Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" Symphony (WNET 13, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 21) at 9 I put on KPBS for a broadcast of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony (1963) from the Ravinia Music Festival in 2022. The Ravinia Music Festival is a summer season for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, much like Tanglewood in Boston or Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia, held in a complex of theatres, some outdoor, some indoor, that on screen looked a lot like San Diego’s Old Globe. The orchestra involved was the Chicago Symphony, along with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and a children’s choir formerly known as the Chicago Children’s Choir but now given the preposterously P.C. name “United Voices,” which seems to be a reflection of the multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds of the members. The conductor was Marin Alsop, a woman who was a protégée of Leonard Bernstein – the show illustrated this with a still photo of the two of them together – and who’s taken on an uncanny resemblance to him. Frankly, when she came out to conduct she looked like Leonard Bernstein in butch-dyke drag. She’s done re-recordings of a number of Bernstein’s works, including the still-controversial 1972 Mass (I have her version on Naxos somewhere around here), which calls for even bigger forces than the Kaddish Symphony and is likewise a full-frontal assault on the Judeo-Christian conception of God. The Kaddish was premiered right after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and a lot of people (including me) assumed that the hysterical (in all senses) narration, originally delivered by Felicia Montealegre (Mrs. Leonard Bernstein) and spoken here by Black actress Jaye Ladymore, was Bernstein yelling out his anger at God for having allowed the Kennedy assassination to happen.

Bernstein did several revisions of the Kaddish, including one allowing for a male narrator (apparently a number of powerful and influential Jews had hissy-fits over the very idea of a woman leading the Kaddish, or any other Jewish prayer for that matter), and there’s even a posthumous version from 2005 that substituted the original narration with an account by Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar of his experiences both during the war and afterwards, though that version is authorized by the Bernstein estate only if Pisar delivers it personally (no longer possible since he died in 2015). But Alsop chose to perform the 1963 original, and in a filmed introduction she said that while there had been previous symphonies with a choir (including Beethoven’s Ninth) and with a children’s choir (Mahler’s Third), she claimed that there isn’t a previous symphony with a narrator, Sorry, Marin, but that’s yet another example of “first-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re biographing is the first to do something even though there are previous examples. It didn’t take me long to think of at least one previous example of a major symphonic work with a narrator: the Sacred Service by Ernest Bloch, who (like Bernstein) was Jewish. In fact, Bloch’s purpose in writing the Sacred Service was to create an overwhelming piece of music expressing the Jewish religious tradition the way Bach, Handel and Beethoven had for Christianity. And though it’s not formally a symphony, I suspect Bernstein was also influenced by Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which premiered in May 1962, less than two years before the Kaddish, in its intermingling of traditional religious texts (in Latin in the War Requiem, in Hebrew in the Kaddish) with secular material in English (Wilfred Owen’s World War I poems in Britten’s piece and Bernstein’s own narration in his) and in the use of both adult and children’s choruses as well as vocal soloists.

For the soprano part in the Kaddish Alsop recruited another African-American woman, Janai Brugger, who was excellent in the softer, more lyrical parts of the score. Obviously Bernstein intended the relatively cool soprano part to give us some relief from all the screaming by the narrator! Brugger also had a massive pair of breasts, partly visible through her ultra-low-cut gown, that looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen. The Kaddish Symphony is a mixed work, with its fast movements punctuated with the loud, spiky percussion sounds Bernstein loved (there’s even a section involving three, count ‘em, three xylophones, and a piano way in the back of the orchestra even though its player has nothing much to do except strike an occasional chord) and its slow sections hauntingly lyrical and by far the best parts of the piece. (For an earlier symphony – his second, The Age of Anxiety – Bernstein originally wrote a piano part just in the last movement, but then extended it so the pianist played throughout the piece, thereby turning it into more of a piano concerto than a symphony.) Like the Mahler symphonies that clearly inspired it (and of which Bernstein the conductor was a major advocate; indeed, though there had been Mahler records before him, Bernstein’s recordings, more than anyone else’s, “made” Mahler’s name as a major composer in the 1960’s), Bernstein’s Kaddish is a work that practically defines “uneven,” but there’s enough good in it to make it worth your time. Alsop handled it as well as anyone could now that Bernstein is dead (and has been for 33 years), and it’s an unenviable challenge just to hold the massive performing forces together, much less create a truly expressive performance (which she did). It’s just that I’m not the kind of person who gets terribly excited about being yelled at on the subject of God.