Our father, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, liked to tell us about the time Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis called to ask him to be the first executive director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, which was being built as a memorial to her slain husband. He was so honored that he blurted out a yes — then hung up aghast. He didn’t feel remotely suited to be executive director of anything.
Our mother, Felicia, called Mrs. Onassis back to say that her husband was deeply humbled, but suggested it might be more appropriate for him to, perhaps, compose a piece to inaugurate the center. That was how “Mass” came to be written. We were in the audience for the first performance on Sept. 8, 1971, when the work’s multifarious sounds and enormous, diverse cast filled the Kennedy Center Opera House with melody, spectacle and joy. Our father’s music has had a special place at the Kennedy Center ever since.
Since President Trump has asserted control over the center, making himself chairman and purging its board and administration in favor of his loyalists, a number of artists (though certainly not all) have severed ties with the institution in protest. Many friends and associates have urged us, the rights holders of our father’s music, to withdraw his works from a gala program on Saturday.
We asked ourselves: What would our dad do? In our hearts, we already knew the answer. He would let his music be heard.
The Kennedy Center was created to gather and uplift all Americans, and all of America’s visitors. Our father felt exactly the same way about making music; he strove to embrace and unite humanity through the works he wrote and performed.
On many occasions, he felt pressured to modify or curtail his own artistic activity. Sometimes the pressure came from the U.S. government: During the Red-baiting hysteria of the 1950s, he faced difficulties in renewing his passport, and almost didn’t make it to Milan to conduct Maria Callas at La Scala.
Often, he felt pressure from those who wished to punish onetime oppressors. Many people, for example, urged him not to perform with orchestras in postwar Germany and Austria. In maybe the toughest situation of all for our father, he anguished over whether to perform in Israel, whose land and people he loved, but whose bellicose government at times gave him profound misgivings.
In every circumstance, after much soul-searching, our father chose to play music. He believed in music’s power — its emotionality beyond words, its harmonic architecture, fundamental as DNA — to raise listeners to a higher level of discourse where beauty would outshine violence and hate. “We can never overestimate the good that comes from artistic communication,” he said in a speech in 1963. “When we touch one another through music, we are touching the heart, the mind and the spirit, all at once.”
Growing up, we observed how our father struggled to make sense of mankind’s cruelties and suffering. We could hear those struggles in his own compositions: the narrator shaking his fist at God in his Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish,” or the boy alto’s innocent voice drowned out by the warlike snarls of the men’s chorus in “Chichester Psalms.”
Bernstein described “Mass” as the expression of a crisis of faith in our own society. He anguished over the disconnect between the people who longed for justice and authenticity, and the fraudulence of the authority figures they turned to for succor. The message of “Mass” has lost none of its urgency. The final, hushed words, sung by the entire ensemble, are: “And fill with grace / All who dwell in this place. Amen.”
The Saturday performance at the Kennedy Center is a fund-raiser for the Washington National Opera under the theme “American Rhapsody.” Two Bernstein songs are on the program. The first is the “Tonight” quintet from “West Side Story,” which conveys the coiled anger of the Sharks and the Jets, combined with Tony and Maria’s soaring melody of longing for their love to raise them safely beyond violence.
The second is “Make Our Garden Grow,” the finale from the operetta/musical “Candide.” The characters, after undergoing a cascade of troubles, at the end express humbler aspirations: baking bread, tending the earth — and caring for one another. The work’s upward-reaching melodic phrases suggest that humankind has the ability to better itself, to blossom forth in literal and figurative harmony.
These days, battered and stung as so many of us feel by President Trump’s relentless assaults on civil rights and the Constitution itself, we can find comfort in our father’s music. His notes invoke the courage to be ourselves, to express ourselves — and to be what Americans have always aspired to be: free.
So we have elected to keep Leonard Bernstein’s music ringing out at the Kennedy Center in the coming seasons. Citizens have many ways to express their alarm right now. We understand if artists feel the best way for them is to refuse to appear at the Kennedy Center.
But we believe that we can make our own strong statement, in honor of our father, by letting people hear his music in that space, as an audible rebuke to Mr. Trump’s ugly policies. We plan to donate whatever proceeds we receive from upcoming Kennedy Center performances to the American Civil Liberties Union.
As our father once said: “It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and thinkers, who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.”
Nina Bernstein Simmons, Alexander Bernstein and Jamie Bernstein are officers of the Leonard Bernstein Office.
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