NEW YORK, NY.- 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 Philharmonics 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 orchestras leaders for help with the movie, Maestro, which has its North American premiere Monday 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 Philharmonics president and CEO. We were really impressed.
Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonics concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductors box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestras archives to examine Bernsteins scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernsteins grave, a Jewish rite.
You could see that he was watching with a very special eye, said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonics music director. He wanted to get into Bernsteins soul.
Coopers 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 Bernsteins who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra and who served as the films 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, in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 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 Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernsteins manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernsteins performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.
Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was feeling unprotected and naked emotionally on the podium. He wouldnt 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 Ive ever experienced.
He said that people often ask: What does a conductor even do? Arent you just up there doing this? He waved his arms. My answer is its 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 Coopers obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that hed 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 realize this brilliant actor is equaled 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 fathers 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 familys existence that he possibly could, she said.
Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernsteins batons, to the conductors 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 that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonics brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)
Bernsteins 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 Bernsteins genius, Spielberg said, he also had an understanding of the complexities of Felicias 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 Bernsteins 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 Orchestras summer home in the Berkshires, Coopers Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license 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 Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Gustav Mahlers Resurrection Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors union.)
Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussys Pelléas et Mélisande. Later that year, for Bernsteins 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernsteins operetta Candide with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Nézet-Séguin said he didnt 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.
Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the films soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Robert Schumanns Manfred overture, which opened the Carnegie program 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 fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to re-create a 1973 performance of Mahlers 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 Bernsteins performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernsteins gestures and explained how to count beats.
He would watch the videos, Nézet-Séguin said, and then text me and say, Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?
Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, 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 Nézet-Séguin 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, Nézet-Séguin 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 Coopers 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 $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Ludwig van Beethovens Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonics 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 Bernsteins Carnegie debut program.
From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernsteins, said Carter Brey, the orchestras principal cellist, who attended a screening.
Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to channeling 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.