I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those is true, then why did I watch it twice? Maybe I found it disturbing and wanted to figure out what was bugging me? If it was disturbing, the disturbance was unconscious.
[That I didn’t watch the whole film in a single sitting is certainly an indication of the fact that I watched the film at home, in front of a small screen, instead of in a theater and with a large audience.]
Was I bugged? Yes, I was bugged, about the damned prosthetic nose. I kept reading that Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic offended some people. Bernstein’s kids defended it. There I am, watching the film. There’s the second scene where Bernstein is seated, gray hair, red shirt, smoking a cigarette, and talking about his (dead) wife. He had an intense almost vibrant tan, a color looking like it didn’t quite make the cut for Rudolph’s nose. Did he hang out in a tanning booth? That bugged me, a little.
I don’t know whether or not I’d have been bugged about the nose if I hadn’t heard so much about it. I never saw Bernstein live, but I certainly saw him on TV and saw lots of photos. As far as I recall I never gave two thoughts to his nose.
Now my father, he had a nose. We called it a Danish nose because his parents were from Denmark. Which was bigger, my father’s Danish nose, Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose, or Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic version of Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose? This is silly.
I wonder if all this fuss about a schnoz is part of the shadow cast by the awful events of October 7th? Or the resurgence of antisemitism in the country? Did I know that Bernstein was Jewish the first time I became aware of him, perhaps from one of those Young People’s Concerts on TV or perhaps it was a more straightforwardly didactic program? I’m pretty sure I knew Louis Armstrong was black the first time I became aware of him. Couldn’t miss it. The color of his skin was as plain as the four-letter-word on your face.
* * * * *
That Bernstein was Jewish probably registered on me when I purchased his recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony in 1965 or 1966. Blew my mind! That, however, wasn’t my first Mahler symphony. My first was Deryck Cook’s completion of the Tenth Symphony as recorded by Ormandy and the Philadelphia. Then I got, maybe the Second, or maybe the First, known as the “Titan,” recorded by Solti and the Chicago Symphony. Loved the slow third movement; didn’t even realize that it was based on “Frère Jacques” until I read it somewhere. (Color me red with embarrassment, but not as red as Cooper’s make-up, not THAT red.) But the fourth movement, someday I’d love to play principal trumpet on that one, just drive the orchestra into the ground, through the earth, and come out somewhere in the South China Sea where we could zing Xi Jinping’s nose.
I was in my late teens when I got caught up in Mahler, not to mention the anti-war movement. Bought all the symphonies (various conductors), Das Lied von der Erde (Bernstein on DGG I believe), Kindertotenlieder, and one or two other things. This was while I was on a break from listening to jazz and hadn’t yet admitted to myself that I could like rock and roll and not feel ashamed. I was committed.
I survived.
* * * * *
Thus, when I heard the finale of Mahler’s Second welling up on Maestro‘s sound-track, I was prepared. To be honest, I thought Cooper’s conducting was a bit over-the-top. Yes, I know, that was Lenny’s style – I’m just using that name to indicate the public persona he created for himself. He was much criticized for his flamboyant conducting style at the time. Back then I thought such criticism was silly.
Judge for yourself. Here’s the real performance on which the movie’s re-creation is based:
In his latest film, “Maestro,” director Bradley Cooper stars as legendary conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein. The Netflix film (which opens in theaters November 22) features a recreation of Bernstein leading a historic performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, the “Resurrection Symphony.” In this archival footage of the 1973 performance, recently restored, Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony Orchestra in the conclusion of Mahler’s 2nd, with soprano Sheila Armstrong, mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England.
Ponder this: When Lenny was conducting, was he acting or were his gestures “authentic”? I know Cooper was acting; after all, this is a movie, and he’s the star. As I said, I did think Cooper’s performance was over-wrought. Could one could validate that judgment by comparing the real with the simulated performance? It’s all in the details, which in this case are measured in milliseconds.
Look, I’m a trumpet player, and a damn good one – whoops! Am I allowed to use that word in polite company? The trumpet is physically demanding. I know, from practical experimentation, that a player has some leeway in just how much they use body movement to reveal those physical demands to the audience. It’s not at all obvious to me that Bernstein had to do all that dancing and gesticulating in order to direct the orchestra. Some of it, sure, but all of it, not so sure. I can easily imagine that some of that was for the public, as part of the Lenny role. Sure it was.
But what’s that Lenny role about? Hiding something? Revealing something? Both?
And yet…Here he leads an orchestra in a simple two octave scale:
Very expressive, no? Yes, a bit of a stunt to be sure, but a stunt many musicians have practiced. Can you practice those scales and arpeggios with feeling? Anger? Check. Longing? Check. Desire? Check. Joy? Check. Und so weiter. Actors can do the same thing with a phone book. Still, could Lenny have gotten the same effect without the elaborate gestures?
Bernstein led a very public life. Conductor, pianist, composer – he composed for Broadway and film, as well as his ‘serious’ classical works – and he had a very well-known series of TV programs presenting classical music to ‘young people.’ He had to evolve a persona to manage all that. What’s the relationship between that persona and rock-bottom requirements of leading an orchestra?
For that matter, what’s the relationship between that persona and his private life, which in this film centers on his relationship to his wife, Felicia Montealegre? His wife, their kids, and his male lovers. He was a homosexual – or was he bi-sexual? that’s not clear from the sources – at a time that was much less tolerant of gay men than we are now. A public man, a gay man, a beautiful wife. What a tangled web he had to weave – one of the topics of this interesting article by Zachary Woolfe.
* * * * *
Here’s a 2-and-a-half-hour documentary of Bernstein rehearsing, performing, and talking about three Mahler symphonies, the Fifth, the Nineth, and Das Lied von der Erde. Bernstein loved Mahler.
But, man, all that death, all the gloom and doom that Bernstein talks about. [You don’t actually have to pay attention to all that talk. I didn’t. But you should listen to some of it, the stuff about death, say at 41:33, or 48:38, later at 1:29:26, or 1:57:16. Und so weiter.] Is that what I was listening to those many years ago? A death wish set to music? It sounds like late Romantic Classical music is trying really hard to end it all. Or maybe it’s just deeply confused about the difference between a technical problem in musical construction, coming to an end, and the Meaning of Life Itself. Not sure I want to listen to Mahler again after all that.
After all that I feel like taking a bath in James “I Feel Good” Brown. He’s got moves too. Oh does he have moves. Could Lenny do a split? Imagine this: We’re coming up to the grand climax of Mahler’s Second and, just before the end, Lenny goes down in a split and jumps up into the cutoff, just like the Nicholas Brothers. Shazam!
Let’s get back to the music. This is a passage from Helen Epstein, Music Talks: Conversations with Musicians (1987) p. 52, where Bernstein is talking with students at Tanglewood:
I don’t know whether any of you have experienced that but it’s what everyone in the world is always searching for. When it happens in conducting, it happens because you identify so completely with the composer, you’ve studied him so intently, that it’s as though you’ve written the piece yourself. You completely forget who you are or where you are and you write the piece right there. You just make it up as though you never heard it before. Because you become that composer.
I always know when such a thing has happened because it takes me so long to come back. It takes four or five minutes to know what city I’m in, who the orchestra is, who are the people making all that noise behind me, who am I? It’s a very great experience and it doesn’t happen often enough. Ideally it should happen every time, but it happens about as often in conducting as in any other department where you lose ego. Schopenhauer said that music was the only art in which this could happen and that art was the only area of life in which it could happen. Schopenhauer was wrong. It can happen in religious ecstasy or meditation. It can happen in orgasm when you are with someone you love.*
WHAT is he talking about? Notice that last sentence. Is he serious? Of course he is. That’s something you do in private. You do not talk about it with your buddies over beers at the bar. Bernstein is saying that same thing happens to him, in full view of the audience, while he’s jumping around flapping his arms grinning and grimacing without embarrassment. No one talks about that either. There are no words.
Is THAT what Maestro is about?
* * * * *
Listen to this conversation between Bradley Cooper and Steven Spielberg, who produced the film (along with five others), goes through all that.
At about 4:16 Spielberg says that this is not a standard biopic, which is what he would have done if he’d directed:
This is an anatomy of a marriage and also an anatomy of looking into yourself. How do you represent yourself to yourself and to the world, even though you and Felicia and your family, eventually, knew exactly who Leonard Bernstein was. So this became a story about a marriage.
Well, if it’s an anatomy of a marriage, then why not make just that film? Get rid of the story about Great Lenny-the-Musician and concentrate on the marriage. Make it a complete fiction, one about a gay man gets married really loves her but has affairs with men they have three wonderful kids loving family closeted life Oh it’s so complicated. Why not make that film?
It could be done, of course, but the reason we care about this marriage is because it is the marriage of a particular man, a musician. As Cooper says later in the interview, Bernstein was “probably the most [visible musician] in the 20th century.” Not sure what James Brown or the Beatles would say about that, but putting that aside, Bernstein certainly had a public life, the public life of a very charismatic musician. As Spielberg said, it’s about how “you represent yourself to yourself and to the world.” And to the world. And to the world. It’s both, the private and the public, a duality Bernstein emphasized in a famous interview, restaged for the movie, where he contrasted the two, finally declaring himself to be, only half in jest, schizophrenic. He’s the prototypical 20th century schizoid man.
Back to the music.
Starting at about three minutes into the interview Cooper explains how he’d asked Santa Claus for a baton when he was eight because he was fascinated with the idea of making music by waving your hands around. At about 17 minutes we learn that, on two occasions, Cooper was with Gustavo Dudamel when he rehearsed and performed Mahler’s Second Symphony, the one featured in the movie, which Cooper conducted live with the London Symphony over a two-day shoot. He also spent 4 nights a week for 3 ½ years watching Bernstein tapes in the library of the New York Philharmonic. That’s a lot of preparation for a mere 6 minutes and 23 seconds of film.
No, the music IS central to the film, as important as the marriage. To the extent that the film has a plot, it’s provided by the marriage. The music is just there, unwavering, an omphalos, and the marriage winds its way around it.
Both of these things, the music, the marriage, are around and about the same thing, this ecstasy, this standing outside yourself and merging with an Other, a composer, a lover, the audience – the world? In one setting it’s deeply private and personal. In another setting it’s deeply public and impersonal. Somehow, they are the same.
In the movie the two worlds came together in a passionate kiss after Bernstein’s triumphant performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony. The kiss was essentially private, between man and wife, though in full view of anyone around to see. Equally important, what Felicia said, “No more hate.” There was no hate left in Lenny’s heart, an accusation she’d hurled at him during a fierce quarrel only moments before – in screen time, I don’t know what it would have been in biographical time.
That’s what Maestro is about, the communion of public and personal, visible and hidden, love and hate. That’s why I had to watch the film twice. Maybe I’ll give it a third whirl.
* * * * *
Let’s finish with a clip from a rehearsal of West Side Story conducted by Lenny/Leonard “The Schnoz” Bernstein. Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa offer up a ravishing rendition of “One Hand, One Heart.”
* * * * *
* That’s one of many anecdotes I’ve collected in, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, 50 pages worth.