I have now posted various materials about Maestro, including a number of YouTube reviews as well as three posts I’ve written about the film. I’ve also written a somewhat longer article at 3 Quarks Daily, based in part on two of those posts. As additional material, here’s a long conversation about Maestro that trumpeter Mark Gould initiated at Facebook:
As some of you may know, Mark Gould is a professional trumpet player who not-so-long-ago retired as principal trumpet at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Many of the commenters on that thread are professional musicians as well.
Why all this stuff about Maestro? Curiosity and calibration. I watched the film – at least twice, I’ll watch it again – and was variously pleased and puzzled. I watched those videos, including many I’ve not linked here, and read reviews and commentary to clarify things I didn’t understand about the film (curiosity), but also to clarify my own responses (calibration). Let me explain.
I am old enough that a big chunk of my life overlaps with a big chunk of Bernstein’s life. Though I never saw him in live performance, I saw him on television, I read articles and reviews, bought recordings (including one of Mahler 2), and performed some of his music (from West Side Story). He has been a significant part of my musical life. But I never read much about his private life much less have read a comprehensive biography. I had a vague sense of his sexual, shall we say, ambiguity, but little more. Thus learning that he was a closeted gay man and deeply conflicted in his private life, and its interplay with his public life, that was new to me. But some things about the private life simply were not clear to me from the movie itself. Does that matter to the overall effect of the film? Maybe, maybe not, but I was curious.
I was also curious about Bradley Cooper’s realization of Bernstein’s conducting style for Mahler 2, a work I’ve listened to many times, though not in decades. Something seemed off. I thought maybe that Cooper had in fact exaggerated Bernstein’s notoriously flamboyant style. But, no, that’s not it. Two video commentaries by young conductors made it clear that Cooper’s timing was off – not to mention this hilarious video commentary and demonstration by TwoSetViolin. Though I am a skilled musician, I don’t have much experience performing in symphony orchestras; that is likely why I didn’t pick up the mismatch.
That’s curiosity.
What about calibration? Movies are complex objects. Our experience of them may be complex as well, complex and even impenetrable as well. How did other people experience the film? It’s not that I think that somehow my experience was wrong, heaven forbid, and I’m trying to correct or revise it, I’m just trying to gauge it, calibrate it, with respect to other people’s experience. That happens in real time at a performance where audience members are residually aware of one another. After the performance friends gather together in a bar and compare notes. And so forth. When I watch the film for another time, that experience will be responsive to whatever I’ve internalized from all this secondary commentary and criticism I’ve been taking in.
Our experience may be unique, but we live as individuals in a society and are affected by others. THAT’s what’s going on here.
In my many remarks about literary criticism here on the Savanna I’ve distinguished between ethical criticism and naturalist criticism. By naturalist criticism I mean the objective analysis, description, and explanation of works of art, an activity pretty much confined to the academy (see my manifesto). By ethical criticism – a term I take from Wayne Booth, who points out the derivation from ethos – I mean evaluative criticism, where the criteria of evaluation can be aesthetic or ethnical (in a narrow sense). Ordinary reviews, whether in newspapers, magazines, in blogs or on Facebook, they’re ethical criticism.
I subscripted to The New Republic for years. Generally the first thing I would read in each issue was the movie review by long-time reviewer Stanley Kaufman. I’d read his review whether or not I’d seen the film and whether or not I intended to see it. But if he gave the film a favorable review I’d go see it (if I could). No doubt he had some influence on my taste, which is a good thing, but I didn’t necessarily agree with his opinion. But over time I came to know his style, his preference. I had him calibrated.
Leonard Bernstein had an affinity for the music of Gustav Mahler, as seen in the climax of the Oscar-nominated 2023 Netflix film “Maestro.” In this special episode of the podcast Embrace Everything, we explore what the two musicians had in common, and learn how Bernstein brought Mahler back into the spotlight in the 1960s. Guests include Jamie Bernstein (Leonard Bernstein's daughter) and Gabe Smith (New York Philharmonic Director of Archives and Exhibitions). Special thanks to the New York Philharmonic for adding archival images to accompany the audio. Hosted by Aaron Cohen.
