I feel I’ve got to say a bit more about Maestro, as my previous post said a lot about Bernstein the musician, but little about his marriage to Felicia Montealegre. 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 Great Lenny-the-Musician story 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 man, a musician, who led a very public life. 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 did have a public life, it was 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. It’s both, the private and the public, a duality Bernstein emphasized in a famous interview, re-staged for the movie, where he contrasted the two, finally declaring himself to be, half in jest, schizophrenic. He’s the prototypical 20th century schizoid man.
Now, 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 6:23 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. But the marriage winds its way around the music.
As for the music, here’s why Bernstein is so important. 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.
BTW, I’ve collected a bunch of similar anecdotes in, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, 50 pages worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment