From The Morning Call
April 11, 2004
The 45 members of the Moravian College Choir are rioting for peace. They shout "Dona nobis pacem," shattering a soothing section of the Catholic Mass.
Throwing away liturgy, they taunt God and government with rhyme: "We're fed up with your heavenly silence/And we only get action with violence." They sway and stomp, criss cross and ring dance, until the stage in Foy Concert Hall resembles something between a rumble and a be-in.
The frenzy is joined by Paula Ring Zerkle, Moravian's director of choral music. She begins by arranging movements in the middle of the singers. Then she bounds into the auditorium to make sure the stage isn't a mob scene. She ends up standing on risers empty of vocalists.
Zerkle, in short, acts less like a conductor and more like a choreographer. Indeed, with her short hair and long earrings, black sneakers and pink pullover, she could be a younger Twyla Tharp.
Welcome to a rehearsal of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers," which will receive a rare concert rendition for 120-plus performers Saturday night and next Sunday afternoon at Moravian.
Premiered in 1971, it's a radical reaction to crises of faith from a pied piper for peace. Bernstein and co-lyricist Stephen Schwartz, creator of the 1971 gospel-busting musical "Godspell," turn the Mass into a seesawing dialogue between the Celebrant, a fairly simple religious leader, and a disenfranchised street chorus.
Angered by demands for peace, exhausted by his own corruption, the Celebrant breaks holy vessels, tears off ceremonial clothes and sings "Things Get Broken," insisting that anyone can be him with the right accessories. He leaves congregants to celebrate their own communion through a healing hymn and a pledge of peace shared with spectators.
Bernstein, Schwartz and guest lyricist Paul Simon, all Jews, used Catholic rituals and catholic methods to address the divisive late 1960s and early '70s.
"Mass" was shaped by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., wars in Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, threats to the sanctity of organized religion and organized politics.
Extremely controversial before it opened, it was commissioned by a president's widow (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) to inaugurate a shrine to America's first Catholic president (the John K. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.). It was also investigated by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's boys attended the first performance to check a rumor that Latin chants contained anti-war codes.
Zerkle chose "Mass" for lofty reasons. She wanted to give her Moravian masses a meaty theater piece after conducting musically theatrical works, including Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms'' and requiems by Mozart, Faure, Brahms and Durufle. Her singers riff off a classical ensemble and a rock band, a women's chorus and dancers. They sing everything from gospel to jazz, 12-tone klezmer to whirling-dervish "West Side Story."
The Agnus Dei is especially tricky. Zerkle's vocalists, who include non-music majors and non-Moravian students, move in increasingly complex patterns while singing increasingly complex parts. At one point during rehearsal Zerkle stopped a whipping call for peace and said: "Your skin should start to peel off soon."
Zerkle chose the chamber version of "Mass" for earthy reasons. Because Foy Hall has no pit, she can't use Bernstein's pit orchestra. Because Foy's stage is shallow, she can fit only half of Bernstein's 200-plus performers. Because the hall is in constant use by Moravian's music department, building set pieces made no sense.
"Mass" is rarely performed because it's massively demanding. Boosey & Hawkes, Bernstein's music publisher, lists the Moravian production as the first of only four scheduled this year. Interpretations are planned for Indianapolis, Columbus and Paris. By comparison, there are a dozen proposed 2004 productions of Bernstein's one-act opera "Trouble in Tahiti."
Performances of the chamber "Mass" are rarer still. Craig Urquhart, vice president of public relations for the Leonard Bernstein Center, says he believes the smaller version is not as exciting or engaging as the complete "Mass." The larger production, he says, simply has more communal power.
Then again, some conductors reject "Mass" because they think it's as outdated as a flower-power poster. Harsh reviewers of the original 1971 production called it "fashionable kitsch" and "subliterate rubbish."
They accused Bernstein of tossing genres like a crazy salad, of slumming with the creators of the hip period musicals "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar."
One of the most pugnacious putdowns was delivered by Harold Schonberg, then a music critic for The New York Times. Bernstein's "Mass," he wrote, contained "the greatest melange of styles since the ladies' magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce."
To Zerkle, "Mass" is a savory stew. "I don't see it as a mishmash," she says. "It's got horrendously dissonant parts. And it's got some easy-going, popular music without your everyday words. I see it as bringing in a lot of styles and making them unified in a lot of different, stimulating ways.
"Spirituality is a lot like that, too," adds Zerkle. "There are a lot of roads up to the same mountain, but we're all headed up to the same place."