Learn more about “Embrace Everything”: https://theworldofgustavmahler.org/ X: @worldofmahler
Facebook: @theworldofgustavmahler
Instagram: @theworldofgustavmahler
Young People's Concert: "Bach Transmogrified"
with the New York Philharmonic
Written and conducted by Leonard Bernstein
Bernstein discusses different transmogrifications or treatments of Bach's works. After an organ recital of the Little Fugue, guest conductor Leopold Stokowski conducts his own transcription of the fugue for symphony orchestra. Other transmogrifications include Foss' Phorion and a version of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 performed by the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble.
Original CBS Television Network Broadcast Date: April 27, 1969
Produced and directed by Roger Englander
Here's the complete program:
The concert ends with a performance by the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble. Whatever possessed Bernstein to have them close the show? They're somewhere between not-very-good and terrible.
If you must have rock and Bach, go with Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale," which was a hit in 1967." No, it's not transmogrified Bach, but, as the Wikipedia entry notes, the instrumental melody is "Bach-derived." It's a much better piece of music. (FWIW, I did an arrangment of it for a band I played with in the early 1970s, which had a Bach-derived name, The St. Matthew Passion. We we pretty good, too, certainly better than those guys.)
At about 44:20 into Maestro we hear Louis Armstrong playing the tango section of “St. Louis Blues” on the soundtrack. What’s that doing in the film? There’s nothing in the film that would explain it.
Had Bernstein met Armstrong, known him, performed with him? We don’t know, at least not from the film. Was he familiar with Armstrong’s music? Judging from what I know of Bernstein, I’m pretty sure he was, and I’m also pretty sure that he liked it. But that doesn’t tell me what that bit of music is doing on the soundtrack. I’m also pretty sure that much of the audience for the film, probably most of the audience, didn’t recognize that as Louis Armstrong, though to the extent that they were explicitly attending to the soundtrack they would certainly have noticed that it was different from any of the other soundtrack music.
This raises an aesthetic issue that was hotly debated in the American academic world in the 1950s and 1960s: Are aesthetic objects, such as films or poems, self-contained and complete in themselves or does appreciation of them depend on contextual knowledge of one sort of another? In this particular context, in order to ‘understand’ or ‘appreciate’ that segment of Maestro (and perhaps the whole film) do you need to recognize that bit of music as being a performance by Louis Armstrong? If so, then I’m afraid most of the audience missed out. Beyond that question, we might also ask: Do you also need to know why that bit of music was on the soundtrack? Well, I’ve suggested at least a partial answer to that question: Bernstein probably liked Armstrong. But is that sufficient? Do we also need to know something about Armstrong’s position in American music? That’s a broad and nonspecific bit of knowledge. Is there something specific to Armstrong and Bernstein? That’s a more specific question. If the answer to that last question is “yes,” then I missed what was going on at that point in the film.
More generally about Maestro, it’s obvious to me, in part from having read a bit about the film and having watched a variety of YouTube videos, that there’s a lot going on in the film that I missed the first time I watched, and the second, and, well I suppose I’m now somewhere in my fourth time through. And I’m certainly not the only one in the audience who has missed a lot. How important is that? If the film is a self-contained aesthetic object, then it’s all there on the screen and on the soundtrack, and none of us have missed a thing. If the film isn’t self-contained, then just how much context must we know?
Let’s set those big questions aside and focus on the film. Here’s what a Google search dredged up for that segment of the sound track:
St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso) / Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor, Pt. 3: Adagietto • Louis Armstrong Quintet · Lewisohn Stadium Symphony Orchestra • Wiener Philharmoniker • Leonard Bernstein
The first thing we hear is an a capella statement by Armstrong, which starts at 44:00 or so in the film. That transitions quickly to the tango section of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” which is also in the soundtrack. That then gives way to the Mahler Adagietto at about 45:30 in the film (03:50 in the above clip).
I did another YouTube search, this time on “St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso),” and came up with this, originally recorded in 1956:
It opens with the orchestra playing something that is obviously based on W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” The orchestra does this and that, reaches a climax at about 2:05, and then cuts off. We then hear Armstrong play a cadenza, the same one that’s on the film soundtrack. Then his All Stars join him in a performance of Handy’s song, which he’s performed who knows how many times before; it was a staple in his repertoire. At about 5:26 Armstrong is joined by the full orchestra (thus fulfilling the basic demands of the concerto grosso form) and this and that with the orchestra, and then Armstrong, the All Stars, join the orchestra to the end at 8:40 or so. Relatively little of that shows up in the soundtrack of Maestro, just Armstrong’s cadenza and the tango section of “St. Louis Blues.”
