BERNSTEIN: Chichester Psalms / On the Waterfront

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Webster, Peter (2017). Church and patronage in 20th century Britain: Walter Hussey and the arts. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.189–198. ISBN 978-1-13-736909-3. OCLC 1012344270. The second movement opens with Psalm 23, complete: 'The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want...' The first three verses of the psalm are sung by a boy solo, to a simple harp accompaniment, as though David himself were singing - but singing in the blues idiom. Then the upper voices of the choir join in at the verse 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...'. But the rustic simplicity of the scene is suddenly shattered by the male choristers, who rudely interject, allegro feroce, with the first four verses of Psalm 2: 'Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?' This section utilises music originally from the 'Prologue' of West Side Story. After the men have made their point their voices gradually die away, and the tranquillity of the opening scene begins to descend once more. A gentle and lyrical setting of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) opens the second movement, featuring a boy soloist (eventually joined by soprano voices) with harp accompaniment, a musical evocation of King David, the shepherd-psalmist. In his initial correspondence with Bernstein, Dr. Hussey suggested a setting of Psalm 2. But Bernstein then proposed a “suite of Psalms, or selected verses from Psalms,” with the tentative title Psalms of Youth—in view of his conception of the music as “very forthright, songful, rhythmic, and youthful.” He subsequently abandoned that title in favor of the present one. As he commented in a letter to Dr. Hussey, the music turned out to be far more difficult to perform than the word “youth” might suggest—notwithstanding the fact that it requires a professional caliber boy or children’s choir. Bernstein composed Chichester Psalms in 1965 during a conducting sabbatical from the New York Philharmonic. In a poem quoted by The New York Times that year, Bernstein described the process of composing the work, commissioned in 1963 by Walter Hussey, dean of the Chichester Cathedral, for a choral festival:

In 1965, Leonard Bernstein took a sabbatical from his post as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Freed from the time-consuming obligations of conducting and studying scores, he could now turn his attention to composition. His objective during this conducting hiatus was to compose a Broadway musical based on Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, in collaboration with director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Bernstein outlined his concept in a poem he submitted to the New York Times on October 24, 1965:After the June 23rd concert by Orchestra Sinfonica de Roma, the Harvard Glee Club and the Newark Boys Chorus, the Pope blessed the musicians, and thanked Bernstein, saying: “ Ecco un Americano che vien a dare lezione musicale a noi della vecchia Europa. (Behold an American who has come to give music lessons to us of the old Europe.)” Hear Chichester Psalms Today Just as Bernstein’s third symphony has provided much of the musically interested general public with its initiation into Judaic liturgy through its focus on the Aramaic text of the kaddish, his Chichester Psalms remains for much of the choral world its principal if not sole encounter with Hebrew choral music. Indeed, for the hundreds of amateur as well as professional and university choruses throughout the world that have delighted in singing this work, and for non-Jews among audiences from America, Europe, and the British Isles to the Far East, Chichester Psalms has often constituted their exclusive experience with the Hebrew language. Notwithstanding the recently proliferated but far more circumscribed attraction among early music ensembles and aficionados to the early-17th-century Hebrew liturgical settings by the Italian-Jewish composer Salamone Rossi, no choral work in Hebrew apart from Chichester Psalms can be said to have attained the status of “standard repertoire” within the Western canon.

In 1977, Bernstein described Chichester Psalms: “the most accessible, B-flat major-ish tonal piece I’ve ever written.” Three Movements, Six Psalms: Words of Peace and Reconciliation

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Chichester Psalms was commissioned for the 1965 annual choral festival at Chichester Cathedral, Sussex, UK. The world premiere took place on 15 July, 1965, at the Philharmonic Hall, New York, with the composer conducting. He subsequently attended the first performance of the original version for all-male choir on 31 July, 1965, at Chichester. Each of the three movements contains the full text of one Psalm and an extract from another, but the relationship between the two texts, both in their meaning and in their musical treatment, is different each time. The work opens with an exhortation to praise the Lord: the mood is triumphal and authoritative, like a proclamation. This is the trigger for the main part of the movement, an ebulliently dancing (and in places jazzy) scherzo-like setting of Psalm 100, where the array of percussion is much to the fore in “making a joyful noise.” In 1977 (or ’78), I was singing with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, DC. On the program was Chichester Psalms, which we were to perform with the Israel Philharmonic and Maestro Bernstein conducting. I had been chosen to sing the short alto solo in the first movement. Almost immediately following its publication, Chichester Psalms also became one of the most obvious works to which choruses turn whenever they seek to include a substantial piece of contemporary “Jewish”—viz., Judaically related—music on concert programs. The orchestration of Chichester Psalms calls for six brass (three trumpets and three trombones), two harps, a large percussion section, and strings. The original conception or “version”—in which form the work was given its premiere at Chichester Cathedral at the end of July 1965—is for a chorus exclusively of men and boys, with the boys’ voices on the soprano and alto lines. (This follows the German, or continental European choral tradition, rather than the established English Church format that calls typically for boys only on the soprano line with adult countertenors on the alto part.) Two weeks earlier, however, Bernstein conducted the actual world premiere at New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall), with the New York Philharmonic and the Camerata Singers—a mixed choir with women’s voices substituting for boys on the soprano and alto parts. Performances since then have been given in both formats. But Bernstein stipulated in a note to the published score that the long alto solo in the second movement, which is unsuited to the timbre of the female—and certainly an adult female—voice, must always be sung either by a boy (which is generally preferable) or a countertenor.