Leonard Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers was given a mixed reception upon its premiere as the inaugural production at the opera house of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on September 8, 1971. A double-LP box set recording followed in the fall, and there were performances in several cities the next year, but the work, which mixed popular music genres with classical ones, never attracted a wide following. Thirty-three years after the premiere, conductor
Kent Nagano gave it only its second recording, using the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and four years after that, conductor
Kristjan Järvi has given it its third, using the
Tonkünstler-Orchester, the State Orchestra of Lower Austria. (Actually, less time passed between the two, since the
Nagano recording was made in November 2003 and the
Järvi in February 2006, though it was held for release for three years.) While these versions are clearly inferior to the one
Bernstein himself conducted in 1971, they serve to alert 21st century listeners that the composition is not just a time capsule of its era. That's the way some saw it in the early '70s, when it seemed of a piece with several other musical theater works that attempted to use the Christian religion to comment on the social turmoil of the period, notably Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, the latter written by
Stephen Schwartz, who also co-wrote the lyrics to Mass. In each work, the tradition-encrusted tale of Christ's life was contemporized in song with an emphasis on skepticism and even cynicism, sung in vernacular language and expressed musically in styles of rock and pop.
Bernstein's version, based on the liturgy of the Roman Catholic mass, was the most musically ambitious and eloquent, tracing the ways in which Christian belief could be perverted and questioned. Creating a government-commissioned work, he may have been trying to "catch the conscience of the king," in his case, President Richard Nixon, who failed to attend the premiere. But his and
Schwartz's attack on those who use Christianity for their own ends, as expressed in "God Said," with its specious justifications for anti-environmentalism and warmongering, must sound only too familiar to listeners familiar with the policies of President George W. Bush, who left office a month before the
Järvi album was released. Sometimes, it seems the best way to be timeless is to be timely. As such,
Järvi, like
Nagano, had the potential to create a version of the Mass that spoke to his own generation as
Bernstein attempted to speak to his. In both casts, that opportunity is squandered, however, and oddly enough in the same ways. While the 1971 recording was full of impassioned performances reflecting the ripped-from-the-headlines quality of the writing,
Järvi, just as
Nagano did, treats the work largely as a museum piece, rendering it as though it was some dusty opera, without much conviction. An added difficulty (again, amazingly, in both versions) is the use of native German-speaking singers in several parts, their accented English making comprehension a challenge and interpretation impossible. Musically,
Järvi, like
Nagano, hews far closer to the classical elements in the score, giving only cursory treatment to the pop music parts, which unbalances the work. If new recordings of
Bernstein's Mass can reawaken debate about a composition that deserves to be remembered, what it really should do is send the curious back to the initial version. Perhaps a theatrical production handled by people less tied to the classical realm could bring the work back in a more meaningful way. ~ William Ruhlmann