Leonard Bernstein’s position at the very summit of America’s creative and recreative musical life—while he was alive and posthumously—has been confirmed over and over again in the decades since the completion of his first major composition, the “Jeremiah” Symphony, in 1942 and his historic conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic in November 1943.

Not only as a composer, conductor, and pianist but as a consummate teacher and advocate, Bernstein was able to illuminate the many worlds of music for vast numbers of people. In shedding light on contemporary musical thought, he revealed his own striking identity through a creativity ranging from large and small works for the concert hall and opera house to smashingly successful musical theater pieces. The threads running through these works are many and varied, but the stronger of them have to do with jazz elements as seen in rhythms that are syncopated and metrically asymmetrical, with melodic structures built on short motifs and distinctive intervals, and, as made apparent in the “Jeremiah” Symphony, a predilection for Hebraic liturgy and a deep sensitivity to texts. In regard to the latter, Bernstein wrote in the foreword to his Symphony No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety”: “I have a deep suspicion that every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theatre music in some way.”

The theatricality of the First Symphony is wrought of intense emotionalism and strong convictions about the Old Testament texts he chose for the final, “Lamentation” movement. According to information provided by the composer upon the work’s premiere by the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 1944, he conceived the “Lamentation” first. Bernstein explained that he had sketched a Lamentation for soprano and orchestra in 1939 and that not until 1942, after he had begun a symphonic first movement and planned a scherzo to follow it, did he realize the connection between the earlier and the newer music. When he completed the symphony, the “Lamentation” movement had been greatly changed and the soprano supplanted by a mezzo-soprano. (Jennie Tourel was the first interpreter of the vocal part.) Following the premiere, the symphony quickly received repeated performances in Boston and New York, where it won a 1944 New York Music Critics Circle Award.

The composer’s commentary on the work includes the following description:

“The symphony does not make use to any great extent of actual Hebraic thematic material. The first phrase of the scherzo is paraphrased from a traditional Hebrew chant, and the opening phrase of the vocal part in the Lamentation is based on a liturgical cadence still sung today in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon. Other resemblances to Hebrew liturgical music are a matter of emotional quality rather than of the notes themselves. As for the programmatic meanings, the intention again is not one of literalness but of emotional quality. Thus the first movement (Prophecy) aims only to parallel in feeling the intensity of the prophet’s pleas with his people; and the scherzo (Profanation) to give a general sense of the destruction and chaos brought on by the pagan corruption within the priesthood and the people. The third movement (Lamentation), being a setting of a poetic text, is naturally a more literary conception. It is the cry of Jeremiah as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem ruined, pillaged, and dishonored after his desperate efforts to save it.”

—Adapted from the LA Phil archive