Movie Notes

September 25, 2021. We were emerging from the COVID lockdowns. The Bellingham Symphony (BSO), a fine regional ensemble under the direction of Yaniv Attar, had been producing online concerts, but however fetchingly they are done online concerts are not the same as a live performance. Now, for the first time since the pandemic had begun, the orchestra was on stage There was a stir in the air.

The program for the evening centered on Ralph Vaughn Williams’s “The Lark Ascending,” to be played by the new BSO concertmaster, Dawn Posey. It was an inspired choice. “The Lark Ascending” was written at the beginning of WWI but not performed before or during the war. When it at last premiered after the war, it came to signify the survival of the human spirit, a renewal of hope after the long slog of that terrible war.

In the Bellingham concert, Posey played it beautifully. As it soared higher and higher, our spirits were drawn upward. We—the audience, the soloist, and the orchestra—were fused in the moment in our grief and hope and in the beauty of Vaughn Williams’s “Lark.” 

I thought about that night after watching the Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a movie based on the life of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Lenny, as he was affectionally (and sometimes not so affectionately) known, was not only the long-time director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he was a celebrity, as well-known and assiduously followed as any movie star. Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker, notes that these days one can scarcely imagine that a classical music director could be a cultural icon, but Lenny was such (Alex Ross). He was admired, vilified, controversial, loved, and despised. And he was beautiful—a Kardashian with real talent.

For all that he was first and foremost a musician. His musical palate was broad. He composed and directed classical music, jazz, rock, and, notably, showtunes. His work includes “West Side Story,” three symphonies, the score for the movie “On the Waterfront,” the operetta “Candide,” a mass (more on the mass below), and much more. He is perhaps best remembered for his conducting and, in particular, for his performances of Mahler, whose compositions had gone into a gentle obscurity (more on Mahler below, too).

But the movie is not about the music. There is no engagement in the movie with Bernstein’s successes and failures as a musician. The movie is about his relationship with his wife Felicia Montealegre (brilliantly played by Carey Mulligan)—a relationship complicated by Bernstein’s many affairs with men and with other women. Mulligan, not Cooper, is the star of the movie. Her subtle evocation of a woman who has over-estimated the difficulty of staying in a marriage with a mercurial personality like Bernstein is the emotional heart of the film. As a complicated love story, it succeeds. Sort of.

All of which puts the critic in something of a dilemma. As a matter of correct critical practice, one should not complain about what a work of art doesn’t do. Better to conjure with what it does, and Maestro, as I’ve already said, is a love story. Perhaps I should just take the movie on its own terms, but for all that it aspires to something more. And that’s the problem.

One can hardly do a movie about Bernstein and leave out the music. And the movie doesn’t leave the music out exactly, but it fails to engage it seriously, except as a showpiece for Cooper. It’s as if someone made a movie about Tom Brady and decided not to engage his football career but focus instead on his complicated marriage with Giselle Bundchen. To tell the story that way—even the story of his marriage—would be to miss the heart of it. Brady without football is not Brady.

The same is true for Bernstein. However interesting his multiple sexual relationships may be Lenny is not Lenny without the music. The man he is in the marriage is the man he is on the podium. His successes and failures as a musician shape his story—even the story of his marriage.

Consider the signature sequence in Maestro. It comes near the end of the movie. Bernstein, played by Cooper, directs the London Symphony Orchestra in the Mahler Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) in Ely Cathedral in England. It’s a reconstruction of a concert that Bernstein played in the same place with the same orchestra in 1973. The Bernstein concert was videoed so it is possible to compare Cooper’s baton work directly with that of Bernstein. In the sequence Cooper is trying very hard to be Bernstein: same gestures, same style. It’s what some have called the “Oscar shot”—Cooper mugging Lenny on the podium. He looks for all the world like a kid riding a bicycle for the first time and, turning to his parents, saying, “Look at me.”

