For Maestro, Bradley Cooper learned from top conductors like Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick Nezet-Seguin — and by stealth in concert halls or from the orchestra pit
On a late spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Richard Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.
The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958-69. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, Maestro, which had its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival.
The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.
“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, then the Philharmonic’s president and CEO. “We were really impressed.”
Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.
“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”
Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer whose works include not just West Side Story but music for the concert hall.
Cooper attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protege of Bernstein’s who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nezet-Seguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.
Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film A Star Is Born, which he also directed.
But Maestro, which airs on Netflix on December 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style on the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct but to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.
Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nezet-Seguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone, in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.
Nezet-Seguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”
Cooper, who wrote Maestro with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in Tár (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced”.
He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms. “My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”
Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.
“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”
Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct Maestro, was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home”.
After a screening of A Star Is Born, Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand Maestro over to Cooper.
“It only took me 15 minutes to realise this brilliant actor is equalled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.
Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (Maestro beat out a rival Bernstein project by actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)
Jamie Bernstein said Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story”. He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, including placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.
Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Connecticut, admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.
“He was just like a sponge, soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.
Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to the conductor’s children. (They defended Cooper recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)
At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute”, a nickname Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)
Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in Maestro; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.
Cooper was eager to approach Maestro less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled. While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart”.
The film, shot largely on location, re-creates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.
At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading masterclasses and driving a sports car with the licence plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.
In his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nezet-Seguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he travelled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors union.)
Cooper stealthily watched Nezet-Seguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nezet-Seguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta Candide with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Nezet-Seguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”
Nezet-Seguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped Cooper find the downbeat for Robert Schumann’s Manfred overture, which opened the Carnegie programme in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of Candide, during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.
Last year, Cooper and Nezet-Seguin travelled to Ely Cathedral in England to re-create a 1973 performance of Mahler’s Resurrection by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.
Cooper, who chose the music in Maestro, had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nezet-Seguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.
“He would watch the videos,” Nezet-Seguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?’”
Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nezet-Seguinn, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an 8-minute section of the piece with a recording.
When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nezet-Seguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.
When Cooper took the podium, Nezet-Seguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold on to a moment or let go.
The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”
Throughout his work on Maestro, Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.
Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its US$550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.
Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village town house for screenings of Maestro. The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut programme.
“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.
Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channelling a supernova”. He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.
“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Javier C. Hernández
Photographs by: Eddie Hausner
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