69: “Maestro” Reviewed

Lenny's biggest stan sounds off

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Victor. Here’s your hint: This composer became, at the age of 7, the youngest student to be admitted to study violin at the Vienna Conservatory. No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 68
Leoš Janáček, Kátya Kabanová

I’m preparing this week’s edition well in advance, so apologies to anyone else who’s weighed in, but even with just two entries, it’s been a very successful round. Joey listened and guessed Janáček as the composer, but leave it to Listener Kevin, Tone Prose’s reigning opera queen, to email in with the exact opera and even scene! We expect nothing less.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Symposium after Cooper’s “Maestro”

Prologue

Who am I (Will) to review Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein new Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro? Well, I’m just some guy. But it so happens that I’m some guy who has watched every Bernstein concert, every Bernstein documentary, and read every Bernstein book (both the ones he wrote and the ones written about him.) I can’t say I’ve listened to every recording he ever made, but I’ve listened to plenty. I know all his pieces — I had collected them on CD by the time I was 17 — and I’ve conducted many of them, including two full productions of West Side Story, making it the work I have conducted in performance more than any other. 

I’ve made a pilgrimage to Lenny's childhood home in Boston and I’ve visited his grave in Brooklyn on no fewer than five occasions, always bringing a single red rose to place on his headstone. I once had the opportunity to help catalog the collection of objects left in his Connecticut music studio, at which time I tried on several of his clothes and stole a single handkerchief, which I now don as a talisman at all my concerts. Leonard Bernstein was, is, and shall ever be my idol (though Stephen Sondheim is my God.)

And even all of that puts me in the minor leagues of Bernstein afición. You’ve still got plenty of people out there like Marin Alsop and John Mauceri who studied with Bernstein and are now making careers conducting MASS and On the Town. But I watch them conduct, and I can tell you this: none of them watched Lenny close enough to understand how he moved his body the way he did. (Bradley Cooper definitely did not.)

Omnibus

Now that you know my priors, you’ll likely understand that it was hard for me to judge this film subjectively because I had so many objective reactions to moments that were portrayed in the film that I’ve seen on video or read about a hundred times. I had the same response to TÁR. And though TÁR didn’t portray an actual historical personage, it sought to portray a world with which I am deeply familiar, and with so much of its portrayal ringing false, I was constantly distracted.

Maestro spent a lot of its time recreating iconic photos, audio clips, and video segments. The Bernstein family photo shoot in Connecticut, for example, or the demo record of On the Town for Jerome Robbins where Lenny and Aaron Copland play the score on two pianos, or the Tanglewood masterclass with that sweaty kid.

I thought those were the weakest bits of the movie; why watch the recreations when you can see the originals? I get it, not everybody’s seen them, and they're iconic. But to any Lennyheads in the audience the discrepancies between reality and recreation are going to stick out, and to anyone who’s coming in fresh these moments are not particularly compelling in the context of the film. Plus, they fail to portray the sheer enormity of Bernstein’s accomplishment as a creative being in the world. When you just show one dance episode from On The Town, one TV interview, one concert... it doesn’t add up to much.

For me, the experience of watching this movie was a little like watching The Crown. The fun of that show is watching the scenes where we see an imagining of what happened behind the palace walls, the conversations, the politics, the interpersonal ups and downs. I thought that the strongest bits of Maestro were the scenes between Lenny and Felicia after they were grown up and dealing with the strains of their ill-fated marriage. Clearly their relationship was supposed to have been the focus of the movie, and I wish that the focus had been tighter.

Book

Here’s my big script note: not gay enough. I think we needed to see more of what Lenny got up to when left to his own devices.

Even though I think you could have cut the whole first act from the script (the black & white act), if you were going to keep it, I think we should have seen much more of the conflict from Lenny about going into his marriage. He and Felicia had a four-year courtship. He knew he was gay, and he must have been terrified about entering into a marriage with a woman. But he also knew that he was destined for professional greatness and the only way he could achieve it was as a family man. This was all hinted at, but I think it could have been strengthened and expanded.

I would really love to talk to a muggle about their thoughts about this movie, someone who has no knowledge of Leonard Bernstein, much less of the world of orchestral / show music. Sadly, I don’t really have anyone in my life who fits that description! What would they think of it? Would they understand who Aaron Copland was or Serge Koussevitzy or Jerome Robbins? These people turn up as characters in the movie, and I think you kind of have to know who they are to understand why they’re there or why they’re significant. (I wish there had been a Sondheim character cameo!)

The Players

I’ll give Brad Cooper a solid 8/10 for his Bernstein impersonation. He got the voice pretty accurate, though he was hindered by him not having smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day for several decades. (But lord almighty did the characters in this movie smoke — and I give Brad credit for that portrayal, because the real life people really did smoke like chimneys!)

I thought Cooper’s old Bernstein was much better than his young Bernstein. For one thing, the age makeup was more convincing in the advanced years; he neither looked nor acted convincingly like a 25-year-old at the beginning of the movie.

The thing that lacked in his portrayal was Lenny’s oozing charisma, and his knowingness about the fact that he was always sort of portraying a character to the world, while also sort of believing that he was that character. I think it’s telling that one of today’s biggest movie stars doesn’t have half of what Lenny had in the razzle-dazzle department.

Carey Mulligan was excellent as Felicia, though I wish she had gotten half the make-up budget allotted to Brad Cooper. My favorite bits of casting were Sarah Silverman as Lenny’s sister Shirley and Maya Hawke as his daughter Jamie.

Regiekonzept

In Barbra Streisand’s new autobiography, she reveals that she wanted to direct a movie adaptation of Gypsy with her playing the role of Mama Rose, but that Sondheim wouldn’t let her because he thought the starring role was too demanding to do both. I kind of wish he had had a similar conversation with Mr. Cooper.

That’s not to say it’s badly directed. It’s certainly showily directed. There are so many artsy flourishes, like the use of black & white in the 1940s & 50s scenes versus color starting in the 60s scenes, with the appropriate graininess applied to the film stock across the decades (and the aspect ratios.) The dream ballet sequence in the On the Town sequence jumped out, an interesting and appropriate choice given the pervasiveness of that device in the Broadway theater of the time, but the fact that that sort of stylized allusion never came back into the filmmaking apparatus left one wanting.

I thought a lot of the choices worked pretty well, and I guess I give him credit for taking big swings, but in another way I wish he had calmed down his stylization just a bit so that the story could stand on its own two legs. Having said that, I think that if I were going to pick one over the other, I’d probably have wanted him to direct the movie rather than act in it. Why?

The Lenny Leap

What people always want to know when a conductor watches a movie about conducting is: how was the conducting?

Well, I’m here to tell you that Bradley Cooper’s conducting performance was the unforgivable sin of the movie, the fly in the ointment, the rotten apple that spoiled the bunch.

In an interview in Variety, Cooper said that he studied conducting for six years, attending rehearsals with Gustavo Dudamel and taking lessons with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. If that be the case, I gotta say, Bradley Cooper’s performance in Maestro is about the worst possible advertisement for the YNS School of Conducting.

It was bad enough when Cate Blanchett made a muck of the conducting sequences in TÁR, but Lydia Tár wasn’t a real person. Bradley Cooper is attempting to imitate the conducting of the single greatest, most technically astute conductor who ever practiced the craft.

Let me take you on a little tangent here: for a number years, my friend Will Slocombe, himself a movie director, was trying to get funding to make a sports comedy about a preternaturally gifted tennis player, and I remember very clearly what he said about casting: for a movie about a guy who’s great at playing tennis, you’ve got to find a great tennis player for the starring role. You can coach a decent enough acting performance out of him, but you can’t do it the other way around. I wish that’s what Cooper had done here, but of course, only like five people know or care about the actual craft of conducting, and that includes major critics.

How is it that actors can be quite so bad at conducting? Don’t they study dance and singing, and do all sorts of physical body training? Why couldn’t Brad Cooper get anywhere near the vicinity of a beat? And how — with all of his supposed “preparation” — could he not have seen that there was meaning behind Bernstein’s intensity and athleticism on the podium?

And sorry, I do have to write one more paragraph about this, because what was even more galling is that the big conducting scene (Mahler 2 at Ely Cathedral) wasn’t even necessary to the plot. Cooper called it “the climax of the movie,” but it was no such thing. It was a completely expendable scene, and thus, as if we were left with any doubt, it proved that Maestro was the ne plus ultra of vanity projects.

The Joy of Music

I quite liked the music drops in Maestro, especially in the first act, when they used lots of music from On the Waterfront and On the Town. The soundtrack got noticeably less musical as the film progressed, but it didn’t bother me. It was very funny when “The Rumble” from West Side Story was overlaid on the scene with Felicia casting the evil eye at her romantic rival Tom Cothran.

My one critique for the soundtrack is that I wish they could have found a place for Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs. It’s so great!

Minor Details

Much like The Crown, Maestro proves that we are living in a golden age of technical prowess when it comes to period pieces. The clothes, the hairstyles, the props, the film stock, etc. are all spot on. (Look, I wasn’t there, but again, I’ve watched all the documentaries so many times.)

One detail I can personally attest to: when Felicia puts Lenny in the proverbial doghouse by setting his pajamas and slippers outside their hotel bedroom, you think to yourself “certainly the embroidered initials on those slippers are so gaudy that no actual person could have had them made.”

Not so! From the same photo shoot as above:

Finale

There’s no doubt that this was Bradley Cooper’s Oscar-bait ego trip, an even vainer vanity project than A Star is Born. But it was a vanity project about a vain man, so in a way, I think Bernstein might have appreciated it (though he would have been horrified by the conducting sequence.)

In the end though, despite a few really good scenes, Maestro — as a viewing experience, a Lenny experience, or a bit of filmic art — is not an improvement over the best of the Bernstein documentaries, Reaching for the Note, produced by the PBS American Masters series.

Thankfully, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, and that’s where I’ll leave you now:

Tone Praise

Leonard Bernstein, Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs

It’s just gotta be. It’s so good!

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