Exhilarated and scared to death. In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker Cooper tells the story of the shot (Remnick interview). After a day directing the London Symphony Orchestra and not just the orchestra, of course, but the choruses and soloists required for the Mahler and, since this is a movie, scores of extras filling up the seats in the cathedral, Cooper realized that his directing had fallen short. He had fallen behind the orchestra, not directing but following, and so he decided to call the orchestra, the choruses, the soloists, and the extras back for another day at enormous expense. This time it went better. But you can still see the fear there and the relief as he and the orchestra round into the final chords. It was, he said to Remnick, the “scariest thing I’ve ever done by far, not even close.” 

What gets lost in that is the music. And not only the music but what the Mahler 2^nd is about: resurrection, the survival of the human spirit. If you watch the Mahler sequence in Maestro and compare it to the Bernstein performance, Cooper’s Mahler is all crash and bombast; Bernstein’s Mahler sings, though perhaps even in Bernstein’s hands not as much as it should. There are better performances of the Mahler 2^nd, but for Bernstein it’s not enough just to get through it—to finish the piece ahead of the orchestra—but to express what Mahler meant to express.

And, if what you want is the music, you can’t really have the last six minutes of the Mahler 2^nd without what precedes it. It’s long, even as symphonies go, an hour and twenty minutes or so. The ending is not the best part. What power it has it gets from the music that precedes it. There is a long, slow build up to the final few minutes. Over and over again in this section of the 2nd, Mahler writes in the score zurückhaltend, “restrained,” and “langsam,” “slow,” sometimes sehr langsam, “very slow.” When in the last few minutes hope bursts forth, it comes out of this long and slow build up. It comes from grief, German schmerz. To go into the finale without what precedes it is to lose the thread of the music. It doesn’t take you anywhere musically or spiritually. 

But so what? It’s a movie, not a concert. True enough. But what makes Bernstein interesting is not that he is bisexual or that he had a long and fraught relationship with his wife Felicia Monteleagre or that he was pilloried by Tom Wolfe for his too-easy left wing politics or that he was handsome and famous but that he was all of these things at once. And that all of these things were caught up with and in the music. And music is the heart of it. And in the music, Bernstein is quintessentially American. Not for him a stuffy academic approach to “serious music,” even the music of Mahler. For Bernstein, it was all serious and it was all performance: Mahler’s symphonies and Broadway musicals and rock and jazz and more. And it was all spiritual. The repeated  zu Gott, “to God,” that comes at the end of the Mahler is Bernstein as well.

For these reasons and others, the movie might better have focused on Bernstein’s Mass (full title: Mass: a Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers). Maestro does pass briefly over the premier of Mass, but only to show Bernstein flirting with a man while Felicia looks on. Mass is even longer than the Mahler (an hour and forty-five minutes), swinging back between the Catholic Tridentine Mass, jazz, rock, and more. It was not well received at the time, possibly because it is so eclectic. And it is something of a mess. But it’s a glorious mess. 

It takes up the same subject as the Mahler 2^nd: resurrection, the revival of the human spirit. In doing so it compacts the twentieth century American experience: the exuberance and the despair, the optimism and the tragedy (Mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). In the end, it seems to give in to despair as the celebrant of the mass exits into the orchestra pit. It’s only after a pause that you get what sounds like birds, a gentle song of praise (“Simple Song”), and a final hymnic prayer. As if hope cannot be contained.

Which brings me back to “The Lark Ascending” and the moment in 2021 when Dawn Posey’s violin sang out the final notes, and we felt, those of us who were there, as if the burden of the previous years had lifted. It was in its own way a resurrection, a rebirth.

It’s this—the bond between the musicians and the audience in the experience of the music—that the movie misses. They are, these moments, unrepeatable. “The Lark Ascending” cannot be played that way again. Not because it cannot played as well or played better but because the moment cannot be repeated. And this, I think, is the essential Lenny truth. He lived for these moments.

But the movie cannot even let him have the moment. In Maestro, after Bernstein concludes the Mahler 2nd, he runs off the stage to embrace and passionately kiss Felicia. The relationship matters; the music doesn’t. 

Too bad, it could have been better.

Clay