Maestro: I run into Lenny again...

 Maestro, Leonard Bernstein, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Homosexuality, Intimacy, Marriage

This seems to be the year of the bio pic.  Not that there aren’t bio pics every year, but there just seem to be more this year, and many of the award contenders seem to among them.  Oppenheimer on the big screen stole the summer, the end of The Crown on the small screen involves many bios being pic-ed.  The Fabelmans qualifies as a Roman a Clef bio pic.  In the fall, we had Napoleon.  I was thinking that Killers of the Flower Moon was also a bio pic, but I suppose it is somewhere between Oppenheimer and The Crown as a history pic.  In any case, other than Barbie, what passes for a blockbuster these days seems more rooted in history than in, for instance, fiction.  So, wouldn’t you think that we would get a veridical representation of a life?

Perhaps it has always been the case, but the bio pic about Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) seems rushed.  We zip from his introduction to his future wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) where they recite their bios, through various highlights in their lives, and seem to arrive at their deaths without quite having had enough time to really get to know them.  I think, perhaps, I have been spoiled by series like The Crown that have the leisure to develop individual characters across multiple episodes and then to set up a finale with characters that you care about and really have a sense of who they are.  Even though a bio-pic focuses on only one character – or, in the case of Maestro, two – having just two or three hours to narrate a life suddenly seems like not quite enough.

Leonard Bernstein has, inadvertently, been a part of my life for a long time, and I was looking forward to seeing certain themes that I had picked up on in other areas.  That said, I have recently written about unreliable narrators in the novel Trust, and I should have been prepared for a new and different perspective…

Like many kids my age, my first experience of Leonhard Bernstein was with the New York Philharmonic’s children’s programming.  At least I think I watched those programs.  What I remember most is listening over and over again to his recording and description of Peter and the Wolf.  I remember the quality of his voice, and the way that each of the instruments played a part – Peter, the Wolf, Peter’s Grandfather, the duck, etc.  But the story, as fascinating as it was, did not hold together for me.  I never quite got the plot – don’t have it to this day.  My fascination with his voice, the details of the instruments, didn’t allow me to integrate them into a coherent narrative.  Oh, at some point, as an adult, I listened again and got the story, but it is gone now – and what I remember is the experiential and unintegrated bits.

As an adolescent, I became enamored of West Side Story.  I don’t think I ever saw the film, but again, listened to the soundtrack over and over again.  This time I felt like I got the story – and when I later saw the film in bits and pieces, I didn’t need to see the whole to understand it, I already had it in hand.  Of course I had Romeo and Juliet as a guide.  But I was brought up short by a performance of Bernstein’s music by a psychiatrist who is also a concert pianist, Richard Kogan.  Dr. Kogan studies the lives of various composers and plays their music while tying it to the composer’s life. 

In the case of Bernstein, Kogan used West Side Story to highlight Bernstein’s use of the tritone, which he also called the Devil’s chord.  This chord is inherently discordant – unlike a major chord, which feels settled and comfortable, the tritone screams tension.  It feels unresolved.  Technically, it is two notes three whole tones apart.  Kogan explained that it is rampant in West Side Story.  Think of the song Maria.  The first two notes in Maria – Mah and Ree – are a tritone apart, and the tension between them is resolved on the Ah. 

Kogan pointed out myriad examples of the tritone in West Side Story and he connected them to the tension that Bernstein was feeling about his sexuality during the time that he was writing West Side Story.  According to Kogan (as I recall, this was some years ago), Bernstein had sequestered his family in Puerto Rico while he wrote the musical as a means of shielding them from the conflict that he was feeling – the tension between the Sharks and the Jets could be understood as the tension between the straights and the gays – or between Bernstein’s loyalty to his family and his loyalty to his sexuality.

The next intersection occurred at a National Meeting of Psychoanalysts.  There a group of us who are interested in the relationship between Music and the Mind were treated to a presentation by Leonard’s daughter, Jaimie.  She is a performer, author, storyteller and composer.  She was at the meeting to talk about her Dad and his career.  When she was explaining about the tritone, one of the analysts raised the issue of her father’s sexuality and wondered about the tritone as an expression of the tension that he felt about that.  There was a long, awkward pause and, in my memory, Jaimie went on to talk about other aspects of the tritone without addressing the question.  At the time, I was proud of the restraint of my analytic peers who did not press the issue.  I somewhat naively wondered, “Did she not know?”.

So this bio pic becomes yet another way of observing Bernstein.  The screenplay, as hurried and rushed as it is, depends heavily on Jaimie’s memoir, “Famous Father Girl”.  That said, the very first scene involves Bernstein lying naked in bed with his male lover when he gets the call to conduct the New York Philharmonic later in the day – a performance that would catapult him into becoming the Bernstein that I (and so many others) would have a relationship with.