Where’s that 1956 performance from? The soundtrack indicates that it involves something called the “Lewisohn Stadium Symphony Orchestra.” What’s that? Well, another search turned up an entry from the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives about a concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in 1956 at Lewisohn Stadium on July 14. It quotes from a review that appeared in The New York Times on July 16:
An evening of jazz was tried at Lewisohn Stadium Saturday night for the first time in the thirty-one year history of the Stadium Concerts. With Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars and the Dave Brubeck Quartet as the attractions, the program drew a sellout crowd of 21,000.
As an added feature, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Stadium Symphony Orchestra and Mr. Armstrong's group in a performance of ‘St. Louis Blues.’ This was filmed for use in a motion picture about Mr. Armstrong that is being produced by Edward R. Murrow. W.C. Handy, who wrote the famous blues, was present for this special presentation of the tune.
We now know about that particular connection between Armstrong and Bernstein, they’d worked together on that performance. (I should have guessed it.)
Here’s a video clip showing the “St. Louis Blues” segment:
We see Bernstein and the orchestra at the beginning; Armstrong's cadenza starts are roughly 02:18. At 02:52 we see a shot of W.C. Handy in the audience. At 03:29 we get a shot of Bernstein, arms folded, listening to Armstrong and his All Stars (Barrett Deems, drums, Edmond Hall, clarinet, Billy Kyle, piano, Dale Jones, bass, Trummy Young, trombone). At 03:20 Bernstein and the orchestra come in; they pick things up at 04:19, with Bernstein conducting in his typically enthusiastic style (FWIW, without baton). That and everything else in that clip had me laughing out loud to the end of the clip (and brought a few tears to the eyes).
There’s a long and convoluted tangle of stories about people and culture meeting in that one concert. W.C. Handy, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Al Jolson, Leopold Stokowski, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, those are some names that come immediately to mind. Explaining just what they’re doing here, all scrambled together, that would take a while, and take me even further from the film at hand, Maestro. There is a perfectly reasonable sense in which all of that is implied by the presence of that music in the soundtrack. But it would be absurd to maintain that you need to ‘know’ all that in order to ‘appreciate’ or ‘understand’ the film.
All of that aside, we need to ask just what’s happening at that point in the film. Given that Bernstein got married in 1951 and judging from the ages of the children we see in that section of the film, it’s reasonable to think that that’s where we are in Bernstein’s life, the mid-1950s. But the film doesn’t show that concert. Rather, that bit of music shows up at 42 minutes or so into the film when Bernstein is at his Connecticut home with his wife, Felicia, their children, and various others, including his sister, Shirley. We see Bernstein and Felicia talking on the second-story terrace. Bernstein’s been lamenting that he feels no inspiration. We cut to the lawn where we see Felicia and Shirley talking about the “price” one pays “for being in my brother’s orbit.” As that conversation comes to a close, we hear Armstrong’s opening cadenza on the soundtrack.
The scene shifts to Bernstein and Felicia playing on the lawn with their oldest daughter while a Nanny holds their infant son in the background. As we hear Armstrong playing the tango section we cut to an indoor party where couples dancing (including Bernstein and Felicia), still with Armstrong on the soundtrack. During the scene the soundtrack shifts to an “Adagietto” from some Mahler symphony (no. 5). And then we’re back outdoors, with Bernstein cradling an infant (his son, Alex) and walking toward the camera. And then sitting on a swing alongside a friend (Aaron Copeland). As Bernstein is leaning over and kissing the baby we segue to a mostly dark shot where we see Felicia in the distance, beyond the edge of a curtain. On the curtain we see a moving shadow, of Bernstein conducting. I assume he’s conducting the Mahler, and then the visual shifts back to Connecticut and kids on the lawn (c. 46:01), with Bernstein puffing away on a cigarette. The visual stays in Connecticut for a bit and then, WHAM!, at roughly 46:41 we see Bernstein on the podium of some performance. As the music continues in the soundtrack, he leaves the podium – I assume the performance is over – and rushes into his wife’s embrace while we hear audience applause. And then we zip forward to 1971 in the Dakota apartment (I’m looking at the screen play), where a party is in progress.
