Bravo, Maestro
With the film Maestro having been in theaters and now streaming on Netflix, I dive into the film and provide my take from a composer’s perspective.
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre Cohn in “Maestro” copyright Netflix 2023
Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s bioflick about Leonard Bernstein, is now streaming on Netflix, following limited release in theaters. I cannot recommend it highly enough. As a portrait of the man who was arguably the single most important American classical musician of the 20th century, Maestro is an invaluable accounting. As the picture of a man tortured by his own ambivalent sexuality vs. the public’s expectations, it is dramatic without ever pandering to either conservative or “woke” values. And as the honest assessment of a tragic marriage, it towers as a work of cinematic art.
Cooper, who directed the film, portrays Bernstein over a period of decades, from his sudden explosion on the cultural scene at age 25, to his final, lonely years. At the center of the story: Bernstein’s marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn (played by Carey Mulligan). Cooper’s performance is staggeringly true-to-life. I watched Bernstein on television from the time I was very small until the 1980s, when I met the man in the last years of his life, and I marvel at the resemblance Cooper has elicited, not only with makeup but with close attention to voice and mannerisms. As Bernstein grew older, his voice grew gravelly from all those incessant cigarettes – he was rarely without one – and Cooper gets it perfectly. More than this, Cooper has brought us the Bernstein of many moods, especially his dark and conflicted ones. In a scene already famous, we see Cooper’s Bernstein lying to his daughter about his bisexuality, only to catch on his face a moment later an expression of ambivalence and regret.
Carey Mulligan turns in an Oscar-worthy performance as Felicia, whose steady hand supported Bernstein in his tumultuous early years, but who suffered neglect and loneliness later on. From Felicia’s budding romance with young Lenny to her hard, last, cancer-stricken days, Mulligan makes us feel her character’s love and pain and outrage and gentleness.
Bernstein led an exceedingly rich life, forcing Cooper to choose carefully those elements that best suited the story he wished to tell. West Side Story, Bernstein’s monumental success as a Broadway composer, is mentioned only in passing, TV’s famous Young People’s Concerts as well. And you’d never know that in the 1960s the Bernsteins hosted a controversial fund-raising event for the Black Panthers, only to be forced to face the fact that the Panthers were anti-Israel, an event made famous – or infamous -- by Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine article.
Instead, Cooper wisely chose to spend eight minutes of film depicting Bernstein conducting the finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony, his signature work as a conductor. In doing so, Cooper made demanding work for himself. He had to study the rudiments of conducting, and then throw them out the window by imitating Bernstein’s erratic, high-energy style on the podium. I was not at the concert depicted in the film, but I did see/hear Bernstein conduct Mahler 2 with the New York Philharmonic in 1986, and Cooper has captured the uncanny blend of wildness and precision that marked his conducting.
Bernstein was best-known as a conductor, while as a composer he was known primarily for West Side Story. But he wrote much more music than one Broadway score, and among the Bernstein works represented in Maestro we hear bits of: On the Town, Fancy Free, Age of Anxiety, Trouble in Tahiti, the overture to Candide, music from On the Waterfront, Chichester Psalms, and more. The piano piece that opens the film was written by Bernstein in tribute to his late wife.
See Maestro for the story but also note this: In Bernstein’s heyday (ca. 1945-1970) it was possible for one musician to bridge classical and popular music in a way that today’s gap between the two would not allow.
- Kenneth LaFave, 2023