The vantage point of the author of a biography/biopic is very important.  I wrote about Ray Kroc in a post about a movie, The Founder, that portrays him (and my thesis was consistent with the picture) in a negative light.  A friend who read it and was a big fan of the Krocs, in part because of their generosity to causes like NPR, was dismayed that I did not have a more balanced view of him.  And I didn’t.  The view that I took was the one presented in the movie, and it was not balanced.  Neither, though, is the view of a child of her parent balanced. 

Marriages are complicated.  They are public – and, especially in the upper classes and the royalty from which those classes are descended, they are political arrangements.  Bernstein, according to Wikipedia, arranged a marriage for the man we met in the first scene with a woman who would serve as the man’s beard.  Being married, for a gay man in the post war years, was an important means of public display around his sexuality.

Marriages are also private affairs.  And they are messy.  And the mess gets observed by the children.  The children see the mess at various points in the lives of their parents and through the various lenses they become capable of using as they grow up.  Divorces are much less messy when they happen early in a child’s life.  When they happen when the child is an adolescent or even a young adult, the children in the marriage tend to take sides and to idealize one parent and denigrate the other.  Partly, though, this tension is a means of addressing an underlying wish, in many cases - the wish that the parents would reconcile and the family could be restored.

Bernstein was, as he states to the Thursday Philharmonic practice audience in the film, an artist.  And as the Sixties dawned, Bernstein declared that the artist, perhaps more than anyone, is aware of his impending death.  And the artist, he goes on to say, must be afforded the freedom to live an unfettered life.  Heck, he said, everybody is doing that now – and I must do it as an artist even if it were not the current fashion, but since it is, I can be truly free.

Freedom, though, comes at a cost.  Felicia (his wife – sorry to have wondered so far afield that I feel I must remind you of her), is, perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie, and certainly through the eyes of the film, much more than just a muse.  She is an anchor – a rock.  A point of stability in a world that, without her, becomes immediately chaotic and unstable.  But his cruelty to her has been met by her cruelty and, I suppose – though this is a supposition on my part – he cannot admit that he needs her when he is in the space of justifying the advantages of his freedom.

So, it is Felicia that makes the move to repair the rupture between them.  She attends his legendary performance conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral with the London Philharmonic.  This rapturous performance – one where Bradley Cooper throws himself as fully into the role as Bernstein himself did – maybe more so – is prelude to his rapturous reconnection with Felicia.

This is pretty heady stuff, through the eyes of a child – and through our eyes as the audience.  We recognize the true love that he has for Felicia, and she takes back her taunts about the falsity of his love.  And then we see Bernstein demonstrate his love for her, tending to her when she is ill and acknowledging her value after she is gone.  There is a fairy tale component to the reunion that feels more authentic than I think I am painting it here.

We see that Bernstein is not a cad.  I don't think we see him as torn so much as unintegrated.  He cannot experience the tension of the tritone.  If it is there in West Side Story, it is perhaps because he wishes that he could feel it.  Instead, he is brought to life by his love for whomever is in the room at the moment, and he loves them deeply, powerfully, but also indiscriminately - and leave it up to them to hold him in check against his passions, but resents them when they do exactly that.

When Felicia dies, Bernstein, not surprisingly reverts to his chaotic life, but in a way that is unbecoming an old man.  He seems to sort of crumble without her and plays on his position of power as a star and as a teacher to pursue younger men and there is something tawdry – but primarily sad - about his descent. 

When Felicia is taunting him, one of the things that she throws his way is a criticism that others have made but one that she has shielded him from to that point.  Others have claimed that he has wasted his talent.  She takes a subtly different tack, stating that he has used his talent to exert power and influence rather than to connect with others.  She accuses him, I think, of confusing being enamored with himself to overcome the ways he feels marginalized.  She would have him sit squarely within his genius and using that as a means to transform the world.

I think she may be entreating him to integrate his narrative, and he may demonstrate that he needs help doing that – that without her (admittedly likely perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie), he cannot keep Peter, and the Wolf, and the other characters straight enough to have the story make sense.  He is distracted by the notes of the oboe and the French Horn – caught up in them, swept away by them, so that he doesn’t get how they all fit together.

One other fact about children of divorce is that, when their parents remarry, the children are twice as likely to divorce as children of divorced parents who do not remarry.  Perhaps we need to believe that it is possible for adults to go on loving each other – even if circumstances keep them apart – for us to accomplish the difficult task of sustaining a marriage.  Perhaps we need to be sheltered from the chaos that our parents must manage – or it helps to see them survive it – for us to internalize a sense of the possibility of something like true love in all its gritty and chaotic splendor.  We have to be strong enough to withstand the gaze of someone who sees us both as they would like us to be and as we actually are.

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