#Recording audio auden age of anxiety series#
Together with the following section, The Seven Stages, it consists of what Bernstein describes as “a series of variations which differ from conventional variations in that they do not vary one common theme. The entrance of the soloist marks the beginning of the next section: The Seven Ages. He described it as “The loneliest music I know.” We then hear a downward scalar figure, which Bernstein tells us “acts as a bridge into the realm of the unconscious, where most of the poem takes place.” It is also interesting to note that Bernstein recycled this music from incidental music he wrote in college for Aristophanes’ The Birds. The poem begins with Quant staring into the mirror behind the bar, wondering if life is better for the mirror version of himself than it is for him perhaps the duet symbolizes Quant and his reflection. The piece begins with an “echo tone” duet for two clarinets in a quasi-improvised style: In the context of the early days of the Cold War and McCarthism, it may also have been a mask for the anxiety many artist felt at the dawn of the nuclear age.īernstein would claim that “No one could be more astonished than I at the extent to which the programmaticism of this work has been carried…when each section was finished, I discovered, upon re-reading, detail after detail of programmatic relation to the poem…” Bernstein revealed few of those correspondences, but the following discussion attempts to piece together the music and the poem as much as possible. As with the Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium), intellectualism was likely to some degree a mask for Bernstein’s expression of his own homosexuality. More importantly, though, was that Auden himself was gay, a fact Bernstein likely knew. While it is not nearly as explicit as Plato’s Symposium, there are a few veiled references to homosexuality in the poem. These complications did not seem to trouble the Harvard-educated Bernstein, who called the poem “fascinating and hair-raising…one of the most shattering examples of virtuosity in the history of British poetry.” As with Plato’s Symposium, which would later inspire his Serenade, he was likely attracted to The Age of Anxiety because of its homoeroticism. Critical reception of the poem has been decidedly mixed in the years since it appeared. The poem seems to be a meditation on the psychological implications of living in the modern world (especially in the context of World War), and concludes by suggesting a turn to religious faith. Complicating matters is the fact that the characters are apparently allegorical representations of various mental faculties from Jungian psychology (intuition, thinking, feeling and sensing). This section of the poem is so opaque that even Auden experts have yet to decipher its meaning. The bulk of the poem, however, is taken up with highly allusive and symbolic verse, including a rather pessimistic discussion of the Seven Ages (Auden’s updated version of Jacques’s speech about the human life cycle in Shakespeare’s As You Like It) and an imaginary journey through a dreamlike landscape of the subconscious mind (which rather resembles England) that Auden refers to as the Seven Stages. The others wander back to their places of residence as dawn breaks. Emble and Rosetta dance together until the others get the hint and leave, but Emble passes out. After much alcohol and a rather long and strange discussion, Rosetta invites the others back to her apartment for a nightcap, hoping that only Emble will accept. After hearing a news bulletin over the radio, they strike up a conversation and move to a booth together. Four strangers are at a bar in New York City one night during World War II: a shipping clerk named Quant a Medical Intelligence officer in the Canadian Air Force named Malin a buyer for a department store named Rosetta and an attractive navy recruit named Emble. The plot of the poem (such as it is) is quickly summarized. Between 19, he would compose an unconventional symphony for piano and orchestra based on it, working on it sporadically between conducting gigs and a tour through the newly created (and still unstable) state of Israel. Auden’s extravagant, book-length poem would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, but it began to stir Bernstein’s musical imagination immediately. Leonard Bernstein first read Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue in the summer of 1947, shortly after it was published.
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