As you watch the Netflix Bernstein biopic Maestro released for streaming on December 20, questions or curiosities may arise regarding Bernstein's musical life and the classical music culture and significant figures portrayed in the film. James Jacobs provides contextual basis and further explanations you might be left pondering about!
Maestro is not a traditional biopic. It’s an impressionistic ride through Leonard Bernstein’s life centered on his relationship with Felicia Montealegre, to whom he was married in 1951 until her death from lung cancer in 1978 at the age of 56, though it also covers the meteoric rise of his career from the age of 25 as well as a few scenes from the dozen years between her death and his own at the age of 72. (It’s fair to speculate that they both would have lived longer if they hadn’t been heavy smokers, a habit faithfully depicted in the film. What’s not shown is that Bernstein actually tasked someone with standing in the wings with a lit cigarette that the maestro would grab the moment he walked offstage between bows.) The film is not comprehensive and doesn’t purport to be, and, considering that Bernstein is one of the most well-documented musicians of all time, doesn’t need to be. His relationship with Felicia is an appropriate subject for a fictionalized movie about him, because it’s perhaps the one aspect of his life that he didn’t dramatize himself and isn’t readily available in one of hundreds of videos and recordings. It’s a passionate and complex love story that comes to life in thrilling performances by Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan.
The first thing we see on screen is a quote from Bernstein that begins: “A work of art does not answer questions; it provokes them.” That word - questions - is key to this movie and Bernstein’s life. Both Felicia and Lenny (I’m going to assume I can call him that) utter the phrase “Any questions?” at key moments in the film, which could only be a reference to its use in the final bars of Bernstein’s operetta Candide; when Dr. Pangloss asks that question just before the coda to “Make Our Garden Grow” it packs an unexpected emotional wallop, like the punchline to the ultimate cosmic joke that feels like the key to understanding the universe (or at least Voltaire), until the riotous applause that inevitably follows a few moments later breaks the spell.
But while it’s not referenced in the film, another significant context for that word in Bernstein’s career is the composition by the American composer Charles Ives called The Unanswered Question. Bernstein considered this strangely beautiful and mysterious piece, written in 1908, to be a prophecy for the crisis music faced in the 20th century, and he purloined its title for his series of six lectures at Harvard University in 1973 that represented the pinnacle of his achievement as an educator and philosopher, as a well as a peek behind the curtain as to his process as a composer and conductor. In this series he provoked many questions about how and what music is able to communicate; watching all six lectures provides a sort of Rosetta Stone to understanding what drove Bernstein as an artist.
It was also prophetic, because his ideas about music have proven to be durable. During much of Bernstein’s life he wasn’t taken seriously as a composer by the classical music establishment. (In 1965, the year Bernstein wrote Chichester Psalms, perhaps his most enduring non-theatrical work, the committee for the Pulitzer Prize for Music declined to give out an award because they didn’t deem any composition written that year to be worthy of it.) His music’s accessibility and legibility to the average listener was considered pandering and reactionary, a characterization that could not be less accurate. He got the last laugh, though he didn’t live to personally deliver it: Gen Z composers have followed in his footsteps in embracing tonality and stylistic diversity, and his own music continues to be performed while that of many of his contemporaries have been forgotten.
But back to the movie. When Lenny asks “Any questions?” many in the audience would raise their hand if they thought that Cooper’s impressively prosthetic-laden visage could answer them from the screen. Since that technology is not yet possible, perhaps I can be of some help.
What is the piece Bernstein plays on the piano in the beginning?
The piece the aged maestro plays at the beginning of the movie is a piano transcription of the Postlude to the first act of his 1983 opera A Quiet Place, the sequel to his 1951 opera Trouble in Tahiti (which we hear a snippet of later in the film.) While the earlier work is a comedic social satire tinged with melancholy, with a musical style not that different from the one he used for his Broadway musicals, the latter is a dark family drama reminiscent of Arthur Miller and Edward Albee which used Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as a model for its musical structure. In the earlier work works the character of the father, Sam, is clearly based on Bernstein’s father (also named Sam), while the latter opera’s depiction of a too-close-knit-for-comfort family gathered for the funeral of their mother, the children full of anger and recrimination for their father, is inescapably evocative of the Bernstein’s own family dynamic in the wake of Felicia’s death. A Quiet Place had a mixed reception to its premiere performances in the 1980s and was largely neglected until a well-received New York City Opera production in 2010 established it as a flawed but powerful American opera that contains some of Bernstein’s greatest music.