What’s going on? In the film we see Bernstein feeling his creativity is gone and his wife musing about strains in the marriage. And then there’s a triumph on the podium. During the ‘down’ part of the visuals we hear what has to be a triumphant concert on the soundtrack, one featuring the music of a black composer and black performers. That music is switched for a very different piece of music from a different tradition, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in a successful performance conducted by Bernstein. The performance, like the Armstrong, is public, while the conversations we overheard are private. The Wikipedia entry for the Mahler indicates that the “Adagietto” “may be Mahler's most famous composition and is the most frequently performed of his works.” Moreover, “It is said to represent Mahler's love song to his wife Alma.” In context, Bernstein’s love for Felicia?
What are we to make of all this? I don’t know, nor, to tell the truth, do I much care just what it ‘means.’ How it works, that’s a different (kind of) question, one I find more interesting. (And more important.)
However, I think the cultural history of “maestro” is even more fascinating, and certainly has a far greater bearing on my thoughts about its modern usage. Along with words like masterful, masterpiece, and genius – all three of which are also inherently gendered, etymologically – the concept of the maestro was also inseparable from certain racial and class profiles, not least because through the centuries of its usage, it denoted values and opportunities afforded only to wealthy, abled males from dominant (European) cultures.
In the 20th century, beyond a demographic truism, the term came to be synonymous with the sort of toxic hierarchical and tyrannical behaviour that was fetishized in the popular image of conductors like Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan. On the surface, it makes for a slightly outlandish “demanding genius” caricature, on which many very ordinary conductors were (and are) happy to trade. But beneath the marketing hype, it also led to gross abuses of power, predatory sexual behaviour, and a pervasive culture of bullying and autocracy. Unfortunately, it still plays out in the often-unhealthy relationship between orchestras and conductors, and the incredibly outdated pay-scale differential between superstar conductors and the players they work with.
I can't help but thinking of that in the context of the current movie, Maestro, which I've been blogging about recently. I've read a number of comments from about the film and about Bernstein; all thought highly of him. But few, if indeed any, of those were from musicians who had worked with him. The movie certainly doesn't depict him as behaving tyrannically toward the musicians he worked with, but then we don't see all that much of him actually working with them as opposed to conducting performances. Two scenes come to mind. One is at an open rehearsal with the Philharmonic, where we see him talking to the audience, but not interacting with the musicians. The other scene is close to the end where he's working with a young conductor at Tanglewood, which whom he dances later at a party. There he's only interacting with the student, and its the student who interacts with the orchestra. I've seen a fair amount of rehearsal footage of Bernstein and he doesn't seem tyrannical there. But off-stage, how was he there?
FWIW, I'm on a trumpet player's listserve and I've read many stories of orchestral trumpet players standing up to conductors.
The film gets right so much of who Bernstein was, allowing us to take in how he was, all at once, ahead of his time, a victim of his time, a gay man, a bisexual, a father, a nonconformist, a narcissist. “Maestro” is full of heart and craft, with riveting lead performances. It’s a film about a musician that doesn’t exaggerate or glorify the creative process, or suggest artists are either superhuman or subhuman. [...]
Although it’s clear that Cooper’s directorial hand is nothing less than breathtaking, the film becomes increasingly disquieting. In the first third of the film, the script sets up an intoxicating premise: a queer Jewish man inhabiting the already-antisemitic world of classical music falls in love with a woman. It can happen. It particularly could happen in a world in which gay artists were always in danger of being exposed and ejected from the institutions they depended on. In the ’40s and ’50s, when Bernstein and Montealegre met and married, psychiatry still considered homosexuality a disorder to be treated or cured. (A note on my language describing Bernstein’s sexuality: In an early letter, Montealegre tells Bernstein “you are a homosexual and may never change.” More recently, his daughter Jamie has referred to him alternately as gay and bisexual.)
And then here:
“Heterosexuals have never known what to do with queer people, if they think of their existence at all,” Carmen Maria Machado writes, in a memoir tracing the invisibility of certain narratives. I don’t want to believe that the director and his co-writer are incapable of writing well-rounded gay characters, but paradoxically, the failure to render Bernstein’s male lovers as three-dimensional people distracts from the central couple’s romance. I longed for more insight into the nuances of Bernstein and Montealegre’s conundrum, and details of his queer life could have provided it. Flattening Bernstein’s gay relationships to a series of knowing glances and brief encounters seemed to underline the main couple’s essential heterosexuality, rather than emphasizing their relationship’s complexity.
