Born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts; Died on October 14,1990, in New York, NY.
Symphony No. 1 (Jeremiah)
Prophecy
Profanation
Lamentation
Composed: 1942
Estimated length: 25 minutes
“The work I have been writing all my life is about the struggle that is born of the crisis of our century, a crisis of faith,” Leonard Bernstein said in a 1977 interview while making a new recording of his Symphony No. 1 (Jeremiah). Th at lifelong concern is already powerfully present in this early, defining work, which reveals the dramatic instinct and ear for vivid gesture that would animate Bernstein’s music across every domain he touched.
Although Bernstein the composer is often associated first with stage works such as West Side Story, Jeremiah marks his earliest major symphonic statement. The first of his three symphonies, it received its premiere in January 1944, just months before Fancy Free would announce his arrival in New York’s theatrical world. The two works already share a common DNA: immediacy of expression and an instinct for emotional clarity that speaks directly to the listener.
The origins of Jeremiah date back to 1939, shortly after Bernstein’s graduation from Harvard, when he sketched a setting of Hebrew verses from the Book of Lamentations for solo soprano and orchestra. Amid the upheaval of the Second World War, the prophet Jeremiah’s lament over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE took on renewed resonance. Bernstein expanded the piece into a three-movement symphony, with the vocal movement—shift ed to mezzo-soprano—as its culmination.
The symphony unfolds in three movements: the first two (“Prophecy” and “Profanation”) are purely orchestral, while the final movement (“Lamentations”) introduces a mezzo-soprano soloist, who sings in Hebrew from the biblical Lamentations, transforming the symphony into a direct human outcry.
With Jeremiah, Bernstein began a lifelong artistic exploration of faith, doubt, and moral struggle—questions that would return in his two later symphonies, The Age of Anxiety and Kaddish, and beyond. Even here, in his First Symphony, the theatrical instinct and the ethical urgency that define his music are already unmistakably present.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Bernstein emphasized that his intention was “not one of literalness, but of emotional quality.” The opening movement, “Prophecy,” “aims only to parallel in feeling the intensity of the prophet’s pleas with his people,” while the scherzo, “Profanation,” seeks “to give a general sense of the destruction and chaos brought on by the pagan corruption within the priesthood and the people.”
By setting a poetic text, the final movement, “Lamentation,” assumes what Bernstein called a “more literary conception,” becoming “the cry of Jeremiah, as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem, ruined, pillaged and dishonored aft er his desperate efforts to save it.”
In addition to solo mezzo-soprano, scored for piccolo and 2 flutes, 2 obes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano and strings.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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