Review: ‘Mass’ Brings Out the Worst in Leonard Bernstein

NEW YORK — “Is ‘Mass’ Leonard Bernstein’s Best Work, or His Worst?” a recent headline asked. Well, after revisiting this two-hour extravaganza on Tuesday, when it was presented by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, I think that if it’s not his worst, it surely reflects his worst tendencies: his allergy to self-editing, his saccharine streak, his embarrassing wordplay, his obsession with (and tone-deafness toward) youth culture, his weak counterfeits of pop styles.

Bloated, bombastic, cloying, quaint and smug — and occasionally, it must be said, very pretty — “Mass” (1971) now exists mainly as a stale memento of the aftermath of the liberalizations in Catholic ritual inspired by the Second Vatican Council. A strained union of high and low culture written for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, it was Bernstein’s grand effort to match the counterculture-fueled energy of recent hits like “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Godspell” and “Hair.”

Indeed, he enlisted Stephen Schwartz, the creator of “Godspell,” to collaborate with him on a text that crowds the traditional Catholic liturgy with hippie-era nostrums. (“I believe in God,” goes one passage that does resonate in our equally self-absorbed times, “but does God believe in me?”)

Blues and rock (or, more accurately, “blues” and “rock”) singers enter the picture. Looking, in Elkhanah Pulitzer’s game but dull staging, like a touring company of “Rent” in their faux-bohemian street clothes, these folks gradually express their frustration with God, and with old rituals and maxims.

“We’re fed up with your heavenly silence,” they cry — promising, if they can’t have the world they desire, to “set this one on fire.” Their rebellion prompts the Celebrant to collapse in a 15-minute paroxysm of doubt, though, even when depicting a breakdown, Bernstein was unable to resist jarringly cute rhymes. (“Praying” and “Kyrie-ing”? Really?)

For a more interesting reflection on the late 1960s, and a musical idiom that matches that period’s explosiveness with a trippy stylistic mélange, try Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia.” Bernstein’s “Mass,” by contrast, is fully convincing only in its moments of serene prayer. Elsewhere, the rock and blues are wan, the whispers of Middle Eastern twang or Indian raga unnecessary. Sprightly beats are ransacked from Bernstein’s own “West Side Story” and “Trouble in Tahiti,” losing their spring in the process.

The performance at David Geffen Hall, led by Louis Langrée, Mostly Mozart’s music director, felt rushed, cramped and vague. (The work comes off better — tighter and more confident — in recordings conducted by Marin Alsop and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.) Calm and collected, Nmon Ford, as the Celebrant, made a sweet sound; a boy soprano soloist, Tenzin Gund-Morrow, was particularly fine.

If the staging’s vigor seemed too strenuously achieved, that may be Bernstein’s fault more than Pulitzer’s or the performers’. Overall, it is simply hard to discern what “Mass” can mean to us in 2018 — why we should perform it at all — other than as a relic.

Perhaps, sneered to a gala audience at the Kennedy Center in 1971, there was something arrestingly rude in the line “Oh, you people of power, your hour is now; you may plan to rule forever, but you never do, somehow.” Now it comes off as a passing cloud of adolescent dyspepsia, forgotten by the end of the work, when the Celebrant, after glumly mourning “how easily things get broken,” snaps out of his funk and, all the performers by his side, once again praises God.

The moral? Radicals should submit to the system; peace is more important than change. For all its counterculture trappings, then, “Mass” is fundamentally, boringly conservative.

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‘Mass’

Performed at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan.