Leonard Bernstein composed the Chichester Psalms in the spring of 1965, commissioned by Walter Hussey, the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, for the cathedral's Southern Cathedrals Festival. The work was written at a particularly fertile moment in Bernstein's creative life - he had recently abandoned a planned Broadway show and had a partially composed symphony that he reworked into the Psalms. The result is one of the most frequently performed American choral works of the twentieth century, remarkable for the range of styles it fuses and the theological depth it achieves.
Bernstein set selected verses from six Psalms in the original Hebrew - Psalms 108, 100, 23, 2, 131, and 133 - for countertenor (or boy treble) soloist, mixed choir, and an orchestra of brass, strings, harp, and percussion. The choice of Hebrew was deliberate: Bernstein, who was deeply invested in his Jewish identity throughout his life, wanted to honor the original language of the texts rather than rendering them in the Christian liturgical Latin or English that dominated the choral tradition. The Psalms are, as he pointed out, Jewish poetry first.
The work's dramatic center is the extraordinary juxtaposition in the second movement, where Psalm 2 - a martial, aggressive psalm depicting the nations raging against God's anointed king, traditionally interpreted as a royal coronation psalm - is interrupted by the countertenor soloist's serene setting of Psalm 23 ('The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want'). The choir of male voices sings the threatening, driving text of Psalm 2:1-4 ('Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?') against the soloist's gentle, vulnerable pastoral song. Bernstein described this juxtaposition as his central statement about coexistence - the hope and the reality of human conflict placed in painful proximity.
The thematic connection to West Side Story is not accidental. Bernstein had spent a decade meditating on the possibility of coexistence between warring groups, and the Chichester Psalms represents his most direct musical meditation on the biblical vision of peace as a divine gift embedded in a world of human violence. Psalm 133:1 - 'How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!' - provides the text for the third movement's hopeful conclusion, suggesting that the unity envisioned is possible but not yet achieved.
Musically, the Chichester Psalms synthesize a striking range of influences. The opening chorus deploys the syncopated rhythmic patterns of West Side Story in a sacred choral context; the setting of Psalm 23 draws on synagogue melody and the vocal style of the Jewish cantorial tradition; the brass writing has moments of almost ceremonial grandeur that recall the English cathedral tradition for which the work was commissioned. Bernstein's stylistic eclecticism here feels not confused but deliberately integrative - a Jewish American composer writing for an English Anglican cathedral, setting Hebrew scripture, drawing on jazz and synagogue melody simultaneously.
The cultural significance of the Chichester Psalms extends well beyond its immediate context. It has been adopted into the repertoire of Jewish synagogues, Anglican cathedral choirs, university ensembles, and professional orchestras worldwide, each finding in it a different but equally genuine resonance. Psalm 100:1-2's call - 'Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth. Worship the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs' - frames the work's spirit of celebratory affirmation, even as the darker psalm texts ensure that this joy is won against acknowledged conflict rather than achieved through avoidance of it.
Psalm 2's role in the second movement deserves particular attention. It is a royal psalm, almost certainly composed for the coronation of a Davidic king, and the New Testament applies it to Christ's messianic kingship in Acts 13:33 and Hebrews 1:5 ('You are my son; today I have become your father'). The psalm's opening question - 'Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?' - is one of the most searching in the entire Psalter, and Bernstein chose it to represent precisely the threat to the peaceful pastoral world of Psalm 23. The nations conspiring, the peoples plotting vainly, stand in tension with the shepherd who leads beside still waters - and that tension is Bernstein's subject: can the world of Psalm 23 survive in the world of Psalm 2?
Psalm 131's contribution - a psalm of childlike trust, only three verses long - gives the countertenor the most intimate text in the work: 'My heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.' This movement, placed as a meditation after the warfare of Psalm 2 and the pastoral peace of Psalm 23, offers a third posture: the trust that accepts mystery rather than resolving it by force.
The decision to sing the psalms in Hebrew was not merely ethnic loyalty but a compositional choice with theological implications. The psalms in Hebrew carry the full weight of their original liturgical context - the Temple worship of Jerusalem, the synagogue tradition, the ongoing living tradition of Jewish prayer. By singing them in that language in an Anglican cathedral, Bernstein insisted on the Jewish roots of Christian worship in a way that no English or Latin translation could achieve, making the Chichester Psalms a small ecumenical gesture toward the Jewish-Christian dialogue that would intensify throughout the late twentieth century.