Maestro: Leonard Bernstein Comes Out of the Closet (and What He Kept in There)

It has taken 33 years since the death of the great orchestral conductor, composer and educator Leonard Bernstein for the first film to reach the screen. biopic about his prodigious and intense career. Bradley Cooper, in his second feature film endeavor (his feature debut was in the fourth remake of A Star Is Born in 2018), he has given himself to the arduous task of starring in, directing and co-writing the screenplay of MasterHe is the subject of this film in which, with a controversial prosthetic nose, he becomes Lenny, as his friends used to call him. And we have to thank him for having done it with depth and honesty, assuming the complex life of a man who ended up being not only the first American who came to lead the great orchestras of his country, but also projected an idea of music to several generations, with his vibrant, unique style and unforgettable charisma.

Creator of "serious music" (opera, concertos, a mass, symphonies), as well as pieces for dance, ballet and musical theater (West Side Story, Fancy Free, On the town...), Bernstein became the embodiment of an idea of music for the collective imagination of his country, especially after his television appearances and the youth concerts he created for that medium. He worked as an educator, promoter of new talents and promoter of so many expressions that no one could dispute his role. The numerous tours that took him to many parts of the world reinforced that idea, to which he linked a series of ideals that, unfortunately, the film barely shows throughout its hours of footage. This incomplete portrait of the human being that Lenny was is the weakest point of an endeavor that dwells more on his relationship with music, with his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre, and his sexuality.

It is curious, if you think about it, that the quartet of talents that created such an influential work as West Side Story was composed of gay men. Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein are the members of that nucleus that in 1957 rocked Broadway with the ingenious reinvention of the plot of Romeo and Juliet. But also each of them led their private lives in a complicated or different way, in a context where openly living a certain kind of sexuality was dangerous in moral and political terms. During the period of the mccarthysmRobbins denounced several of his left-leaning colleagues under the fear of being exposed as a homosexual through FBI reports. Bernstein, in this film, struggles with those desires, but from the opening sequence we see him with a man in bed. And that gives rise to the whole film, which discusses the composer and conductor from that prism, necessary without a doubt to show a complete profile of his personality, although it does not reach the same level of transparency when it overshadows other areas of his life.

In 1943, suddenly replacing the ailing Bruno Halter in a concert programmed by Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein, at the age of 25, became overnight the rising star of American music. After that, he would conduct for the New York City Simphony, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, at La Scala in Milan, in Tel Aviv, in Prague, with the Vienna Philharmonic, with the London Symphony and the Boston Symphony; he would give lectures at Harvard and keep his famous appearances at the Tanglewood Festival, he would win awards such as the Tony, several Emmy and Grammy; would receive Oscar nominations for his film music, while continuing to create new compositions or revisit his previous work - as he did in 1984 when he recorded with a cast of extraordinary voices (Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, Marilyn Horne and Tatiana Troyanos) again his West Side Story. He directed for Maria Callas in two of her most famous productions (Medea and The Sonnambula), and in December 1989, shortly before his death, he presented in Berlin the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, in salute to the fall of the Wall. Friend of Aaron Copland, disciple of such demanding masters as Koussevitzky, Fritz Reiner and Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bernstein quickly developed a technique and charisma that made him stand out as a sort of superstar in his field. He was, at the same time, a family man, and his three children have given their approval to this film production. He visited Cuba, by the way, for a couple of weeks during which he came to recover from the failure of his candid on Broadway, and dedicated to "The Latin American Spirit" one of his television concerts in 1963, where no music from the island was played, but it was evoked by the Cuban danzon by his friend Aaron Copland and the poem by Guillén Sensemayain the musical version of the Mexican José Revueltas.

Cooper and Josh Singer's screenplay (Spotlight and First Man) has chosen among all that a channel that concentrates on some of the contradictions, decisions, successes and conflicts of the human being that was Lenny. The key point is his marriage, and the tensions that the protagonist's sexuality created within a story that culminated -after a brief period of separation- with his return to his wife, already ill with cancer, and her death in 1978. It seems as if Bernstein's life ended there, in the context of that discussion of his erotic preferences. And that erases other important aspects of his biography, which are not only his own, but also those of Felicia Montealegre herself, who shared with him political sympathies for causes they both supported and which are barely alluded to here.

It should be recalled that Bernstein got to see his FBI file, which documented in depth his activities and relationships with numerous personalities, and it was a document of more than 800 pages. His support for civil rights, his sympathy for the Kennedys, his appearances in Israel or his relationship with members of the Black Panther Party, his support for nuclear disarmament or the fight against AIDS, for example, attest to a no less complex area of his existence, which in some cases cost him being blacklisted for a certain time by Senator McCarthy and his henchmen, or not having Richard Nixon among those who attended the premiere of his Masscomposed at the request of Jacquelin Kennedy, in 1971. His wife accompanied him in several of these cases, but this is not mentioned either in Masterwhich merely presents her as an actress and devoted mother of a family in the shadow of her brand new husband.