Bernstein's first appearance with the New York Philharmonic
The scene shifts to a studio apartment on November 14, 1943, in which Lenny receives the fateful phone call telling him that Bruno Walter, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is ill and unable to conduct that afternoon’s concert. Bernstein, the orchestra’s assistant conductor, is expected to lead the nationally broadcast concert without a rehearsal. If it seems in the movie like Carnegie Hall is just down the hall from his apartment, that's because it actually was. (The music used here in the film is from his soundtrack for On the Waterfront.) Bernstein was one of many artists who lived in the residential units above the hall, which had the least expensive rents in that neighborhood. (I myself almost lived in one of those apartments; I got as far as being shown a unit that I was told was directly underneath the one Bernstein had lived in. They offered me a lease, but I decided that even that reasonably priced apartment was too rich for my blood, and I ended up in Brooklyn like everyone else in 1995. It looked pretty much the same as it did in the movie.)
Manfred Overture
The program Bernstein was to conduct was very difficult, and began with a piece that's extremely challenging even for experienced conductors: the Manfred Overture by Robert Schumann. As referenced in the film, it begins with a rest on the downbeat followed by three notes that all begin on the off-beat. If the previous sentence doesn't compute, try this: sing "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." Sing it fairly quickly, beating time as you do it, one beat for every two syllables, on the "Twink"s, the "lit" and the "star". Now sing it but make the first syllables of "Twinkle" and "little" silent while still beating time as if you're singing them, and drop the "star", so it's (beat) -kle (beat) -kle (beat)-tle. It's not so easy. One could argue that Schumann made it unnecessarily hard - it's just three notes of equal length. But by making the conductor and musicians sweat over them, they're given a restless quality that fits the mood of the piece, and it also immediately establishes a bond of communication from the first note; everyone on stage has to be fully present and you can't mail it in. This is probably the riskiest possible way to start a concert with a conductor who hasn't rehearsed with the orchestra (and it's also a perfect metaphor for the beginning of a career in which it seemed he was always one step ahead of himself and the others around him.) It probably helped that Bernstein was obligated to begin the concert with the national anthem, which he could have used to establish a rapport with the ensemble. You can hear that historic concert below:
Fancy Free and Aaron Copland
The scene then shifts to the development of the ballet Fancy Free, Bernstein's first collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins. We see Bernstein play through his score with Aaron Copland to record it for Robbins' use. Robbins seems unimpressed by Bernstein, who, despite his triumph at the Philharmonic, was not yet a household name. But he could not have failed to be impressed that Bernstein got Copland to do this utilitarian task:
Copland was by this time one of the foremost American composers who had already written Lincoln Portrait, Rodeo, and Fanfare for the Common Man; the premiere of Appalachian Spring occurred six months after the premiere of Fancy Free. Bernstein and Copland had met in 1937 while Bernstein was still at Harvard, and by 1944 they had long been close friends.
(There are several references in this scene to Artur Rodzinski, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic who gave Bernstein his job there. Rodzinski himself was in his first season at the orchestra, and was fired midway through his fourth season after a bitter contract dispute. He famously packed a revolver on his hip while conducting, and at one point tried to strangle Bernstein in a rage of professional jealousy.)
The fateful meeting with Felicia at a party thrown by the great pianist Claudio Arrau
We then go to the crucial scene when Lenny meets Felicia. By this time over three years had passed, and Bernstein was now a celebrity, if still in the "promising young" category. The success of Fancy Free led to the even greater success of the Broadway musical On the Town, and his now-legendary debut with the NY Philharmonic had led to numerous return appearances with the orchestra as well as engagements in Europe and throughout the US.
On February 5, 1947 (the day before Felicia's 24th birthday) he went to a party at the home of the great pianist Claudio Arrau in the northeastern corner of the borough of Queens, following a concert in which he conducted him in the Brahms D minor piano concerto. He brought in tow his sister Shirley - a fine singer and musician in her own right who dabbled in film production and other endeavors but spent most of her life helping to manage her brother's affairs - as well as his friends and collaborators Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the great writing partners who deserve their own movie; they almost steal this one with their hilarious rendition of "Carried Away" from On the Town. which they not only wrote but starred in during its original Broadway run.
But back to Felicia. She was at the party because she was studying piano with Arrau. While she was musically talented, her piano lessons were mostly intended to keep up the ruse that she came to the United States to pursue music, when in truth her great passion was acting.
But I'm ahead of myself again. Felicia Montealegre Cohn (the combination of Spanish and Jewish surnames was instantly intriguing to Bernstein) was born in Costa Rica to a Costa Rican mother and an American Jewish father. She moved to Chile at a young age for her education. She and Bernstein bond over the fact that they had multiple artistic interests and that they discovered their avocations on their own with little help from their non-artistic parents.
Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood
Let's skip ahead now to the scene in Tanglewood, where Felicia joined Lenny for a meal with, among others, Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitsky.
