Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety: A Great American Symphony during McCarthyism

Philip Gentry

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Musicology and Musical Analysis Theater, Performance, and Music History Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis

Abstract

Leonard Bernstein's 1949 second symphony, subtitled "The Age of Anxiety," is an exploration of post-war apathy and exhaustion at the dawn of McCarthyism. Examining the work both in its political context and also within the context of Bernstein's beloved American symphonic tradition, I show how Bernstein flipped the triumphal musical rhetoric of the "Koussevitzky manner" on its head to bid farewell to the modernist and Popular Front traditions that had previously nurtured him.

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1974The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 1997The cultural front: the laboring of American culture in the twentieth century 1995The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 1950The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom 2017Alger Hiss, The True Story 1980Twentieth century literature 1998The culture of spontaneity: improvisation and the arts in postwar America 1963The radical right

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