There's also a strong religious explanation for the rarity of "Mass" productions. More than 30 years after its debut, the show is still considered blasphemous. The Gloria, for example, is counterpointed by a less than glorious chant: "Half of the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election/Half of the people are drowned and the other half are moving in the wrong direction." The lines were written by Paul Simon, a well-known poetic slayer of sacred cows.
Last year the pious criticized the choice of "Mass" to christen a center and a concert series at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The school's president, Father David M. O'Connell, offered a rhetorical retort. "If The Catholic University of America can't address crises of faith," he said on opening night, "who can?"
Zerkle is in O'Connell's corner. "If you can't question your beliefs, then your beliefs are a little shaky," says Zerkle, who has conducted Haydn's "Lord Nelson" Mass and a "salon" mass by Rossini. "You question your beliefs so you can move through your own crisis. I think Bernstein was trying to cross religions, trying to bring people together. I think people get offended by that challenge. He was taking chances all the time. That's what made him him.''
Bernstein insisted he wrote "Mass" as a spiritual festival, "a theater piece about a mass." Thanks partly to his non-denominational musical attitude, the work has had a healthy afterlife.
Zerkle is a member of a chorus of musicians who have performed parts of "Mass" outside "Mass." She's opened Moravian's Christmas Vespers with "Almighty Father," an unaccompanied hymn setting. Others have sung the Celebrant's first number, the beguiling "A Simple Song," at weddings and ordinations. "God Said," a gospel sermonette, is particularly popular with drum corps.
"Mass" has shared storied sites, sacred and semi-sacred. In 2000 it was presented at the Vatican, without props and dancers. Nearly 8,000 watched the indoor show on outdoor screens in St. Peter's Square. Last November a fully theatrical "Mass" was staged in Dallas to mark the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. One of the sponsors was the museum in the book building where a sniper's rifle was found.
Politics aside, "Mass" culminated Bernstein's career as a composer and conductor, pedagogue and activist. As he did in "Wonderful Town," "West Side Story" and other musicals, he mixed and matched idioms with flair. He borrowed the running liturgical commentary from Britten's "War Requiem," which interpolates Wilfred Owens' war poems. He borrowed "A Simple Song" from his medieval-to-rock score for a canceled Franco Zeffirelli movie about St. Francis.
Each of Bernstein's three earlier symphonies concerned universal, timeless anxieties. The third, nicknamed "Kaddish," invokes the Hebrew tradition of arguing with God, the same ritual that angers Catholic reviewers of "Mass." "Kaddish" premiered in December 1963 and was dedicated to John K. Kennedy.
Some believe the Celebrant represents Bernstein's dismay at the decline of '60s idealism. At the time he was saddened by the 1968 murder of his good friend, Robert Kennedy, and by the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.
In 1970, the year before "Mass" debuted, Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted a fund-raiser for the defense of imprisoned Black Panthers. Tom Wolfe wrote an infamous essay skewering the "radical chic" gathered in the Bernsteins' Park Avenue apartment.
Others believe the Celebrant represents the power-drunk, out-of-touch administration of President Richard Nixon. Nixon refused to attend the first performance of "Mass" at the Kennedy Center; instead, he let FBI agents serve as his emissaries. They investigated the rumor that subversive texts had been written by Father Daniel Berrigan, a peace activist jailed for allegedly plotting to kidnap presidential adviser Henry Kissinger, who was in the audience that night.
Finally, "Mass" is the musical autobiography of a burrowing spiritualist. It's the work of the son of a man who would have preferred to be a rabbi rather than a distributor of beauty products. A religious activist who united the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics to play Mahler, a Jewish composer banned by Nazis. A peace steward who on Christmas Day 1989 conducted a performance of Beethoven's ninth symphony by the newly destroyed Berlin Wall.
With typical chutzpah, Bernstein made a small but significant change to the choral text, Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy." He replaced "joy" with "freedom."
"Lenny lived four lives in one," said composer Ned Rorem after Bernstein's death in 1990, "so he was not 72 but 288."
During the "Mass" rehearsal Zerkle seemed to be channeling Bernstein's ghost. She encouraged her charges with clicks and claps, whoops and swoops. When the peace chant dragged, she stomped a foot and shouted a history lesson. "You're angry! There's a war on! You are fed up with it!" reminded the graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, a mecca for Vietnam War demonstrations.
At one point Zerkle rolled her eyes and fired imaginary guns at both temples. She was asked if she felt she was running the Grammy awards ceremony or some other multimedia circus. She smiled, sighed and confessed: "It feels like there's too few of me, and too many of them."
geoff.gehman@mcall.com
610-820-6516
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