Because, in life, Bernstein kept seeing men — and not only at the events the film allows us to briefly glimpse. Ultimately, he left Montealegre for a younger man, Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), who worked in classical radio. If included, this risky decision could have been a great turning point in the film. Scenes of Bernstein attending the dying Montealegre are moving; they could have been more meaningful if we had understood the drama and sacrifice behind his loving presence at her bedside. He didn’t just drop out of one or two coke-fueled soirees; he left a relationship.
0:00 Ivan Fischer
2:07 Seiji Ozawa
4:02 Gilbert Kaplan
5:49 Bernard Haitink
7:49 Alondra de la Parra
9:46 Daniel Stewart
11:46 Marin Alsop
14:02 Mark Bartley
16:06 Ricardo Chailly
18:32 Mariss Jansons
20:34 Benjamin Zander
21:41 Valery Gergiev
23:06 Zubin Mehta
24:39 Christian Vásquez
26:49 Leonard Bernstein
29:15 THE BEST ONE [i. e. the one in the film, Maestro]
I’ve been posting about Maestro (2023) since the last week of December, which isn’t what I had in mind when I made that first post. I thought that would be it, but this that and the other and I’m still thinking about it. Then, yesterday (actually, it was a day or two before, but what’s the diff?) I noticed that Netflix had Jack Black’s School of Rock (2003). I had pleasant if somewhat vague memories of having watched it on TV at some undefined time in the past. “Why not?” thought I to myself, “Why not?” So I did. It was a heart-warming laugh-riot, which Maestro was not.
One thought I had immediately: Why wasn’t there more of this in Maestro? By this I mean the sheer physical joy of making music. Without that, no Lenny, no New York Philharmonic, no London Symphony, no overwhelming performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony (aka Resurrection). It’s like my musical compadre Rick Rourke said, “It’s the closest you can get to really being, feeling totally happy with yourself.” I mean, it may not look like it with the jumping and the grimacing, but Lenny was having a riot up there on the podium, and the orchestra was into too. That’s what made him great, no? YES!
That’s what I was getting at in my 3QD piece about Maestro. I’m talking about Mahler’s First 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.
What I had in mind was the role of lead trumpet in a big band. While I have played lead in college big bands, I was mostly playing second, the so-called “ride” chair (at least that’s what it was called in olden days), for the trumpet soloist. But I once had that kind of experience playing with the Sage City Symphony, a community symphony in Bennington, Vermont.
We were performing Variations on “America” (originally written for organ). There’s a movement where the principal trumpet plays the melody in the middle register. Nothing complicated or tricky, just the melody, straight. I wasn’t playing principal. While I was playing second, that part was cued in, so I decided to go for it. And I did (I’m talking about the section that starts at about 06:12 in the linked recording, something of a “shout chorus” in big band terms). What fun. And no one was harmed, though some of the string players looked back at us (trumpeters) with wide-open eyes and raised eyebrows as if to say “WTF?” Yeah!
And that’s how Jack Black played his rock guitarist man-child in School of Rock. His lead guitar gyrations make Lenny look like a model of afternoon-tea decorum. Since Black is a musician, I assume that’s really him singing and playing in this clip from the opening of the film:
Watch him starting at 01:25. Over the top? Yes, I suppose, maybe. But not for rock and roll. Fun? Hell yeah!
How would you get that kind of energy into a movie like Maestro? Beats me. That’s not my job. Were they trying for it? I don’t know. If not, should they have been? Yes. Why? Because without that, no real, deep down, music. I don’t care what the genre. That’s where music lives and breathes. Getting that into film. Not so easy.
Especially when you have a complicated story to tell. And the story in Maestro, the story of the marriage, the story of the marriage mixed with performing, was certainly complicated. But that’s why those guys make the big bucks, to tell complicated stories, and tell them well. And I’m not sure how well they told the story, whatever the story is. Judging from what I’ve heard in some of the review clips, I missed major story points the first two times I watched Maestro. Now that I know what’s going on, at least I think I do, I picked up on it the third time through. But if you don’t already know more than a little about Bernstein’s life – which, I suspect, excludes much of the audience for the film, many of whom were born after Bernstein died (in 1990) – then piecing things together from the scraps strung together on screen, that’s going to be hit or miss. Maybe that matters, maybe not. Sure, if you’re concerned with biographical truth, it matters, but there’s artistic truth, which may well diverge from biographical truth. And, at some point and at some level, that’s certainly true for Maestro. Still, I don’t know. It’s complicated.
