Lone(ly) Star

MAESTRO, Transept, and the search for connection

We watched MAESTRO the day it came out on Netflix, and I‘m still thinking about it two days later, along with so much of the commentary I‘ve read from friends and colleagues. It‘s rare that a film grabs the classical geek world all at once like this one, so it‘s special and heady as the discussion about it takes shape with such intense engagement.

The commentary that’s come across my screen comes largely from people who are super knowledgeable about the film‘s depicted world. Many of them are performers and teachers who knew Leonard Bernstein personally. They have a lot to say about the accuracy of the film - which meetings didn‘t happen as portrayed, who was never at the same party with whom, et cetera. I‘m fascinated by this information. To me, Bernstein is a legend, one of the only classical musicians whose name and face I knew as a teenager, but never met. I‘ve sat in Jamie Bernstein‘s apartment listening to friends try out a new cabaret performance, but I‘ve never met her either. In some giant classical music Venn diagram, there‘s a big overlapping circle of people and places between me and Lenny, but we‘re never under the same arc. I hang on the commentary of my friends who knew him like a Trekkie meeting William Shatner‘s dentist, embarrassed but rapt.

Because who doesn‘t want to know more about Leonard Bernstein? He was the first grrreat Amerrrican conductorrrrr, just like Serge Koussevitsky says in the film, and in a profession of larger than life personas, his was the largest by a mile. He was in our parents‘ televisions explaining sonata form in the fifties, hosting the Black Panthers in his apartment in the sixties, pissing off Jackie Kennedy by having a baritone throw the body and blood of Christ around in MASS in the seventies, and touring universities to meet students for lectures, cocaine, and sex in the eighties. He conducted Beethoven 9 at the Berlin Wall in 1989, just after it fell, just before he died. It felt right somehow that the composer of “The Age of Anxiety” should pass at the dawn of glasnost.

Many of my industry compatriots have bemoaned the lack of music in MAESTRO. The film’s soundtrack is almost all Bernstein, yet the film depicts very little of his musical life. I understand the desire of any musician to see that on screen, especially since Lenny’s life was richer than almost anyone else’s before or since. Multifaceted before it was cool, he soloed, conducted, and composed. Musicians who see the film are hungry for a window into the hours this titan spent toiling over scores, the practice, the rehearsal, the work. What was it like??

But the only window they see is the first image in the film: the window of Lenny’s apartment, morning sun streaming in around the margins, mostly blocked black by a thick curtain. It suggests a darkened theater waiting for a downbeat. When nearly naked Bradley Cooper pulls the curtain energetically back, the great stage of New York lies before him - but wait: is it his bedroom that’s the stage, and Lenny the suddenly exposed star, his secondo uomo unconcealed by the rumpled sheets?

Who’s performing for whom? On reflection, this is what stays with me as the central question of the film.

I love Felicia Montealgre’s initial entrance into the story, exiting from a city bus at the end of a suburban block, walking the long distance toward us and the Westchester-y house where she’ll meet Lenny for the first time. It says everything: she’s not from here, the journey was long, she’s heading to this address on purpose. She squares her shoulders in the street before entering, to find Adolph Green and Betty Comden belting “Carried Away” from Wonderful Town, you know who at the piano. Everybody’s on. And everybody’s talking over everybody else. By my estimation, at least half of the film’s dialogue is people interrupting one another, talking past their partners, not really listening, planning for their next salvo. It feels more like combat than conversation. Very America in search of its Great American Things.

The film leaves so many things out of this big human‘s story, all of them important. Bernstein’s musical achievements as a conductor, pianist, and composer, his politics and the price he paid for them, his entitled behavior and careless abuse, his ambitions, his definitive educational and philosophical contributions - none get full attention in this film and some are ignored completely. What is fully emphasized, however, for both Mister and Missus Bernstein, is what each was required to give up for life at the top.

America demanded of its First Great American Conductor that he not be gay. Heartbreaking, the scene in the film at Tanglewood where Koussevitsky basically tells Bernstein this (what is Mrs. K muttering to him in Russian during this talk?). Felicia is there, and she signs up to be the required wife. “I know exactly who you are,” she says, but no one in their twenties can know exactly what the effect of their decisions will be down the road. Both Bernsteins perform their roles admirably at first, with a long scene replaying verbatim their real-life interview with Edward R. Murrow. But it’s a performance that can’t last. They both end up with less love than they want or need, and it tears their lives apart.

Initially I was surprised that the film gave so much real estate to the reenactment of Lenny’s filmed conducting of Mahler 2 in the Ely cathedral. It’s the scene that people reference when they’re being snarky about Bradley Cooper’s Oscar ambitions, and I think that’s because the moment seems bizarrely long for the non-geeks. But for us classical cult members, it makes sense to focus on the over-the-top ecstasy of his “Auferstehn” moment (for the uninitiated, here’s a video of a bunch of people doing the same thing, and I can guarantee you they were all inspired by seeing Bernstein on film first). The film seems to be saying, look, here in what you think is his most performative moment, he’s performing the least. He’s zooming on the connection he has with the people around him. This is a respite from the 24/7 performance of his life as the First Great American Conductor.

In the sad penultimate scene of the film, Bernstein is old and tired at Tanglewood, stopping a student in a rehearsal of Beethoven. He starts to give a note but the student is already talking past him. The two of them speak simultaneously, interrupting, not finishing their own sentences. Finally, Bernstein steps to the podium to demonstrate. His gesture is unclear, all verbal instruction absent, but the student nods and the audience applauds. It’s a frightening, empty moment, everyone performing an old script about geniuses and acolytes, the picture of the thing and not the thing.

