Music: A Mass for Everyone, Maybe

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 Brüderschaft.