In the spring of 2018, I went to the Royal Ballet in London to see a performance that celebrated the centenary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor. One of the three items on the programme was a revival of The Age of Anxiety, first performed in 1950 with choreography by Jerome Robbins (who also collaborated with Bernstein on the musicals On the Town and West Side Story). Robbins used Berstein’s second symphony as the setting for his ballet, which had premiered in April the previous year, conducted by the legendary music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky. (Here is an early recording of the symphony, with Bernstein conducting, from 1950.) This score was Berstein’s musical reinterpretation of a long, book-length poem of the same name by the expatriate English poet Wystan Hugh Auden, written in America towards the end of the second world war, and published in 1947.
Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety was immediately recognised as having captured something of the spirit of the age of those post-war years, but more for its snappy title than for its unperspicuous contents. Today the poem remains better known for Bernstein’s musical adaptation and Robbins’s ballet – which Auden reportedly disliked – than for the ideas presented in verse. It is structured as a discussion between four people who meet by chance in a New York bar, but this is no simple late night conversation or pub argument. Rather, Auden offers his readers a sophisticated attempt to analyse the problematic spiritual condition of modern western societies, characterised by the loss of traditional faith and the loss of a sense of shared community. The opportunity to exploit these absences for our own advantage, “the temptation to sin” – which, a few years earlier, Auden had described as “what the psychologist calls anxiety, and the Christian calls lack of faith” – is contrasted with the opportunity to establish community and solidarity with others, who share both our recognition of this loss and the sense of impossibility of recovering faith or community in their tradition senses.
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