Vocal score for Leonard Bernstein's "MASS"
Exhibit Label: Leonard Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. The family soon moved to Boston, and Bernstein grew up playing the piano and working in theatres. At 25 he was named the conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
Bernstein’s body of work was abundant and wide-ranging, including music for the stage – On the Town, Peter Pan, On the Waterfront, Candide and West Side Story – as well as choral and orchestral pieces such as Symphony No. 1, Chichester Psalms and MASS.
In 1963, shortly before the premiere of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 “Kaddish” in Tel Aviv, Israel, President Kennedy was assassinated. Bernstein dedicated the piece to Kennedy’s memory, honoring a president who shared his progressive ideals.
Bernstein died in 1990. His fusion of high culture and pop culture continues to influence American composers and musicians today. (Special exhibit, "Art Reframes History," on view on the Museum's seventh floor from September 9, 2020 through May 9, 2021)
Exhibit Label: Born in New York in 1948, Stephen Schwartz started as a record producer at RCA, but rapidly transitioned to Broadway theatre. In 1971 he wrote music and new lyrics for Godspell, as well as collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on the lyrics for MASS. At one point in the early 1970s three of his musicals were on Broadway simultaneously: Godspell, The Magic Show and Pippin. Later achievements include Grammys for his work on Pocahontas and Wicked, and Academy Awards for his work on Pocahontas and the Prince
of Egypt.
When Wicked reached its 1,900th performance, Schwartz became the only songwriter in history to have three separate shows performed more than 1,900 times on Broadway. (Special exhibit, "Art Reframes History," on view on the Museum's seventh floor from September 9, 2020 through May 9, 2021)
Exhibit Label: Envisioned as a dramatic, musical pageant, MASS was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Bernstein was influenced by Kennedy as a leader who shared his progressive views and saw Kennedy’s death as an event that led to the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In MASS, he uses the traditional sacred liturgy of a Catholic mass combined with the Jewish tradition of debate with God to illuminate what Bernstein perceived as chaos and deterioration in American society.
According to Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, “MASS is very polarizing, and people either love it or hate it… There are lyrics that sound as if it’s his own inner voice, where he says: ‘What I say I don’t feel, what I feel I don’t show, what I show isn’t real, what is real I don’t know.’ You could write a whole biography of Leonard Bernstein by tracking MASS itself.” (Special exhibit, "Art Reframes History," on view on the Museum's seventh floor from September 9, 2020 through May 9, 2021)