7 - “Screaming Gets You Nowhere”: Bernstein's Mass and the Politics of Peace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2020
Summary
From the beginning, Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers was a source of controversy and intrigue. Music critics disagreed sharply on its artistic merits, religious leaders debated its theological and spiritual message, and many others—including J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon—questioned its politics. The piece, after all, was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy herself to inaugurate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was written by a composer well-known for his left-leaning politics, and would premiere mere months after the New York Times began publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, which revealed systematic presidential deception about the conduct, rationale, and extent of the Vietnam War. Although Bernstein's FBI file reveals that then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's specific concerns about the piece were, in retrospect, laughable, it is understandable that the “law and order” Nixon administration would wonder whether Bernstein might have embedded in Mass messages critical of the government or the presidential administration.
It was amid the public scolding he received in the political aftermath of the infamous January 1970 “radical chic” party that Bernstein began to make progress on the long-delayed Mass. Fortunately for Bernstein, Tom Wolfe's cataclysmic article appeared during a triumphant period: he was in Vienna for six weeks, conducting a new production of Fidelio that was hailed by critics across the world. Bernstein told a Viennese reporter that he had a theme for the Kennedy Center commission, that he would be writing a new musical in the style of West Side Story, and that he simply needed the time to work on it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DCWorks, Politics, Performances, pp. 153 - 186Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020