7-30-18<\/p>\n
A birthday card for Leonard Bernstein.<\/em><\/p>\n Recently I compiled notes and gathered thoughts for a memorial service I was asked to conduct for a dear friend, Stephane Irwin, who recently died of cancer. I do almost all my writing, drawing, and sleeping to background music, and on this evening I punched up YouTube on my big screen; found performances of the great funeral masses of Mozart and Faur\u00e9 to help set the mood \u2026 and noticed a clip I had never seen \u2013 Leonard Bernstein conducting Mozart\u2019s Requiem<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Requiem<\/em> was the last thing Mozart ever wrote (and in fact never was completed); which makes the Funeral Mass a little spooky, at least intriguing. This performance is astonishing. It was recorded in 1988, and by happy coincidence I commend and share it on the centenary of Bernstein\u2019s birth.<\/p>\n \u201cLenny the Lion\u201d was a kaleidoscopic character in American music. Composer and conductor, he was also a \u201cpopularizer\u201d of serious music. When I was a child, I watched his series on CBS-TV, Young Peoples\u2019 Concerts<\/em>, in which he explained the history and musical essentials of pieces performed on the broadcasts (imagine that<\/em> on network \u2013 or cable \u2013 TV today!). He composed operas (Candide<\/em>), Broadway musicals (West Side Story<\/em>) and symphonies. He conducted an array of music, and was largely responsible for the rediscovery of Vivaldi and Baroque music. He was a public figure, frequently recalled in a Tom Wolfe essay pandering, in plaid bell-bottoms at his posh New York apartment, to Black Panthers \u2013 \u201cI dig. I totally dig.\u201d<\/p>\n He was \u201cout there,\u201d outrageously talented and irrepressible. Many of his musical contemporaries, fellow Jews, were conflicted about performing in Germany after the war. Isaac Stern made a show of boycotting concerts there. Yehudi Menuhin (family name Mnuchin, by the way) and Daniel Barenboim were among those who were comfortable performing in that land of the great composers, to discerning and welcoming audiences.<\/p>\n Bernstein was in the latter group. He chose a relatively minor church in a small Bavarian town \u2013 short drives from Munich, Dachau, and Berchtesgaden \u2013 to perform Mozart\u2019s sacred works. The church\u2019s design is of the off-putting late-Baroque and Rococo styles of fluff, ornaments, and countless filigrees; but of Mozart\u2019s own time. Other conductors, like Karl Bohm, recorded in the same church. <\/p>\n But my little guided tour here is about more than music\u2019s universality, or Bernstein\u2019s open mind, or Germany\u2019s musical soil.<\/p>\n Note well Bernstein’s conduct as a conductor in this video. He always revered Christian sacred music so much that \u2013 when conducting in churches or cathedrals \u2013 he carefully explained to his musicians and his audiences that church<\/em> music, not mere concert music, was the fare. He would broach no applause, before, during, or after the work. <\/p>\n More than that, you will see, he begins with head bowed and a long silence. Praying? Maybe so; his own wife died shortly before this Requiem mass was performed. He ends the performance again with head bowed and almost uncomfortable silence throughout the church. And between several movements, Bernstein paused for seeming prayer or meditation, at one point dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief. <\/p>\n This is sacred<\/em> music, he said\u2026 and says the same to us through the years. Too much Christian music today is performed as, well, performances \u2013 with applause, curtsies and bowing, encores and whistling. In or out of church. Worshiping God? That priority largely has become obsolete.<\/p>\n So: in the presentation of 200-year-old Requiem masses, or cantatas, oratorios, or Te Deums \u2013 where is the reverence; the original, spiritual intentions? For that matter, in our contemporary churches and their worship services themselves, where is the reverence today? <\/p>\n How many of us attend churches where Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts are encouraged? Where people shuffle in and out, casually chugging from ever-present water bottles? Where \u2013 turning Bernstein\u2019s ethos on its head \u2013 music is a literal concert performance, no opportunities for the congregation to sing lyrics or do anything other than clap and jump? Where services have the form of spontaneity but deny the power thereof; tightly managed? Where creeds and the Lord\u2019s Prayer are never spoken?<\/p>\n Am I being legalistic? No; I don\u2019t think there have to be neckties and below-the-knee dresses and strict reliance on old hymnals to get to heaven, or present meaningful worship. Or to commune with God among fellow believers.<\/p>\n But neither should 21st-century Christians feel like they are weird strangers to miss\u2026 reverence in church. What a concept.<\/p>\n How many of you feel this way; have been smothered by these things; miss the things that I miss? Many of you \u2013 I get mail. My messages on \u201cWhen Worship Music Is Neither\u201d elicit more mail than any other topics here. These are not matters of mere nostalgia. We miss \u2013 and, complicitly, make other people miss \u2013 the respect, the opportunities for contemplation, the privacy of prayer and meditation, the\u2026 reverence of worship services.<\/p>\n Not those of our childhoods, not of Bernstein\u2019s time, nor of Mozart or Bach\u2019s days, but of 2000 years of corporate worship. We can be exuberant, but the core of \u201creverence\u201d is to revere<\/em> God. Just because there are no prohibitions of dirty shirts and sandals\u2026 should not require us to make uniforms of such things. <\/p>\n Clear an hour, try to ignore the stupid YouTube commercials, and commune with the music linked here. And the liturgical settings. See if you agree how profound it is, and how the period-performance and setting the American Jewish conductor respecting a Christian mass in Mozart\u2019s heimat<\/em>, can teach us about reverence. <\/p>\n + + + <\/p>\n