Music: A Mass for Everyone, Maybe

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Bernstein is not Bernstein for nothing, however. Beneath its puff and serious pretensions, Mass is often a diverting and provocative entertainment. The assortment of musical styles it uses—rock beats, sweet jazz, ballads, brassy marches, hymns and vampy blues, twelve-tone rows, delicate woodwind quintets, faint echoes of Stravinsky, loud echoes of Orff—has great appeal that largely deserved to take the first-night audience by sentimental storm, as it did. Appropriately enough, Mass also proved a splendid celebration of various performing arts. Baritone Alan Titus, 25, who played the self-defrocking priest, capped a fine evening of singing and acting with a 16-minute "mad" scene that any veteran Lucia might envy. The conductor was Maurice Peress, 41, a Bernstein protégé, who is music director of the Corpus Christi and Austin symphonies. Peress inspired and controlled his multimelodic forces like a general conducting split-second land, sea and air operations. The Alvin Ailey dancers were sweetly sinful, or sinuously despairing, as occasion demanded. They cavorted through some majestically evil blues during one of the show's most vibrating moments, a fine Bernstein/Schwartz parody of a Gospel sermon on the creation, which rises to a crescendo of syncopated cynicism as it satirizes man's use of religion to justify poverty and exploitation: "God said it's good to be poor . . . So if we steal from you/It's just to help you stay pure."

There is a long musical and theatrical precedent to modifying the Mass for concert purposes, and even interjecting dancers and performers into it. Saint-Saëns's and Gounod's Masses often ring more true to the stage than the chancel, and Verdi's Requiem is notably operatic in style. These days, of course, just about anything can and does go, from the Congolese Missa Luba to Joe Master's Jazz Mass to Jesus Christ Superstar and that devout nun who danced by the altar during a service in California a few years back (TIME, May 17, 1968). Bernstein's conception is therefore far less innovative than it seems. Yet he deserves credit for launching a near multimedia creation on an inaugural program before official Washington, which would, no doubt, have gladly accepted a somewhat more piously familiar work.

The same is true of allusions to the Berrigan brothers ("This is the gospel I preach . . . Yea, even unto imprisonment"), the virtues of draft evasion and pacifism ("And everyone who hates his brother is a murderer"). Such signs of radicalism are now more or less conventional, not to say chic. So is Bernstein's inclusion of so many black and white players on a Washington stage and his ecumenical use of Hebrew prayers. (When it first became known that Bernstein would do the Mass, New York wits remarked: "What'll he call it? The Mitzvah Solemnis?")

Still, the new Kennedy building may evolve into the equivalent of a national center for the performing arts and exert influence on programs and standards round the country. The flair Bernstein displayed, his musical reach and richness, should loosen things up for the future and set an ambitious precedent for the serious musical stage.