Limited-edition lithograph marking 10th anniversary of 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) 

Leonard Bernstein was deeply impacted by the assassination of President Kennedy. In a speech at the United Jewish Appeal Benefit on November 25, 1963, Bernstein said, "I know of no musician in this country who did not love John F. Kennedy. American artists have for three years looked to the White House with unaccustomed confidence and warmth. We loved him for the honor in which he held art, in which he held every creative impulse of the human mind, whether it was expressed in words, or notes, or paints, or mathematical symbols.... Our music will never be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind." -- Stephen Fagin, Curator 

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in 2003, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra performed Leonard Bernstein's "MASS" at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. The two sell-out performances on November 22 and 23, 2003, were complemented by a special exhibit, "Our Nation's Stage," created by The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza to explore the development of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the making of "MASS," commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the 1971 opening. Reporting from Dallas on the 40th anniversary, Washington Post reporter Lee Hockstader wrote, "This production of 'Mass' is taken as a further sign that the city has come to terms with the assassination, as is the carefully designed Sixth Floor Museum, which opened in 1989." -- Stephen Fagin, Curator

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)