ABSTRACT
Fritz Reiner, who had taught Leonard Bernstein conducting at the Curtis Institute, was eager to have the work performed by his Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Reiner had urged Bernstein to add a fourth movement, deeming the Lamentation ending too depressing for the audience. Later Guido Cantelli conducted the Italian première and a recording by Leonard Bernstein and the St Louis Symphony Orchestra was issued by RCA. Bernstein’s treatment of the theme is richly romantic, passionately rhapsodic and in the climaxes highly dissonant. Jeremiah’s words have a particular tragic significance for the Jewish people in the 1940s and Bernstein expressed their anguish in this deeply moving music. Bernstein’s Second Symphony The Age of Anxiety was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. In the original 1949 version of Epilogue, Bernstein omitted the piano except for a single chord on the final page, described by him as one eager chord of confirmation’.
