The Private Life of a Master of Music | L.A. Confidential

A still from the movie "The Master of Music" (2023). Data map

Walking down the streets of Los Angeles during the holidays, I could see the bus changing into a promotional poster for Bradley Cooper's new film "Maestro," which was also a trailer for the movie as soon as I opened the social networking app. I was indeed looking forward to the film, but not because of the overwhelming publicity offensive.

This time last year, I was forced to stay in bed for an extended period of time because of a sciatica attack. The physical aches and pains combined with the anxiety about the future in an inflationary period were the only calming thing that Leonard Bernstein recorded in 1958 with the New York Philharmonic on "Young People's Concert." Don't get me wrong, I'm not a classical music enthusiast, and I'm entirely interested in using music to improve my understanding of poetry. However, these thirteen master classes have made me a layman with great relish, and even gave me an important life lesson: if I feel lost, frustrated, and helpless, the best way to cope is to rely on "beauty", and there is no wound that "beauty" cannot heal.

The higher the expectations, the greater the disappointment. I didn't see the maestro in the biopic film "The Master of Music", only the private life of the maestro Bernstein. This is an era of advocating "identity", especially in the United States, the more you can speak out about your non-mainstream identity label, the more courageous, the more righteous, and the more worthy of other people's likes and retweets. Because Bernstein's homosexual (or rather bisexual) tendencies are rarely known to outsiders, Cooper's revelation of this privacy to the public is particularly "deep", and the Bernstein he directs and stars is "complicated" (according to several mainstream American media outlets, including the New York Times). What I saw, however, was a multi-dimensional, flattened Bernstein, to whom he meets his former boyfriend, clarinetist David Oppenheimer (Matt Bomo), in the park after marriage, who walks with his new wife and holds the baby in his arms, to whom Bernstein whispers, "I slept with your parents." "It seems that there is a fear that the audience will be too stupid to understand the hints at the beginning of the film, so the director must make it clear that the master has a unique sexual orientation.

In this way, the film scrapes together the master's romance (the Guardian calls it a "scrapbook") and ignores the more entangled inner part of the relationship: in the United States, when Bernstein was active, homosexuality was still taboo in mainstream culture, and the older the master, the more "specific" the type of emotional object became—all the young and talented "little fresh meat" of the classical orchestra. The reason for this is that the master himself was born with an incorrigible romantic love, or did he use the power at hand to coerce the other party into throwing himself into his arms, or was this simply the default trend within the New York art circle, and the "conservative" people were despised by the art circle? You (Bernstein) are not at all what you say you love humanity, but quite the opposite. You know, the original weight of this sentence should be equivalent to the last sentence that the husband said to his wife when the husband and wife physically attacked each other in the movie "A Marriage Story" (A Marriage Story), "I hope you will go out and be hit by a car right now", but because Bernstein's personality is very limited, I don't know if he loves human beings, and I don't know what "love human beings" means.

Equally flat is Bernstein's "American identity." He was the first American to become an international orchestra conductor, but the only scene in the film where he was mentioned was at dinner with a mentor who believed that his Jewish identity would not be recognized by mainstream society and suggested that he change his surname to a more American-sounding "Burns." The director wanted to highlight the discrimination against minorities in the United States, but ignored Bernstein's American cultural characteristics, which were very different from those of European conductors of his time, and the film recreated Bernstein's ballet "Fancy Free," inspired by the American painter Paul Cadmus's reprimanded gay erotic illustrations, and the famous musical "West Side Story," also known as "Romeo and Juliet" (based on the contradiction between Puerto Rican immigrants and native white immigrants). What's more, there doesn't seem to be a divide between high art and popular art in Bernstein's eyes, which is also closely related to the American culture of the same era: when cartoons such as "Bugs Bunny" and "Cat and Mouse" first came out, Bugs Bunny and Tom often performed solo piano performances with great skill! "Snoopy" comics have the character of the musical genius Schroeder, whose idol is Beethoven. Looking back at Bernstein's achievements today, one would praise him for popularizing classical music to the American public and educating a large number of young classical music lovers. However, when I listened to "Young People's Concerts," I was surprised that Bernstein often used the analogy of American pop culture figures like "Superman," which was very natural, and perhaps to him and his contemporaries who grew up watching Disney animation and Snoopy, classical music itself was a "cool" thing.

In a way, you could also say that if Bugs Bunny and Tom were born today, they would probably be keen to talk about their identity labels, because the latter is the "coolest" thing of our time (think of the 2016 Disney animated film "Zootopia"). I can even vaguely imagine Cooper's excitement when he found out about Bernstein's "gossip": "Great, no one has photographed his sexuality yet, and he will definitely win an award!" "Every era has its own antics of every era, and it is impossible for these former masters to think that they have been "rediscovered" because of their non-mainstream sexual orientation.

Does all this imply that classical music isn't "cool" enough in America today? I don't know, because since Stanley Kubrick's 1972 crime film A Clockwork Orange, psychopathic murderers seem to have had a special fascination with classical music, especially Beethoven and Bach, a phenomenon that has not stopped on the big screen to this day. If I were a parent, I would have to think about whether I wanted my child to learn piano.

Qian Jianan

Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan