baby's cradle. A middle scherzando section features short, sharp notes, analogous, maybe, to the chopping of human beings or the comedian's hiccups. Eryximachus, the physician, talks about bodily harmony as a scientific model for understanding love patterns. The music is mechanistic, and the percussion parts anticipate some sections of the composer's Chichester Psalms. Agathon praises Eros as being the youngest god; he shuns the very sight of senility and clings to youth, he is beautiful, moderate, courageous, and smart. For Bernstein this is the most moving speech of the dialogue. The movement's length allows us to enjoy long processes reaching romantic musical climaxes. While Socrates mocks Agathon, Bernstein honors him. Socrates describes the unique doctrine of love he had learned from the seer Diotima. The dialogue between the cello and solo violin might correspond to the conversation between these two wise personages. While for Plato this is the peak of the dialogue, in Bernstein's composition this is only an introduction to the last section, in which the handsome Alcibiades and his band interrupt the symposium. There is more than a hint of jazz in the celebration, "the natural expression of a contemporary American composer imbues with the spirit of that timeless dinner-party", in Bernstein's own words. The Serenade was first performed at Teartro La Fenice, Venice, with Isaac Stern and Orchestra Del Teatro La Fenice conducted by the composer. The critics were not so enthusiastic, yet Bernstein considered it his best "serious" composition. Bernstein biographer, Humphrey Burton, who passed away last month, observed that the work, “can also be perceived as a portrait of Bernstein himself: grand and noble in the first movement, childlike in the second, boisterous and playful in the third, serenely calm and tender in the fourth, a doomladen prophet and then a jazzy iconoclast in the finale.” Bernstein read The Symposium in the summer of 1951, a short period before marrying the actress Felicia Montealegre. I must admit that the connection between the musical work and the philosophical one is rather loose. However, I maintain that by choosing the dialogue Bernstein did something of great importance. As Margalit Finkelberg writes in the introduction to her Hebrew translation of the dialogue, the love discussed in The Symposium is Pederasty, a form of homosexual relationship in ancient Greece. For many centuries, until the 1960s, the academic establishment tried to deny that this is the kind of love discussed in the dialogue. However, truth cannot be hidden. As Didier Eribon writes in his wonderful book "Reflections on the Gay Question", throughout history The Symposium provided gay men with self-legitimation, the feeling of being proud of oneself, to form a positive self-identity albeit all the cultural taboos and restrictions, and see themselves as the successors of the great Greek culture. Bernstein probably did love Felicia, but whether he was gay or bisexual, he was undoubtedly attracted to other men and had relations with other men throughout his life - including in his visits to Israel. Composing a piece based on The Symposium, in the 1950s, is a great gift that Bernstein gave to an entire community. Oded Shnei-Dor
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