“Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s biopic about Leonard Bernstein, is streaming on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December 2023. Like its subject, “Maestro” is many things: a showcase for the acting talents of Mr. Cooper as Bernstein and of Carey Mulligan as his wife, Felicia; an insight into the cultural life of the 1940s to the 1970s; and a meditation on marriage. But at its core, “Maestro” is something far deeper. Mr. Cooper’s film is a devastatingly honest critique of the idea that traditions are disposable and that we as individuals have the power to transcend our own cultural norms to live solely for ourselves.
Conflict With Traditional Values
The time was the 1970s, when America was coming out of various closets. For Bernstein, this meant turning his back on marriage and, by implication, the Western institutions that stemmed from the idea of marriage—family, community, culture, and country. I don’t believe he realized it, but at that moment, Bernstein rejected the very things he had fought throughout his life to bring back or preserve: faith and traditional tonal music.Bernstein the composer was ridiculed and sidelined by the composing establishment of his day for shaping melodies, utilizing harmonies, and adhering to form. Such traditional endeavors were anathemas to the academy, which espoused the method known as serialism.
Serialism denied the universality of tonality, which is simply the hierarchical arrangement of notes, as in a scale. For instance, in the do-re-mi scale we all know, “do” is the tonic note, or the home base around which all other notes are arranged. The fourth and fifth steps of the scale—“fa” and “sol”—are next in importance, as anyone who plays three-chord songs on the guitar will tell you, because the three most fundamental chords are based on the first, fourth, and the fifth steps of the scale. Other pitch relations are less strongly related to the “do,” and this hierarchy creates tonal music, or as many of us call it, music.
Not so in serialism. This theory insists on treating each note as “equal” to all others. It denies or attempts to deny the hierarchy inherent in how we hear pitched sound, the experience that makes any given note more closely related to some notes than to others. Serial composers insist that composers treat all notes the same. All notes must be played in a serial composition before any one note is repeated. This undermines the natural tendency of the ear to hear pitches in hierarchical relation. (If the insistence on making equal things that are not in fact equal sounds familiar, it could be because ontology, art, and politics are all deeply connected. It’s no accident that communism’s strongest intellectual advocates, such as Theodor Adorno, championed serialism.)
In his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, an event not mentioned in “Maestro,” Bernstein delivered an intellectual blow to the enemies of tonality, one that to this day has not been fully appreciated or even understood. Previously, the question of whether music was tonal had been considered a matter of the composer’s choice. One could choose to be a tonal composer or a serial composer. But Bernstein argued that tonality is an unavoidable fact of how humans hear pitched sound. It is not that composers may choose to write tonal music or not, but that the human ear perceives in terms of innate, hierarchical connections (the definition of tonality) that cannot be denied. A composer may intend to write serial music, but the ears of listeners will only struggle to make what they hear into a tonal hierarchy. Nontonal music in the strict sense is not possible—not merely undesirable (or desirable), but impossible.
Why was such a conservative composer so ardently fixed on breaking with conservative values? Those of us who remember him (and we are a fading lot; Bernstein died 34 years ago this October) recall him as politically left-leaning and culturally radical. He and his wife once hosted a fundraising party for the Black Panthers. How “conservative” could he possibly have been? One of the aspects of Bernstein’s personality brought out by Mr. Cooper’s film was his ability to see three sides of every coin. “My heart is open,” Mr. Cooper’s Bernstein exclaims, and indeed it was—open to love, but also to its facsimile. (“Facsimile” is the name of one of his scores.)
The dark figure of Tommy (Gideon Glick) in “Maestro” is case in point. This was a man of no particular talent or ability who Bernstein allowed into his life and family circle because he convinced himself that Tommy was in some sense exceptional. Similarly, Bernstein welcomed the Black Panthers into his home in the misplaced belief that he was doing good. As documented in a famous essay by Tom Wolfe, it took a guest at the fundraiser to point out that the Panthers were viciously anti-Israel, whereas Bernstein had supported Israel from its birth. (This is not in “Maestro.”) When a heart is too open, infection may enter.
Losing His Way
It is just such infection that traditional institutions are established to shield against. Bernstein did not understand this as it applied to domestic life. His marriage to Felicia was a container that kept the wilder parts of his personality under control, centering them in the same way that a symphony’s score brought his defiantly erratic yet incredibly precise conducting style into focus. Bernstein and Felicia reunited, but tragically, she was diagnosed with cancer and died soon after.Untethered from the anchor that had given him safe harbor, Bernstein was never the same. His conducting continued to be strong, but almost all the works he composed after coming out and experiencing estrangement from Felicia were grossly inferior to the music he composed while with her. Those earlier works include “Candide,” “On the Waterfront,” “Serenade After Plato’s ‘Symposium,’” “Chichester Psalms,” and of course, “West Side Story.” There was a bomb of a musical called “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” a show riven with leftist political rhetoric that closed after seven performances; “A Quiet Place,” an opera of almost no musical substance; a thinly appointed Concerto for Orchestra (subtitled “Jubilee Games”), and various small pieces. Only “Songfest,” a cycle of poems set to music, exhibited the same vibrancy of his earlier scores.
Now, the irony is this: The same case can be made for the traditions of marriage, family, community, and country. They aren’t options. They are the truth of the human condition. In the same way that the human ear struggles to make music out of sounds that defy tonality, human nature, when faced with radical promiscuity or the denial of family relationships, will rebel and demand the truth of innate connectivity.
Reduced to its ontological core, this dichotomy amounts to the Western tradition of natural law versus the modernist conceit of mental gymnastics and political power. Bernstein said again and again that humanity’s greatest tragedy was its loss of faith. Music, for him, was a reaffirmation of faith, of trust in God (he was not an atheist), and in the beauty that flows from that trust. Yet in his personal life, depicted in “Maestro,” Bernstein descended at the end into drugs, dissipation, and promiscuity.
Bernstein, in darker moments, wondered if, as his character says in the film, “man is just this trapped animal.” Tragically, he became one. It might not have happened if the faith he put in his art had also been placed in the traditions of human relationship.