Photo taken from internet

In defense of the memory of Felicia Montealegre, however, it must be said that Carey Mulligan gives a brilliant performance in her portrayal. With subtlety, without boasting, without overstepping the right tone, she balances the rictus, the excesses, the subdued color chosen by Bradley Cooper to play the protagonist. And when I speak of excesses I mean those points where his work as writer, director and performer are mixed in moments as confusing and unnecessary as turning Lenny into one of the dancers of Fancy Free. This, fortunately, happens only in some sequences, and Cooper takes advantage of other moments, not only to show an impressive work of physical characterization, supported by a production that always keeps him at the center, and for which he was rigorously prepared. It is not easy to revive the energy and intense relationship that Bernstein expressed with his musicians, and if Kazu Hiro's makeup helps him in such an endeavor, the actor does not stay on the surface, see the scene in which he resurrects the music of his admired Gustav Mahler. His work will put him among the nominees for the main awards of the upcoming awards season, as already proved after the announcement of the Golden Globe and Critics' Choice Movie Awards contenders, to be presented this month, where he has, among his main contenders, Cillian Murphy in another biopic: the Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, which seems to me an undoubtedly superior title.

As well as Master explores the dualities of Bernstein's life, the film itself can be divided into two zones, demarcated by black and white at the beginning, and the second part in color, both photographed by Matthew Libatique, renowned for his work on Darren Aronofsky's projects. Michelle Tesoro's editing helps the 129 minutes go by like a blast of good music, though that doesn't prevent a connoisseur of Bernstein's life from wondering if at least one sequence that addresses the aspects that are skipped here won't appear on screen. Hidden, avoided, discreetly alluded to, in a film that, just as it definitively brings its protagonist out of the closet, seems to have preferred a tone of discretion on those other points, for reasons that still remain enigmatic. It is worth clarifying that I am not the only one disappointed in this regard, some voices have already been raised to complain about these black holes. In a way, Master aims to jump on the model of those "lives" of great composers that the Hollywood of the 50's produced, sweetening to the point of transforming the stories of those men into fairy tales, as they did with Cole Porter, in a film that reimagines his career completely ignoring the homosexuality of the creator of night and day and Anything goes. Here the biography of Leonard Bernstein seems only a sexualized review of some of his most notable passages.

Photo taken from internet

A little more than a year ago, when it hit the screens TárIn Todd Field's excellent and uncomfortable film about an orchestra conductor entangled in the skein of an accusation of sexual misconduct, Leonard Bernstein's face and voice were visible throughout the footage of this sharp and piercing film. Destroyed by the effects of his arrogance, his infidelities, his excessive handling of power, Lydia, the protagonist played magnificently by Cate Blanchett, returns to her modest childhood home seeking the peace of mind she no longer has. And she weeps when she re-watches one of Bernstein's didactic concerts, recorded on an old VHS tape, listening to the composer of Serenade explaining the deep and transcendental meaning of the music. To a certain extent, with that sequence Leonard Bernstein returned in a big way to cinema, and finally this project, which has the backing of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg as producers who at one point also thought of directing it, is what we see as a result of Bradley Cooper's efforts. However, curiously, neither Cooper nor Scorsese were able to pick up any trophies at the recently concluded Golden Globes ceremony, held on January 7, where neither Cooper nor Scorsese were able to pick up any trophies at the recently concluded Golden Globes ceremony, held on January 7, where neither Cooper nor Scorsese received any trophies. Master neither Killers of the Flower Moon won the awards that many predicted for them (with the exception of the best actress award for Lily Gladstone for her performance under the direction of the director of Cab driver), which is a bad sign for their respective Oscar races.

MasterIn short, it is one of those works that confirms that good intentions are not enough when it comes to covering, as in this case, the existence of a person who was larger tan lifeand the honest approach to several of his anecdotes fails to balance the need to review others as well. Beyond the problematic prosthetic nose and these limitations, it is a good introduction to the personality and the enormous talent of Leonard Bernstein. An introduction that calls for others that go beyond the line that marked the end of his marriage and help us to better understand the Lenny who died at the age of 72 years of such passionate dedication to what he loved the most: music. And that makes us think, in the Cuban case, about how much we have delayed in bringing to the cinema the biographies of our most relevant composers -now, for example, that it has been 60 years since the death of Lecuona, whose Malagueña young Lenny liked to play the piano-; with the wish that when they can be produced, they will encompass all that they were: real beings, contradictory, loved and hated, unforgettable and indispensable. As was Leonard Bernstein, in the beautiful and complicated season of those eternal summers during which he was the king and lord of Tanglewood.