#Auden age of anxiety text series
The “Seven Stages” continue to follow this theme as it gradually evolves from one variation to another in a melodic concatenation, rather than a series of contrasts. In the seventh variation, we hear oboe and English horn reprise the clarinet duet with a more aged timbre, closing the circle of memory and reminding us that life is a cycle. In the earlier variations, one can hear the energy of youth and in the later ones, greater complexity and reminiscence on variations past. What follows is a series of seven variations on the theme of the “Prologue,” which represent the “Seven Ages” of man. Bernstein heard this descent as a “bridge into the realm of the unconscious” in which the rest of Part I takes place. Near the end of this brief prelude, the solo flute states the second part of the theme: a slowly descending scale, potent in its simplicity. Here, it manifests in the inflections that pull the somber minor key closer to a Jewish prayer mode called Ahava rabah. Their melody also carries what Bernstein called the “Hebraic trace,” which he found in Aaron Copland’s music. A “lonely improvisation” by two clarinets casts an aura of quiet meditation, sounding similar to the flute stops on an organ. The brief “Prologue” introduces the two halves of the theme that will permeate the whole first half of the symphony. Bernstein also saw himself in the poem and thought of the piano soloist as an “autobiographical protagonist,” not so much a concerto soloist, but a personality we can track on the psychological journey through the work.Īlthough he attributed it to his “unconscious hand,” Bernstein traced the outline of Auden’s story into his own music. The four individuals meet in a bar on All Soul’s Night in the “Prologue,” converse in a series of metaphysical wanderings through the “The Seven Ages” and “The Seven Stages” of man, before departing in a taxi in the “Dirge,” heading to a party at Rosetta’s apartment in the “Masque,” and then dispersing during the “Epilogue.” Auden’s poem vacillates between English pastoral settings and urban American ones and draws on numerous literary and musical points of reference, so the dizzying array of styles in Bernstein’s music works in counterpoint to the poetic text. Rosetta, Quant, Emble, and Malin represented, for Auden, Carl Jung’s four-fold division of the psyche (Feeling, Intuition, Sensation, and Thought). Serge Koussevitzky, conductor.ĭuring the summer of 1947 Bernstein had read Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, which depicts an encounter between four individuals in New York City during wartime. First performance: April 8, 1949, Symphony Hall, Boston.
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