1, Jeremiah, in which the Prophet's Lamentation is sung by a mezzo-soprano.īecause he was not satisfied with the original (1963) version, the composer, in 1977, made some revisions. (Bernstein used the same device thirty-six years ago in his Symphony No. The woman represented in the Symphony, that aspect of humankind which know God through intuition, and can come closest to Divinity, a concept at odds with the male principal of organized rationality. In the original version, the choice of a woman as the Speaker and as vocal soloist (singing sacred words traditionally reserved for men in the synagogue) was in itself a dualistic decision. He does this both in his speaker's text and in his music. In his Kaddish Symphony, Leonard Bernstein exploits the dualistic overtones of the prayer: its popular connotation as a kind of requiem, and its celebration of life ( i.e. It was not until the 12th century, however, that the prayer reached it's present-day form, and through folklore came to be associated with mourning. Originally, in the period following the destruction of the Second Temple (70 A.D.), fragments of the Kaddish recited by a preacher at the end of an discourse when he was expected to dismiss an assembly with an allusion to the Messianic hope. In fact, there is reason to believe that the doxology became the basis for the Christian Paternoster (Lord's Prayer). This doxology (the first two sections) is written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the vernacular language at the time of Jesus. Far from being a threnody, the Kaddish is a series of paeans in praise of God, and, as such, it has basic functions in the liturgy that have nothing to do with mourning. On the contrary, it uses the word chayei or chayim ("life") three times. Yet, strangely enough, there is not a single mention of death in the entire prayer. To the Jews of the world, the word Kaddish ("Sanctification") has a highly emotional connotation, for it is the name of the prayer chanted for the dead, at the graveside, on memorial occasions and, in fact, at all synagogue services.
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