Symphony No. 1 "Jeremiah"

Leonard Bernstein’s first foray into large-scale orchestral writing, the Jeremiah Symphony is at times reverent, nervous and theatrical, moods that speak to the World War II-era zeitgeist. The Symphony began life in 1939 with a single-movement “Hebrew song” for soprano and orchestra, based on a text from the Book of Lamentations. Bernstein resumed work on the song three years later when he decided that it could provide a fitting close to his symphony-in-progress. The first two movements were completed in a frenzy as the composer sought to enter it in a competition sponsored by the New England Conservatory (and featuring his Tanglewood conducting mentor Serge Koussevitzky as jury chairman). The symphony didn’t win, but it caught the ear of Fritz Reiner, then music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, who invited Bernstein himself to come and conduct the premiere in 1944. With Jeremiah, Bernstein was not slavishly copying received symphonic models, as one might expect from a 24-year-old, but branching out in form and content. The first movement, “Prophecy”, has a dark, weighty fervour as it evokes Jeremiah’s forecast for the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple. In “Profanation”, the second movement, Bernstein employs a restlessly changing metre to evoke the turmoil around the temple’s destruction, while drawing thematic material from Hebraic chant. The anguished last movement features a mezzo-soprano singing the Lamentations passages that reflect on Jerusalem’s fall.