Music: Bernstein Talks About His Work

Several days after the great moment, Leonard Bernstein was sick in bed in his Washington hotel suite. He looked gaunt, and was exhausted from more than a year's work on the Mass in places as far-flung as Montauk, Tel Aviv and Vienna, and by a final bout of rehearsing that over the past few months has permitted him only three hours' sleep a night. Disappointed but not discouraged by the critical reception of his Mass, Bernstein was overwhelmed by the passionate response he felt it had stirred among the audience in general. On this and other topics he spoke to TIME Reporter-Researcher Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov, displaying an extraordinary enthusiasm for his own work.

ON THE THEME AND ITS EFFECT: The celebrant represents what in every person allows him to live, to go from day to day, which is the capacity to believe. That is what is destroyed along with the order of the Mass and the vessels of Communion. Then there is the long silence. Everyone in that silence has to look inside himself, and find in himself that spark of God. Not in any icon or symbol or trappings of religion but inside. Only when he finds that can he begin to relate to another person, then to a group, ultimately to society. And this is the miracle I saw take place: the waves of tenderness, these waves of touching and embracing, began to spread from the stage to the house, until they passed through the whole audience and then even out into the street. I saw people embracing strangers on the street—cops, just ordinary people.

ON HOW HE CONCEIVES THE WORK: It is as though you are attending a Mass, or participating in it or just listening to it, and as it goes along simultaneously there are thoughts, reactions, objections, questions, doubts, emotions engendered by the liturgy itself. The Mass is constantly interrupted by these thoughts: "Wait a minute! Just hold it for a second! I have a question about that, or I do not believe that." All these interruptive thoughts are actually prayers in themselves. No matter how violent they are, no matter how angry they are, they are prayers born of an immense desire to believe, which is in conflict with the in ability to go along blindly with it. It is a prayer. It is wanting to believe.

ON WHETHER THE MASS IS RELIGIOUSLY OFFENSIVE: A lot of the Mass is about failure, about the fact that we have come to this extraordinary point of evolution and yet we are still killing one another officially, which is an enormous failure of the human race. And it is one of the main things we have to confess in the Mass. I have been interested in Catholicism since I was very young, and I learned a lot from my wife, who was brought up a Catholic. I was naturally very eager not to offend the Catholics or the Kennedys, and yet there was pretty violent stuff. You see, I have not written a Mass. I have written a theater piece about a Mass. It cannot be performed in a church as a Mass. Yet it is still a deeply religious work. The Communion we give is the kiss of peace, which was a feature of the early Christian Mass. Catholics who heard it have told me it was one of the deepest experiences they ever had.