The movie’s stayed with me and brought up a lot of sad memories: closeted mentors and their unhappy wives, moments of deep musical connection in performance followed by alienation within a crowd of colleagues. But mostly I keep thinking about that masterclass. A Facebook friend of mine commented on her own masterclass experiences in a thread, and stopped me in my tracks:

“They…can’t tell me what they really want, and I suspect it’s because they don’t know AND they need to be needed so much that they create trauma around them in order to be needed.”

I was in plenty of famous-person masterclasses in my young days, panicking over the word salads and the lack of instruction and the impatient demonstrating. I can still remember the shame that burned my face when Famous Art Song Man sat next to me in a class forty years ago and shoved me off the bench with his jutted left hip. I was embarrassed by the sudden, unfriendly, sharp contact of our unintroduced asses. I wasn’t worth his consideration of my personal space - I was simply so musically hopeless he had no choice but to butt me out of his way so he could stop me murdering Poulenc.

As he played, gorgeously, I thought, yes, you are amazing and I am not, but why won’t you tell me what to do?

He just wants to dominate me, I thought.

But I’d never considered that the this trauma, this tearing down and belittling of a student, might have at its source a profound, untouchable loneliness.

If you get a shot at a real performing career in America, you’ll be on the road. We move around from gig to gig almost constantly, crossing state lines, growing skilled at hacking bad hotel breakfasts. The European life of walking from home and clocking in at the opera house is only attainable for a few people in a few cities. Every colleague I know keeps a mileage log in their car and their frequent flyer number stored on their phone.

It bends us toward a life of rootlessness and intense loneliness. There you are onstage at Wigmore or La Scala or Lincoln Center or the War Memorial, the audience on their feet, your entire body buzzing from the applause but mostly from what you just did, using your body and breath to draw sound from yourself, sometimes through a tube or at the end of a lever or bow, concentrating to nail your practiced moves and then getting lost in the flow of melody and harmony, in one partner’s or many colleagues’ combined efforts and sounds. You’re open and thrumming and can hardly find the edges of your self in the bright, warm eruption of shared appreciation. And then, the dressing room, the cab, the lobby, the hotel room, the screen, the ticket app, the wake-up call, the suitcase, the airport. So many spaces in succession, and you’re alone in every one.

So yes, it can all feel realest at that moment of greatest drama and artifice, the moment you practiced the most, because at that moment you can sometimes be truly connected to everyone around you. The next morning, too early, you’ll be on the plane with your mask and earbuds, willing yourself into the window, hoping no one will try to have a conversation.

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Last night, I found out at the last minute that Transept was live-streaming their concert from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I love me a choral Christmas concert and I love multiple people in Transept. Like most professional choirs in the USA, their membership comes from all over the country. Transept is more concentrated than some, with the great majority of their singers based in the Midwest, but I know a couple of Texas singers who go up to work with them.

The concert was just gorgeous, inventively programmed with a sweeping narrative about the fragility and precious joy of the Nativity, taking full advantage of the venue’s stunning acoustics and using repertoire of many centuries and languages.

I got online and listened from my cozy living room in the countryside south of Llano, Texas, and I bet you don’t even know where that is, why would you? We are ten miles from the nearest Dairy Queen, which is far in Texas.

There I sat, rain falling softly on the cedar and oak outside, while beautiful singing happened a thousand miles away but also on my lap. There were my friends from Minneapolis and Houston and San Francisco and Waco, friendships formed over a span of thirty years in those different cities. Somehow they had all come together in Sioux Falls. Somehow, I could touch a few buttons and conjure them into my home on the darkest night of the year.

Moving from MAESTRO to Transept in a day made me weep.

The movie had caused me to think about how lonely our lives in music are, from the mechanics of travel to the solitary act of practice and performance, to the incredible, maddening, exposed isolation of fame.

But the choral concert made me marvel at the possibilities of connection, time and space be damned. Say what you will: my friends were in my living room, and their voices were singing to me.

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Being a musician is so lonely, the hours in the practice room, the physical and mental things that no one else can touch or understand.

Being a musician is so connective, the constant and necessary coming together with others from whom you can learn, with whom you can enjoy.

Travel isolates us and underlines our loneliness.

Travel expands our experiences and our minds.

Our screens divide and sequester us, looping us back in on our preconceived ideas and fears.

Our screens open the world to us, connecting us as never before, and we are never alone.

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One day past the darkest night of 2023, I send out a big thank you to Leonard Bernstein, who had to not only wear the title of Great American Conductor, but navigate the first major American career lived in the spotlight of television and international travel. Lenny, baby, maestro, we still find it hard thirty years later, and we’re all on screen now, even us grunts are always on planes. How did you do it, along with everything else?

I call up one of my favorite videos, which is not you orgasming to Mahler, but you playing the Ravel G major piano concerto with the Orchestre National de France. You sit in the middle of the band playing and meeting the eyes of your colleagues, the greatest chamber musician, sometimes encouraging just with your eyes, trusting your fellows and not having to show everything.

My husband comes over to listen with me as you play the beautiful second movement, preserved for us forever through this technology so easily dismissed or criticized. Time and space be damned, here you are, and it’s a miracle.

We’re connected to you, Lenny.

I don’t know about y’all reading this, but all I want is that connection, sitting in the middle of a band or in an auditorium, hearing notes blend live or over my data plan.

I know I found that connection in music before I ever found it anywhere else.

What a miracle, listening to this Ravel like we listened to Transept from our house out in the middle of the Lone Star State. Texas likes to call itself that, but there is obviously no lone star - the sky is full of them. If one seems to shine brighter than the others, it’s just a matter of perspective from where we’re standing at the moment.

Here’s to the wide sky and everything shining in it.

Thanks this time to Stephanie Moore, Clara, Micah and Emily, Fredrick, and Michael.