Mass

A kaleidoscopic synthesis of pop, Broadway, blues, gospel, avant-garde and quasi-medieval styles, Mass is Leonard Bernstein’s two-hour exploration of faith and doubt, filtered through the political upheavals and social concerns of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Bernstein was struggling to resume his composing career after leaving the New York Philharmonic in 1969 when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis commissioned a work for the opening of Washington’s Kennedy Center in 1971. Bernstein saw the Roman Catholic liturgy as a chance to honour America’s first Roman Catholic president while examining his own spiritual doubts. Billed as a “theatre piece for singers, players and dancers,” Mass was born of the same zeitgeist that spawned Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, and followed in their brash explorations of the religious, political and cultural fissures of the era. At the heart of Mass is the traditional sequence of the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei, all flavoured with secular irreverence—a marching band here, kazoos and bongos there. Bernstein and his lyricist, the hip young Stephen Schwartz (Godspell), also insert questioning “tropes”—bluesy rock numbers delivered by “street” performers—and short, modernist “meditations”. At the work’s centre is the Celebrant, a jeans-clad, guitar-wielding figure who is introduced with the soaring “A Simple Song”, and who later experiences a hallucinatory-spiritual breakdown. Though Mass is often labelled as a countercultural period piece, it stands as a soul-searching journey that has yielded a number of successful revivals in the 21st century.