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.