Leonard Bernstein's Mass premiered at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on September 8, 1971 - a premiere that was simultaneously a celebration and a provocation. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a tribute to her slain husband, the work was performed during the height of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, and Bernstein infused it with the crisis of faith that characterized much of the American intellectual and religious left in that era.
The work's full title - 'Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers' - signals its hybrid nature. Bernstein took the Latin text of the Roman Catholic Mass as his structural foundation but interspersed it with original English texts by Stephen Schwartz (later composer of Godspell and Wicked) and Paul Simon. The result is a meditation on the Mass itself - on what it means to perform sacred ritual in a world convulsed by war, assassination, and social breakdown.
The Celebrant, the central character, begins the work as an ecstatic street preacher and gradually disintegrates under the weight of questions that the ritual cannot answer. The crisis comes in the dramatic centerpiece: surrounded by a choir demanding comfort that he cannot give, the Celebrant smashes the sacred vessels - the paten and chalice - and screams 'I don't know!' This act of liturgical desecration draws its spiritual genealogy from Job 3:3, where Job 'opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth,' and from Ecclesiastes 1:2's bleakest declaration: 'Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless.'
Biblically, Mass engages most deeply with the Wisdom literature's confrontation with meaninglessness and with the Psalms of lament. Psalm 22's opening cry - 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' - hovers over the Celebrant's breakdown, the same cry that Jesus uttered from the cross (Matthew 27:46) and that the church's liturgy had tried to contain within structures of praise and petition. Bernstein's point seems to be that those structures, beautiful as they are, cannot simply absorb every human cry of desolation without rupture.
The work's resolution - tentative, hard-won, deliberately unsatisfying to those who want easy comfort - comes through the simple Latin word 'Pax' (Peace), spoken quietly and passed from person to person among the performers and into the audience. John 14:27 provides the theological context: 'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.' Bernstein seems to suggest that this peace is real but that it does not arrive through the performance of inherited ritual alone; it must be lived through the rupture and somehow recovered on the other side.
The critical reception was deeply divided. The Vatican condemned the work; some Catholic theologians found it sacrilegious. Others, including several prominent theologians, found it a serious and theologically literate engagement with the crisis of faith in modernity. Its cultural significance is impossible to deny: it captured a specific moment of American spiritual crisis with extraordinary theatrical force, using the structure of the Mass itself as both the vehicle and the subject of its interrogation. It remains one of the most controversial sacred works of the twentieth century, performed rarely but discussed constantly in conversations about the relationship between art, faith, and doubt.
The Kennedy Center premiere itself was a cultural landmark. The building that commemorated an assassinated president was inaugurated with a work that dramatized the breakdown of faith - as if the Kennedy assassination, the violence of the 1960s, and the Vietnam War had together made naive faith in God's providential ordering of history impossible to sustain. Bernstein's Mass is, in this sense, an artistic response to the problem of theodicy - the same problem that Job confronted and that the Psalms of lament address: how to pray when the evidence of God's goodness is not apparent.
Stephen Schwartz, who co-wrote the English texts, was simultaneously working on Godspell (1971), his musical about Jesus's teachings. The two projects represent opposite poles of religious response to the same cultural moment: Godspell finds in the Sermon on the Mount and the parables a Jesus whose simplicity and directness can renew faith even in a secular age, while Mass depicts a liturgical structure collapsing under the weight of questions it cannot answer. Together, they constitute a kind of diptych of 1970s American religious searching.
The work's final gesture - passing the word 'Pax' from person to person - is an enactment of John 20:21, where the risen Christ appears to his disciples and says 'Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.' The peace of the risen Christ is not explanatory but commissional: it does not resolve the questions but sends the recipients back into the world with a task. Bernstein's Mass, for all its crisis and breakdown, ends with this same commissional peace - fragile, qualified, but present.