.” Finally the show was leaving New York for out-of-town previews , and Charnin had to tell his father the truth. Apparently it was acceptable when papa was informed that all the authors were Jewish.1 Leonard Bernstein, one of those four, put it this way: When I was a boy, and announced I wanted to be a musician, my father screamed in horror because to him “musician” was a word like “beggar,” a person who came around to weddings scraping on his fiddle and begging a few kopeks. My father didn’t know that there was a highly intellectual world of music. 178 Neither, for that matter, did the klezmorim know about it; and given the lowly status of Jewish musicians in East Europe, such reaction was not untypical.2 After Bernstein had become successful, Sam Bernstein was asked how he could have ever opposed his son’s career. His immortal reply: “How did I know he was going to be Leonard Bernstein?”3 Bernstein’s earliest memory of music, dating from about 1926, was in his father’s temple, Mishkan Tefila (Dwelling of Prayer) in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a sanctuary where, to quote him from a 1989 interview: “I felt something stir within me, as though I were subconsciously aware of music as my raison d’etre.” Elsewhere he says: “We had a fabulous Cantor . . . then the organ would start and the choir would begin . . . and I began to get crazed . . .”.4 One would be hard-pressed to find another composer in history who is as widely known for having written so many large compositions on Jewish themes as Bernstein, due in no small measure to the energizing conflict between him and his father.5 This need for Jewish expression carried over into some of his nonspecific Jewish works. As I have shown elsewhere, his Symphony No. 2: The Age of Anxiety and his theater piece Mass have significant Jewish content.6 Although his symphonic works were sparked by the interaction between his American conditioning and his Jewish heritage, motives of...

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