In contrast, School of Rock is straightforward. Dewey Finn, man-boy guitarist and vocalist, gets kicked out of his rock band. He lucks into a gig as a substitute teacher at a toney private school. There he decided to get the kids to form a rock band so he can place a band into the Big Competition. The kids are into it. Of course, they have to keep this secret from the rest of the school and from the parents. This leads to inevitable complications. It is inherent in such films that the complications will break down just before the climax. And it is equally inherent that they will be overcome. The kids do well in the competition, which they enter on the sly. They don’t win, but the parents have crashed the show (well, they do pay for their tickets) and are won over by the kids (& Dewey in short pants). Everyone is happy.
It's a straightforward feel-good family film. Which Maestro is not. There we have a big climax about 3/5 to 2/3 of the way through, the performance of the finale to Mahler’s Second. That creates a technical problem: Now what do we do? We watch Bernstein’s wife die is what we do. He’s with her at the end, and then... You see the problem.
Two different kinds of film. Two different sets of technical problems. Those in School of Rock are well-known, and the solutions taken are imaginative and fun. Those in Maestro...I don’t know. Does the film work, dramatically? Not sure.
* * * * *
BTW, Sarah Silverman has a supporting role in each film.
And at about the same time School of Rock was being filmed and actual honest to God School of Rock was established as a business. The causal relationship between the two is not clear (judging from the Wikipedia article), but the school is open in fourteen countries. There’s a branch in Hoboken, NJ, where I live.
Maestro Movie Review today! Beyond The Trailer host Grace Randolph's reaction & review of the 2023 movie from Bradley Cooper about Leonard Bernstein! Will it win all the Oscars?! Should you see the full movie in theaters or on Netflix?! Enjoy Maestro in 2023 and be sure to make Beyond The Trailer your first stop for movie and entertainment news here on YouTube today!
CHAPTER TIMES
Lincoln Center - 00:00
Hate & Respect - 1:23
Visual Symphony - 2:00
Coopers Bernstein - 3:48
Young Peoples Concerts - 4:53
Ignoring the Work - 6:22
Woman Behind The Man - 7:22
Carey Mulligan - 10:51
Bradley Cooper - 11:40
Bernsteins Evolution - 13:53
The Bernstein Family - 14:38
So Little Music - 16:30
Bernstein Legacy - 17:01
Grand Visual Flourishes - 18:22
Other Cast Standouts - 18:43
Conclusion - 18:58
That’s a topic that was central to a famous interview that Edward R. Murrow conducted with Bernstein and his wife. About 38 minutes into the film, Murrow asks: “Lenny, what’s the big difference in the life of Composer Bernstein and Conductor Bernstein?” Here’s Bernstein’s reply:
Well I suppose it’s a difference. It’s personality difference which occurs between any composer or any creator versus any performer. Any performer, whether it’s Toscanini or Tallulah Bankhead, or whoever it is, leads a kind of public life. An extrovert life, if you will. It’s an oversimplified word, but something like that. Whereas a creative person, uh, sits alone in this great studio that you see here and writes all by himself and communicates with the world in a very private way and lives alone in this great studio that you see here and writes all by himself and communicates with the world in a very private way and lives a rather grand inner life rather than a grand outer life. And if you carry around both personalities, I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic and that’s the end of it.
Here, as reference material, is the original interview.
The passage I quoted above starts at about 03:27. If you compare the two, you’ll see that some relatively minor changes have been made for the film.
* * * * *
My 3QD piece centered on how Bernstein presented himself as a conductor and, in particular, how he conducted himself on the podium. He had a very flamboyant style, which was widely criticized at the time.
For what it’s worth, I sensed that there was something off in the way Cooper conducted the finale to Mahler’s Second Symphony, the dramatic climax of the film, which occurred about three fifths or so through the film. I was thinking that maybe Cooper was too flamboyant, but I was wrong about that. Subsequently I listed to critiques by two young conductorsno one has ever heard of (by which I mean me) who pointed out that his timing was a bit off. OK, so my intuition was correct, but my understanding of it was not.
That Cooper’s timing was off, that’s a minor issue. What’s interesting is that he spent so much time – six years of preparation – trying to get it right. That’s the remarkable thing. Who’d notice if he nailed it? Why does that matter?
That’s one thing. There’s also the historical question, which the film avoided. Why? These days flamboyant conducting is not the issue it was in Bernstein’s time. I suspect that bringing up the issue would have been a distraction.