Koussevitsky deserves a paragraph. Born in Russia, and a renowned double bass virtuoso and respected composer as well as a conductor, he was Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 25 years. He conducted the world premieres of many works including Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Prokofiev's Violin Concerto no. 1, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, the version for full orchestra of Copland's Appalachian Spring, and Bernstein's Symphony no. 2 "The Age of Anxiety". He also commissioned many other works including Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Britten's Peter Grimes. He was one of Bernstein's most important mentors and was far more than the Old World fuddy-duddy he's depicted as in the film who wanted him to change his surname to Burns to try to avoid antisemitism. (It should be noted that Bruno Walter changed his name from Bruno Schlesinger for precisely that reason, and Bernstein himself had previously adopted the name "Lenny Amber" for one of his first jobs, arranging and transcribing jazz and pop tunes for publication.) If he seemed unduly concerned about the effect that working on Broadway shows would have on his classical music career, it's only because no one had done that before (though not for lack of trying: both Britten and Stravinsky tried and failed to get their work on Broadway, and near the end of his life Shostakovich expressed regret that he never wrote a pop musical.) Also, Koussevitsky basically created Tanglewood, which is why its main performance venue, the Shed, is named for him.
The fantasy dance sequence that follows, in which Lenny and Felicia are swept into the world of a Broadway musical, contains elements of both Fancy Free and On the Town, which aside from their common premise (three sailors on a day's leave in New York) share no musical or choreographic material.
If you've ever been to Tanglewood you will immediately recognize the scenes that were shot there. (Please try to get there at some point in your life. It's worth the trip.) The uncomfortable scene when Felicia meets the clarinetist David Oppenheim occurs in the Shed, as does the conducting lesson near the end of the film. And there are several pastoral scenes of Lenny and Felicia walking through lustrous green fields that were shot on Tanglewood's grounds.
Important missing biographical details around 1950's
At this point we're only about 35 minutes into the movie. We skip ahead to 1955 - in the interim in real life Felicia and Lenny break up, she pursues her acting career and takes up with the actor Richard Hart, he dies, she and LB get back together and marry and have their first two children, Lenny has run into trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee which temporarily suspends his passport and makes the NY Phil stop engaging him for five years, he writes the scores for On the Waterfront, Trouble in Tahiti, and Wonderful Town and has started appearing on television in CBS' educational Omnibus series, and he has just started working on Candide and West Side Story simultaneously. Here is the interview with Edward R. Murrow that is recreated in the film:
What did they mean by "our little Joan of Arc"?
In a later scene at a party at their apartment in the famous Dakota building on the Upper West Side, someone mentions to Felicia that she's "our little Joan of Arc." While this is meant to refer to her determination to keep herself and her family together despite Lenny's increasing "sloppiness", it's also a reference to a performance in 1958 when she actually played Joan of Arc, with her husband conducting, in Arthur Honegger's powerful oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake:
Biographical accuracy of the Candide scene
The scene where LB is rehearsing a chorus in "Make Your Garden Grow" from Candide, with Felicia in attendance, is a bit puzzling: the time in the film seems to be the late 60s and I could find no evidence of his conducting Candide at that time, or, for that matter, any time before his celebrated 1989 performance of it in London. (Plus it's highly unlikely that he would be rehearsing the chorus; that's what choral directors are for.) I'm assuming the filmmakers concocted this scene so that 1. we could hear a bit of this chorus that is one of his most moving melodies, and from which we get "Any questions?" and 2. so that they could include the discussion about the song "I Am Easily Assimilated", for which Bernstein and Felicia co-wrote the lyrics, complete with a reference to his ancestral home in Ukraine that supplies an unlikely rhyme to the Spanish word for hernia:
We see Felicia performing in a television presentation of Facade by William Walton, a musical framework for the whimsical poetry of Edith Sitwell. Here's a bit of the real Felicia performing this piece:
The Kennedy Center scene
There is a scene at our own beloved Kennedy Center, with Bernstein sitting between Felicia and Tom Cothran at the premiere of MASS. There are plenty of MASS clips to choose from, so instead here's a clip of LB talking about his love for DC and his memories of Kennedy:
The cathedral performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2
Ely is about 100 kilometers from London and has a cathedral that had its origins in an abbey established in 672; the earliest parts of the building date from 1083, and it was officially open for business in 1109. That's a very long time. But I'm willing to believe that there was never a more magnificent musical moment in that building than this performance of Mahler's Second Symphony, which was re-created in the movie:
REM song "It's the End of the World As We Know it"
Late in the film we hear "Leonard Bernstein" namechecked in REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know it" in the same verse as Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs. Apparently the world is going to L.
The poem Felicia references to throughout the film
Finally, here's Bernstein's setting (from Songfest) of the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem "What My Lips Have Kissed" that is referenced several times by Felicia in the film, particularly the line "I only know that summer sang in me":
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