‘Maestro’ is ‘a portrait of a marriage’
Director Bradley Cooper stars as the iconic conductor while Carey Mulligan captures ‘the essence’ of his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre
‘But when you really do things live, on a film shoot, there’s an authenticity that you can’t really beat.’
JASON RUDER, Los Angeles-based music editor
If you’ve spent some time at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, a few scenes in the new Bradley Cooper-directed Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro” might give you some deja vu. Here’s the lawn outside the Koussevitzky Music Shed; there’s the hedge maze.
Born in Lawrence and educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard University, Leonard Bernstein spent most of his adult Iife based in the New York City area, where he led the New York Philharmonic between 1958 and 1969. However, he had a profound connection to Tanglewood as well. There, he studied under BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky as a member of the 1940 inaugural class at the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center), and returned to teach and conduct almost every subsequent year until his death in 1990.
And in the film, which begins a limited run at the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema starting Dec. 1 before streaming on Netflix Dec. 20, Tanglewood sets the scene for the growing affection between Leonard Bernstein (portrayed by Cooper) and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
As Cooper learned more about the conductor, he decided that he wanted to “tell the story of Lenny and Felicia — our parents — and have it be a portrait of a marriage, rather than a conventional biopic,” explained Jamie Bernstein, the pair’s eldest daughter, in a Zoom call.
While creating that portrait, Cooper maintained regular communication with
the three Bernstein children — Jamie, Alexander, and Nina. “He checked in with us all along,” said Jamie Bernstein. “That was amazingly touching and also reassuring, because it was very clear to us from the beginning that Bradley wanted to get things right, and really cared about accuracy.”
When Los Angeles-based music editor Jason Ruder joined the creative team for Cooper’s directorial debut, 2018’s “A Star Is Born,” he found Cooper insistent that the musical film’s vocals be recorded live on set rather than pre-recorded or overdubbed later. When Cooper later proposed the same process for the Bernstein biopic, Ruder was “extremely excited and horrified, at the same time,” he said in a recent phone interview.
Recording live “presents a new layer of challenges,” said Ruder, the executive music producer and supervising music editor for ”Maestro.” If there’s an error with a microphone, or someone accidentally makes noise, it can ruin a take, which is why recording before or after shooting a scene is much more common. “But when you really do things live, on a film shoot, there’s an authenticity that you can’t really beat,” said Ruder.
Upon first reading the script, Ruder understood that “music had to be the heartbeat” of the movie, he said. The film’s soundtrack heavily features pieces by Leonard Bernstein, which were selected and matched with scenes by Cooper. “He really had a distinct vision in his head,” Ruder said.
A handful of scenes re-create or imagine significant musical events in Bernstein’s life, such as the premiere of his own “Mass” and the performance he filmed of Mahler’s immense Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” at England’s Ely Cathedral. The latter is the most extensive musical sequence in the film, and Cooper conducted the orchestra live.
The creative team briefly considered scoring the film with existing recordings of Bernstein conducting, Ruder said, but instead engaged the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin to create new recordings, with Nézet-Séguin matching Bernstein’s exuberant style as best he could.
“His tempo and internal clock for things is really something to witness,” Ruder said of Nézet-Séguin, who also extensively coached Cooper in conducting for the film. “You could give [Yannick] a recording, he could listen to it a few times, and he could turn it around and almost match it.”
It was also important to Ruder that the film use an established ensemble rather than contract session players: He wanted it to sound like a performance that would be heard in a concert hall, not necessarily “like a film score.”
The team “all sort of obsessed” over Bernstein’s original recording of the “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral, said Ruder. “I don’t know that I could put my finger on what makes it ‘Lenny.’ It’s hard to articulate, but there’s some magic in it.”
Cooper nailed that scene, Ruder said. “It’s a sight to see.”
To re-create the married couple’s world on film, Cooper embarked on what Jamie Bernstein called “a very deep dive.” The director used her candid 2018 memoir “Famous Father Girl” as source material to flesh out the family’s life — several details and quotes appear in the film.
One particular scene, showing the pair’s first meeting at a lively party, “rings so true” to her own memories of parties her parents hosted, Jamie Bernstein said. ”Even as really little kids, we could readily perceive that our parents really adored each other.”
Their relationship was not without its complications, which are also depicted in the film. Leonard Bernstein had a number of affairs with men, and Montealegre was aware of them to some extent. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote in a letter to him shortly after they married, and stated that she was willing to accept him “without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar.”
Still, their marriage was hardly loveless, Jamie Bernstein said. “I think the snag came when our dad brought that private side of his life home, and that was not their deal,” she said. The pair separated briefly in the mid-1970s, but reconciled shortly afterward and remained together until Montealegre’s death from lung cancer in 1978. After Bernstein’s death 12 years later, he was buried next to her at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Jamie Bernstein noted that she was especially impressed by Mulligan’s portrayal of Montealegre, since the actress had much less archival material to work with than Cooper. Montealegre was extremely sociable and a “marvelous conversationalist,” but intensely private, she said. “I don’t know how [Mulligan] did it, but somehow she caught the essence of our mother.”
If Montealegre had lived to see the movie, she “maybe would have been ambivalent,” said Jamie Bernstein, but as a fellow actress, she surely would have been impressed with Mulligan’s performance.
What about Lenny? “Our dad would have loved it,” she said. “Because he loved attention.”