Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms has become one of his most popular and enduring works. It started out as a case of life happening while Bernstein was making other plans.

Conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kept Leonard Bernstein from composing much for more than a decade. He took a sabbatical from the orchestra in 1965 to compose a Broadway musical based on The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder.

He eventually abandoned that project, but before taking the sabbatical, he had received an invitation from Walter Hussey, the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England. Hussey wanted Bernstein to compose a new piece for the Southern Cathedrals Festival, to be hosted by Chichester Cathedral in July 1965. He wrote, “Many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about the music.”

Hussey had specifically requested a setting of Psalm 2. Instead, Bernstein set three other psalms. Verses from Psalm 2 interrupts the second movement, otherwise a setting of Psalm 23. Hussey may have assumed that Bernstein would provide a text in English, but Bernstein set the Hebrew text instead. Once he settled on his basic idea for the piece, it took him only three months to compose the music.

Chichester Psalms and Kaddish

Ironically, then, Bernstein’s only two important compositions of the 1960s were choral pieces that set Hebrew texts. (He had composed the other one, Kaddish,his third symphony, in 1963.)

The symphony includes 12-tone writing, which may have caused anguish for some listeners. It uses a Hebrew text, a prayer traditionally chanted at a graveside or other memorial occasions.

The world premiere of the symphony took place under Bernstein’s direction in Tel Aviv in December 1963 He dedicated the symphony to the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated the previous month. The audience received it with great enthusiasm.

Reviews of the American premiere with the New York Philharmonic exactly one month later met with mixed reviews. Some people liked it very much, others expressed strong hostility. That experience may have been on Bernstein’s mind as he composed Chichester Psalms.In any case, he compared the two works in two separate interviews:

I think the Psalms are like an infantile version of Kaddish, if you know what I mean. They are very simple, very tonal, very direct, almost babyish in some ways and therefore it stands perilously on the brink of being sentimental if wrongly performed.”
[Interview with J. Goldsmith, R.A. Hall, and R. Allen re: symphonies, for Columbia Records Convention, Aug. 3, 1965]

Obviously [the biblical thing interested me]. I mean I keep coming back to it. I’ve written 2 works in the last 10 years, can you imagine since I took the Philharmonic which was at the point when I finished West Side Story. Since then I’ve written 2 works, neither of them for the theater in all that time. And one was Kaddish and one is the Chichester Psalms – they’re both biblical in a way. So obviously something keeps making me go back to that book.
[Intv. w/ John Gruen, Ansedonia Italy, 1967. Tape # 11, side A pg. 1 – 8]

Reception of Chichester Psalms in New York

The first performance

Chichester Psalms received its world premiere not at the Chichester festival, but in New York on July 15, 1965, with Bernstein conducting. It was Bernstein’s first appearance as conductor after his sabbatical. The occasion was ostensibly part of the orchestra’s French-American Festival. Earlier, the first program in the festival had comprised French music. The second program presented only Bernstein’s own music. The soloists represented the French element.

1. Serenade (Zino Francescatti, solo violin)
2. The Age of Anxiety (Philippe Entremont, solo piano)
3. Chichester Psalms (with the Camerata Singers, John Bogart treble soloist

In the program notes, Bernstein wrote, “I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theater music in some way.” In his review of the premiere performance in the New York Times, Raymond Ericson pointed out that Bernstein had turned the two earlier works into ballets.

He wondered if perhaps the Chichester Psalms had been composed with Broadway in mind, and the necessary simplicity of writing popular music. He also speculated that “the unsatisfactory experimental complexities of his previous work, the ‘Kaddish’ Symphony” explained the Psalms’ harmonic simplicity.

The melodies, “among the sweetest that Mr. Bernstein has written in any context,” invited critics to call the piece banal. Ericson countered this possibility by saying that the same charge has been leveled against beloved sacred works by Fauré and Poulenc. Besides, Bernstein composed these sweet melodies with “such skill and conviction that the work ends most movingly.”

Bernstein chose Psalms 100, 23, and 131, with selected verses of other psalms “used to throw these three in relief and unify the composer’s philosophical intention, wherein the ideas of praise, meditation and strife lead to the ending: ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is, for bretheren to dwell together in unity.'” Ericson called the opening movement “lively, almost jazzy.”

The first recording

In the few years since West Side Story, wrote Howard Klein in his review of the first recording of Chichester Psalms, Bernstein had devoted his energy to more “serious” works. He had left Broadway behind.

Klein called the Chichester Psalms “at once a lovely, enchanting work and a noisy, exciting one.” It, along with Kaddish,” showed a spiritual turn in Bernstein’s music as it fused “the secular sounds of the Broadway stuff” with the sacred and semi-sacred texts.

Klein recalled that Kaddish “raised quite a ruckus, shocking some listeners with its textual presumptiveness.” But he also observed that nothing in Chichester Psalms would likely offend anyone. Many listeners would find parts of the piece “jazzy,” but Klein points out that the energy comes from irregular meters like 7/8, and that there is no syncopation in them.

It is difficult to assess how well any new work will succeed. Klein suggested that Chichester Psalms “may nudge their way into the repertory. They are difficult to perform, probably, but good college or university ensembles could tackle them.”

Bernstein’s ballet Facsimile (1946) occupied the other side of the disc. Klein has little to say about it except to suggest that Bernstein’s stage works perhaps “will wear better in the long run.” Facsimile, he wrote, is the more serious of the two works, but also more derivative. Klein found the newer work more rewarding.

The second New York performance

The second performance of Chichester Psalms by the New York Philharmonic gave Ericson a chance to assess the now year-and-a-half-old piece. He said that the piece “met with immediate favor and has since developed a deserved popularity.”

On second live hearing and repeated hearing of the recording, Ericson had even more respect for Bernstein’s mastery. The work’s very simplicity gives it a timeless quality, he wrote. Bernstein presented attractive themes without sentimentality, and sweetness while retaining dignity. The occasional pungency provided just the right contrast.

Once again, the Camerata Singers joined the Philharmonic, this time with treble Carroll Benton Freeman.

Reception of Chichester Psalms in England

Anticipation of a newly-commissioned work

The Times of London published a description of Chichester Psalms in advance of the Chichester premiere.

The composition is not liturgical music, for Mr. Bernstein was asked to write as he felt rather than to supply a piece of conventional church music, and the work consists of three exciting, imaginative movements by a composer who stands quite confidently with one foot in the concert hall and the other in the world of light music; in its vigour and tunefulness, and in its vivid colour, the music is entirely typical of its composer.

Hussey had provided Bernstein with a photograph of the cathedral’s nave and informed him of the forces that would perform the work: the festival’s three choirs, the Philomusica of London, and additional brass.

Bernstein added two harps. For the orchestra, he required “probably the most elaborate battery of percussion ever to be heard in a cathedral, including bongos, blocks, and a rasp. The finished work displays Bernstein’s understanding of both how to compose for a very resonant space and the sonic aspects of the English choral tradition.

Bernstein’s choice to set the text in Hebrew gave the choirs the task of learning to sing familiar texts in a language they didn’t know. A Hebrew scholar at the cathedral had made a tape recording of the correct pronunciation.

Chichester Psalms in Chichester

The cathedrals of Chichester, Winchester, and Salisbury combine forces for the annual Southern Cathedrals Festival and take turns hosting it. Each festival presents the choirs both separately and combined in both concerts and regular worship services. In 1965, the reviewer notes, it was a fairly new festival, but very successful.

Its second concert that year presented three 20th-century works, the other two by Michael Tippett and Alan Rawsthorne. The reviewer seems not much impressed with the Chichester Psalms. He described the first movement as”. . . an enormously spirited piece with swings gaily along in an infectious septuple rhythm, with rapid modulations that may sound just a little too facile.”

The second movement “is curiously Brahmsian in layout and feeling. So occasionally is the third, where sentimentality is by no means eschewed as gentle phrases, warmly harmonized, slide easily from one key to another. Perhaps the balm is a little too thick.”

Chichester Psalms in London

The Times also met the London premiere with a yawn.

The accessible and cozily repetitive music of Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” ensures that an audience will go home with the songs in its head if not in its heart. Last night’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and soloists [sic] under Istvan Kertesz heaped on to these qualities the persuasion of warm expression, particularly from the chorus.

The review goes on to take as many words to criticize the countertenor soloist’s inaccurate rhythm and intonation.

Years later, another critic described the piece in greater detail, but with no greater enthusiasm.

For most of the audience the novelty was probably Leonard Bernstein’sChichester Psalms, commissioned in 1965 by the Dean of Chichester for a kind of rival three choirs festival (Chichester, Winchester, and Salisbury) of the south. It is immediately engaging contemporary-music-without-tears. Like Haydn, Bernstein obviously believes in praising the Lord with a light heart.

In the opening number, catchy rhythm and jingling percussion sound the note of gladness. Then comes a boy alto, whose sweet evocation of green pastures is only briefly interrupted by nations raging together. Finally, the home-coming to a promised land of unity and peace, with quite a few milk-and-honey cliches thrown in for good measure. The Hebrew psalm texts seemed to pose few problems in performance. Under David Willcocks it all went with a will.

“Serious” works written for the concert hall in the 1960s seldom found favor with music lovers. If critics found Chichester Psalms not serious enough to merit their enthusiasm, audiences accepted it immediately. It remains one of Leonard Bernstein’s most successful works not written for the theater.

See also my earlier post on Bernstein as a music educator.

Sources:
Bach Choir: Albert Hall / Joan Chissel. The Times [London]. May 10, 1972
Bernstein on Bernstein / Howard Klein, New York Times. January 30, 1966
Chichester Psalms (1965) / Leonard Bernstein at 100
Leonard Bernstein’s Setting of Psalms for Chichester Cathedral / The Times [London]. July 19, 1965
Music: Bernstein returns. He conducts his own compositions with Philharmonic—”Psalms” in Premiere / Raymond Ericson, New York Times. July 16, 1965
Music: Bernstein returns. Maestro selects 3 diverse works that reflect religious spirit of season / Raymond Ericson, New York Times. December 29, 1966
Symphonies and Psalms / J. G., The Times [London]. July 3, 1967
Symphony No. 3: Kaddish (1963) / Jack Gottlieb, Leonard Bernstein at 100

Photo credits:
Cathedral exterior. Photo by Evgeniy Podkopaev. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Bernstein portrait. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Cathedral choir. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons rel=”nofollow” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chichester_Cathedral_Choir,_West_Sussex,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg
Cathedral nave. Some rights reserved by Rob Farrow via Geograph