Maestro: The Man Who Could Not Love Life Moderately

I've spent more than two decades as a professional orchestral conductor. So when a film is built around one of the most famous conductors of all time, I watch it differently.

I notice the hands. The rehearsal language. The relationship between the conductor and the orchestra. The physicality on the podium.

But most importantly, I watch to see if the filmmakers understand that conducting is not merely something a conductor does. For many conductors - and I’d even say most of them - it defines who they are to their core.

Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO understands that about Leonard Bernstein.

But this is not a film about some inevitable or tragic cost of being a conductor. Many great conductors have had long, beautiful, grounded lives. They’ve built families, sustained marriages, maintained friendships, and developed artistic careers without destroying everything around them.

MAESTRO understands all of that. What Cooper captures so well is the complexity of Leonard Bernstein, including both the magnificence and failings of this extraordinary man.

Bernstein's appetite was insatiable.

For music. For people. For attention. For ideas. For family. For Felicia. And for life itself.

The film states this thesis early, and in Bernstein’s own words. When Koussevitzky tells him to focus, to stop wasting time on musical theatre, and to “keep his life and his work clean,” Bernstein simply cannot accept the premise. To him, the idea that a person should only be one thing is deplorable.

The film refuses to reduce him to any one thing. He is not simply the brilliant conductor who neglects his family. Nor is he the closeted bisexual man trapped inside a conventional marriage. Nor is he just the charismatic narcissist who needs every room to revolve around him. With Bernstein, the narcissism and the overwhelming love of life were inseparable.

In MAESTRO, Lenny’s love for Felicia is not presented as fraudulent. Nor is his love for his children. He does not harm the people around him because he is incapable of love. Rather, he harms them because his appetites are so intense that he cannot, or will not, contain them.

The two men inside him.

Cooper’s Bernstein understands the divide within himself. In an interview, he openly discusses how the conductor lives a very public life, while the composer works alone, communicating with the world privately, and “living an enormous inner life.” Bernstein was both.

There is a scene early in the film where Lenny composes on the toilet with the door open. While it plays as a joke, the scene is an honest portrayal of a man doing his most solitary work, in the most solitary room in the house, but refusing to be alone for any of it.

The film takes this chasm seriously. Bernstein’s dissatisfaction as a composer is that his list of compositions is not long enough. But what lands as most truthful is Bernstein’s implied reason that he cannot sit still long enough to compose: he loves people so much that being alone is unbearable for him.

But here’s what the film doesn't say: Most of a conductor’s career is not spent in public. Conducting requires far more hours alone preparing than it does on the podium. The irony is that while Bernstein abhorred solitude, he chose two professions made almost entirely of it. So his larger-than-life public presence was likely his escape hatch.

On the podium, Bernstein’s excess became purpose.

There is an important distinction here. Lenny did not simply choose career over family. That would be a much less interesting story. For him, music was the medium through which he experienced being alive. Cooper’s Bernstein throws himself fully into every moment in that musical world, fully present, both on and off the podium.

There is a detail in the film that non-musicians may read as poetic license. Bernstein describes his Carnegie Hall debut and says he remembers nothing after the downbeat. He says that he “blacked out,” and came to when the audience applauded.

That is not embellishment. That is accurate.

Conducting demands a divided mind; a simultaneous focus on what is supposed to happen (the score), what is about to happen, and what is actually happening in the moment. The concentration required is massive. I have personally walked off the podium with no memory of the previous forty minutes. Most conductors I know have, as well.

For Bernstein, that was the point.

Watch the Mahler Symphony #2 scene in the Ely Cathedral. While Cooper's conducting has been harshly criticized by my profession, technique isn't what that scene is about. What he portrayed brilliantly was that Bernstein threw his entire body and soul into every moment on the podium. He was completely present, consumed by the sound, and left no boundaries between himself, the orchestra, the score, the audience, and the emotion.

Felicia sees Lenny more clearly than anyone, including himself.

Carey Mulligan's Felicia sees Lenny with absolute clarity from the beginning. “I know exactly who you are,” she tells him early, and asks him to give it a whirl anyway. And the love between them is undeniable; the stillness, the tenderness, the banter, the shared history.

And then there is the Mahler Adagietto sequence, which is one of the most devastating things in the film. The music is a love letter. But as Felicia watches, we see through her eyes that Lenny’s passion is for far more than her; it’s for something so all-consuming that she’ll never be able to compete with it.

The tragedy of their marriage is not that Lenny never loved her enough. It may be that he loved her as deeply as he was capable of loving anyone, and that even that was not enough to contain everything else inside him.

The film's hardest moment is not about Bernstein’s infidelity. It is Felicia telling him that his “truth is a lie”; that it “consumes the oxygen in every room and leaves no one else space to live or breathe as themselves.” She tells him that it is exhausting to love and accept someone who will not love and accept himself.

The Final Analysis: What the Film Refuses To Do.

MAESTRO neither excuses nor judges Bernstein. Rather, it asks us to consider whether the qualities we celebrate in extraordinary artists can be separated from the qualities that devastate the people closest to them.

In Bernstein's case, the passion, the selfishness, the love, and the music were all real. But so was the damage.

Bernstein said “A work of art does not answer questions. It provokes them, and its meaning lives in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

While he was describing art, he might as well have been describing himself.

---------------------------------------

As a conductor-turned-screenwriter, I'm creating stories set in the world of classical music. Conductors keep turning up in my writing. MAESTRO explains why.

Ethan Danov

Conductor | Screenwriter