#4 - Leonard Bernstein - Symphony #2 "The Age of Anxiety" (1949/1965)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-aU2Se1RHwIn 2002 I was working at a music festival in Door County, Wisconsin, and first heard this piece, and was absolutely fascinated by it; not just it's difficulty and complexity, but by the fact that I hadn't heard this piece by Bernstein before (after being familiar with works like West Side Story and Candide) and how this piece was actually program music. For my 20th century music class in college, we were required to analyse a piece and I picked this piece in a heartbeat, partially because I knew no one else would because of the fact that it's not extremely well known or performed often. I also wanted to know what was the motivation behind it, and why it was called the Age of Anxiety.
It's in fact based on a poem by W.H. Auden. When writing my paper I read the poem and then analysed the score and music. It's in fact not a direct influence, although the overall premise of the poem and the characters are the basis for the piece. The piece takes place during the beginning of WWII, where 4 characters meet at a bar and basically hit it off and become friends through the events happening in the world (drowning their sorrows, easing the pain, and the like), and each explaining their own "meaning of life" while acknowledging the others as valid (not dismissing at all)... the way Bernstein does this is through a set of theme and variations, very different from what most people think theme and variations are (he varies the melody immediately preceding the variation, and then a new variation begins based on thematic material preceding that, and so on.
The second half of the symphony begins at bar close, when the 4 are at their lowest, on their way to the girls' apartment for a nightcap, and they end up partying it up to kind of ease that grief in a mad jazzy frenzy (the most "Bernstein sounding" part of the symphony, with complex rhythms and percussion)... at the end of that, the frenzy is over... the grief is over... but the piece ends with a beautiful piano cadenza and then a triumphant return of the orchestra, Bernstein's point being that "all that is left is faith".
If anyone wants to read my paper, I can send it to you... I'm not posting it here. But I may revisit it and re-read the poem and see if any of what I wrote over 10 years ago has changed in my living experiences.
Topic: Top 50 "Classical" Works - Currently: Scorpion 47-48, Splent Addenda (Read 13735 times)