Boy with Cheek

"Listen, Almighty, with all your might," cries the speaker, shouting her furious prayer over the orchestra's anguished scream. "You show me nothing at all," she tells God, and the orchestra blares Amen. But that seems a bit stiff.

"Have I hurt you, Father?" she inquires, then offers him the comfort of a nice lullaby. As the song ends, cosmic loneliness returns, and the existential monologue continues with the orchestra fast on its heels. At last a kind of accommodation is achieved. "We are in this thing together," the speaker tells God. "You and I."

Taking such a sharp and familiar tone with God would be called chutzpah in Yiddish, but what Leonard Bernstein intended for his Third Symphony was a musical statement of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Bernstein's Kaddish was commissioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 75th anniversary eight years ago, but it was not until three years ago that Lenny was gripped with "this horrible sense of imminent destruction," and finally buckled down to work. Last week Boston finally played its Kaddish.

Curious Whimper. The 50-minute work, performed without interruption, is more an oratorio than a symphony, with speaker (Bernstein's wife, Actress Felicia Montealegre), soprano (Jennie Tourel), the New England Conservatory Chorus, the Columbus Boychoir and a drastically altered orchestra: 17 string players were crowded off the platform to make way for a percussion section that had to man five timpani, three side drums, a bass drum, four kinds of cymbals, a tam-tam, three bongos, three temple blocks, a wood block, sandpaper blocks, rasp, whip, ratchet, triangle, maracas, claves, tambourine, chimes, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, celesta, piano and harp. Charles Munch, God bless him, conducted.

With such an ensemble, the Boston was committed to Kaddish up to its ears. Bernstein had come to town to cajole and kibitz while poor Munch tried to lead rehearsals. "Beaucoup mieux, Charles," Lenny called down from the balcony, then finally took the baton himself for one of the last run-throughs. "Wonderful! Marvelous! Beyond my greatest expectation!" Lenny cried when all was ready. And indeed, when the music dissolved into the curious whimper that closes the work, Boston's well-dowagered matinee audience gave Bernstein and all the performers a nonstop 15-minute ovation.

Sheepish Thunder. Boston liked Kaddish better than Tel Aviv did when Bernstein took it there for its December premiere. Few Israelis could accept what they called "this American Kaddish"; when the cantor chants the Kaddish in the synagogue, it is with a cry, not with the hand-clapping Lenny prescribed for the choruses. Said one Israeli critic: "It's philosophy, it's drama, it may even be music, but it certainly is not Kaddish."

Bernstein conceives of the prayer as less a lament for the dead than an affirmation of life in the face of death, a celebration of God at the very moment when his mystery is the most difficult to bear. This dualistic concept gives his music a savage, struggling complexity, in which great orchestral thunder dies under the thumb of fragmentary jazz melodies, then resolves itself in intricate contrapuntal passages for both chorus and orchestra. But Bernstein does not settle on any idiom long enough to perfect it. Because his concentration span is short to the point of dilettantism, he achieves with all his battalions of singers and musicians only the affectation of beauty.

Worse, his metaphysics overwhelms his music--the orchestra does little more than italicize the words of the speaker, and the emotional flow of the music follows the text almost sheepishly. The despair he portrays is only the despair of the prideful; drama is merely melodrama. Bernstein is a man of both cheek and genius; and in this case, the composer in him has been no more than the advocate of the showman, the charmer, the chap in the chukka boots shouting down from the balcony.

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