If they’d have gone into the question, what would they have turned up? That’s a tricky question, and I suppose different people would come up with different answers. Were I to tackle the question, I’d argue that by the end of the 19th century classical music had been assigned to an abstract non-physical realm of Platonic ideals. Flamboyant physical movement shatters that illusion as it brings attention to the conductor’s body and so physicalizes the music. That, however, would require an argument, which is more than I want to present in this note.
* * * * *
Instead, I want to conclude with a very different interview. Back on July 2, 1966, Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington were interviewed for television. Here’s the interview:
Both men were well known, both were used to presenting themselves to the public and had been doing it for years. I have a post where I analyze this interview as a performance. Because that’s what it is. They’re not on stage. They’re having a casual conversation outdoors, seated at a table at what appears to be a country club of some kind. But they’re on camera talking with an interviewer and are keenly aware of the public nature of their conversation. And, as I argue in my post, the conversation takes on the character of a negotiation between Prof. Jazz and Prof. Classical on behalf of their respective musical traditions. From my post:
5:05, Ellington, “...what I’ve been trying in talking...trying to de-categorize this, it’s American music.” Note that Ellington did not particularly like the term “jazz.” He goes on, “it’s getting to the point where the modern contemporary composer and the guy who’s supposed to be a modern jazz composer, they all come out of the same conservatories.” [...] Bernstein remarks that Ellington was one of the pioneers; he replies that he didn’t come out of the conservatory [laughter]. Bernstein refers to Ellington’s “so-called symphonic jazz” & Ellington remarks that he “had a conservatory in the capital theater...sit there and listen to the symphony before the picture.”
5:53, Bernstein offers, “you wrote symphonic jazz and I wrote jazz symphonies.” They laugh, Ellington offers his hand, Bernstein accepts. As musical analysis that phrase is, if not exactly nonsense, nearly so. As a proposal in a cultural negotiation, which this is, it is very good. And the chiasmic formulation (“symphonic jazz,” “jazz symphonies”) is crucial to the proposal. By turning it into wordplay, something Ellington knew very well, that phrase makes it work as a proposal and elicits both the laughter and the handshake. The words are a proposal while the handshake is the mutual acceptance.
THAT’s the world in which Bernstein evolved his public persona. How did the parallel world of African American music affect so-called Classical music and its sense of itself in the world? The relationship between these two musical cultures was an important theme in the the cultural life of 20th century America starting in the 1920s and continuing through the 1960s and beyond. That’s the world in which Bernstein gyrated and gesticulated while conducting.
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.
I’ve been watching Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic starring and directed by Bradley Cooper. I’m, say, 3/5 of the way through my second viewing and don’t know whether I’ll (have time to) finish. The first viewing took two, or was it three? sittings. That says more about me and the many things on my mind these days than it does about the film. Chances are that if I’d seen in a theater, especially a packed theatre, I’d have been attentive the whole way through. No problem.
Not sure what I think. Here’s the trailer:
The music you hear on the soundtrack is from Mahler’s Second Symphony. A bit over midway through the film we see the final moments of performance (glimpsed at 1:36 in the trailer, then in rehearsal 1:44, and when it’s over, & 2:19). 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.
Here's a question: When Lenny – let’s call him that, the public performing persona – was conducting, was he acting or where his (rather flamboyant) gestures “authentic”? I know Cooper was acting; after all, this is a movie, and he’s the star. But I thought Cooper’s performance of Lenny’s performance was over-wrought. I’m not sure that 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 microseconds.
Look, I’m a trumpet player, a semi-virtuoso trumpet player. The trumpet is physically demanding. But the player has some leeway in just how much they reveal about those demands to the audience. It’s not at all obvious to me that Bernstein had to do all that in order to give direction to 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.
He led a very public life, more so than just about any other classical musician. 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 what he actually did on the podium?
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 it is now. So, 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 2.5 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, was partly responsible for the Mahler revival of the 1960s, and, for that matter, I too loved Mahler, still do, probably.
I say “probably” after hearing Bernstein’s remarks on those pieces of music. All that death, all that gloom and doom. Is that what I was listening to all those years? A freakin’ death wish set to music? It sounds like late Romantic Classical music 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 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 cut off.
Here’s an interview with Bradley Smith, director and star of the film:
Here's a post where I comment on a most interesting interview between Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein in 1966. Though it takes the form of a conversation, this is very much a performance between these two, a performance and a negotiation about their respective musics.
A rehearsal conducted by Bernstein with a ravishing performance from Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa: