Maury Yeston

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Maury Yeston (born October 23, 1945) is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.

He is best known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine. Yeston also wrote a significant amount of the music and most of the lyrics to the Tony-nominated musical Grand Hotel in 1989, which was nominated for best score. His musical version of the novel The Phantom of the Opera (not to be confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber's version) called Phantom has enjoyed numerous productions in the U.S. and around the world. He has also written a number of other off-Broadway musicals, a song cycle, a Cello Concerto, and other pieces.

Yeston serves on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.^[1] He is also President of the Kleban Foundation, serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series.^[2] He was the Director of the BMI Music Theatre Workshop in New York City for two decades beginning in 1982.^[3]

Contents 1 Life and career 1.1 Early years 1.2 Musical theatre successes 1.3 Recent years and family 2 Work 3 Awards and recognition 4 Discography 5 Notes 6 References 7 External Links

[edit] Life and career

[edit] Early years

Yeston was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His English-born father, David, founded the Dial Import Corporation, an importing and exporting firm, and his mother, Frances Haar, helped run the business. But the family loved music. His father sang English music hall songs, and his mother was an accomplished pianist. Yeston noted in a 1997 interview, "My mother was trained in classical piano, and her father was a cantor in a synagogue. A lot of musical theatre writers have something in common. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill – each one had a cantor in the family. When you take a young, impressionable child and put him at age three in the middle of a synagogue, and that child sees a man in a costume, dramatically raised up on a kind of stage, singing his heart out at the top of his lungs to a rapt congregation, it makes a lasting impression."^[4] At age five, Yeston began taking piano lessons from his mother, and by age seven he had won an award for composition. He attended the Yeshiva of Hudson County through grade eight. Yeston's interest in musical theatre began at age ten when his mother took him to see My Fair Lady on Broadway. At Jersey Academy, a small private high school in Jersey City, Yeston broadened his musical study beyond classical and religious music and Broadway show tunes to include jazz, folk, rock and roll, and early music. He took up folk guitar, played vibraphone with a jazz group, and participated in madrigal singing.^[5]

As an undergraduate at Yale University, Yeston majored in music theory and composition and minored in literature, particularly French, German, and Japanese. Yeston noted, "I am as much a lyricist as a composer, and the musical theatre is the only genre I know in which the lyrics are as important as the music."^[5] After graduating from Yale in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College at Cambridge University in England. There he belonged to the Footlights dramatics organization and wrote several classical pieces and a musical version of Alice in Wonderland. Alice was eventually produced at the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut in 1971. At Cambridge, he focused his musical goals, moving from classical composition to theatre songwriting.^[6] Upon earning his master's degree at Cambridge in 1972, Yeston returned to the United States to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which included a teaching position at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the country's oldest traditionally black college. At Lincoln, Yeston taught music, art, philosophy, religion, and western civilization, and started a course in the history of black music.^[6]

Yeston pursued his musicology doctorate at Yale and enrolled in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, travelling to New York City each week, where he and other aspiring composer/lyricists were able to try out material for established Broadway producers and directors. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale in 1974, publishing his dissertation as a book by the Yale University Press, The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (1976). He also wrote a Cello Concerto that was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma and the Norwalk Symphony, Gilbert Levine conductor, 1976.^[2] He then joined the Yale music faculty, where he taught for eight years, serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music. He published another book with Yale University Press, Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches (editor, 1977). He was twice elected by the student body as one of Yale's ten best professors.^[5]

[edit] Musical theatre successes

Nine

While teaching at Yale, Yeston continued to attend the BMI workshop principally to work on his project, begun in 1973, to write a musical inspired by Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½.^[7] As a teenager, Yeston had seen the film, about a film director suffering a midlife crisis and a creativity drought, and he was intrigued by its themes. "I looked at the screen and said 'That's me.' I still believed in all the dreams and ideals of what is was to be an artist, and here was a movie about... an artist in trouble. It became an obsession," Yeston told the New York Times in 1982. Yeston called the musical Nine, explaining that if you add music to 8½, "it's like half a number more."^[5]

Phantom and other projects

After the success of Nine, Yeston left his position as associate professor at Yale, although he continued to teach a course there every other semester on songwriting. He turned to writing a musical version of Gaston Leroux's novel, The Phantom of the Opera. He was approached with the idea by actor/director Geoffrey Holder, who held the American rights to the novel. Initially, Yeston was skeptical of the project. "I laughed and laughed.... That's the worst idea in the world! Why would you want to write a musical based on a horror story?.... And then it occurred to me that the story could be somewhat changed.... [The Phantom] would be a Quasimodo character, an Elephant Man. Don't all of us feel, despite outward imperfections, that deep inside we're good? And that is a character you cry for."^[6]

Yeston had completed much of Phantom and was in the process of raising money for a Broadway production when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced plans for his own musical version of the story. After Lloyd Webber's show became a smash hit in London in 1986, Yeston's version could not get funding for a Broadway production. However, in 1991, it premiered in a full-scale, top quality production at Houston's Theatre Under the Stars and has since received over 1,000 productions around the world.^[3] The Houston production was recorded as an original cast album by RCA records. Yeston's Phantom is more operetta-like in style than Lloyd Webber's, seeking to reflect the 1890s period, and seeks to project a French atmosphere to reflect its Parisian setting.^[5]

Yeston also wrote In the Beginning (originally called 1-2-3-4-5), a musical based on the first five books of the Bible, presented at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987 and 1988.^[8] In 1988 Yeston recorded a studio recording of a musical called Goya: A Life in Song. Plácido Domingo sang the role of Spanish painter Francisco de Goya, with Jennifer Rush, Gloria Estefan, Dionne Warwick, Richie Havens, and Seiko Matsuda. Domingo was interested in starring in a stage musical about Goya and suggested to producer Alan Carr that Yeston would be the right person to create the vehicle, since Domingo had admired Yeston's work on Nine. Because of Domingo's time commitments, the musical was made into a concept album instead.^[6]

Grand Hotel

Also in 1989, Tommy Tune, who had directed Nine, asked Yeston to improve the score of Grand Hotel, a musical that was doing badly in tryouts. The show was based on the 1932 movie of the same name and on an unsuccessful 1958 musical called At the Grand, with a score by Robert Wright and George Forrest. Yeston wrote six new songs for Grand Hotel and rewrote approximately half the lyrics in the show. After Grand Hotel opened on Broadway in November 1989, Yeston, along with Wright and Forrest, was nominated for the Tony Award for best score. The show ran for 1,077 performances.

After this, Yeston wrote December Songs (1991), a song cycle adapted from Franz Schubert's Winterreise. December Songs was written as a commissioned piece for the 1991 centennial celebration of New York's Carnegie Hall, where it was performed by cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci.^[3] The work crosses over the line from classical music to Broadway to cabaret.^[6]

Titanic

The discovery of the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic in 1985 attracted Yeston's interest in writing a musical about the famous disaster. "What drew me to the project was the positive aspects of what the ship represented – 1) humankind's striving after great artistic works and similar technological feats, despite the possibility of tragic failure, and 2) the dreams of the passengers on board: 3rd Class, to immigrate to America for a better life; 2nd Class, to live a leisured lifestyle in imitation of the upper classes; 1st Class, to maintain their privileged positions forever. The collision with the iceberg dashed all of these dreams simultaneously, and the subsequent transformation of character of the passengers and crew had, it seemed to me, the potential for great emotional and musical expression onstage."^[5] Librettist Peter Stone and Yeston knew that the idea was an unusual subject for a musical. "I think if you don't have that kind of daring damn-the-torpedos, you shouldn't be in this business. It's the safe sounding shows that often don't do well. You have to dare greatly, and I really want to stretch the bounds of the kind of expression in musical theater," Yeston explained.^[9] Yeston saw the story as unique to turn-of-the-century British culture, with its rigid social class system and its romanticization of progress through technology. "In order to depict that on the stage, because this is really a very English show, I knew I would have to have a color similar to the one found in the music of the great composers at that time, like Elgar or Vaughan Williams; this was for me an opportunity to bring in the musical theater an element of the symphonic tradition that I think we really haven't had before. That was very exciting."^[9]

The high cost of Titanic's set made it impossible for the show to have traditional out of town tryouts. Titanic opened at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1997 to mostly negative reviews. The New Yorker's was a rare positive assessment from the New York press: "It seemed a foregone conclusion that the show would be a failure; a musical about history's most tragic maiden voyage, in which fifteen hundred people lost their lives, was obviously preposterous.... Astonishingly, Titanic manages to be grave and entertaining, somber and joyful; little by little you realize that you are in the presence of a genuine addition to American musical theatre."^[10] The show's strong showing at the Tony Awards enabled it to outlast its competition. It ran for 804 performances and 26 previews.

Assessment

According to Show Music magazine, Yeston "has written some of the most formally structured music in recent musical theatre. But he also has the gift for creating ravishing melody – once you've heard 'Love Can't Happen' from Grand Hotel, or 'An Unusual Way' from Nine, or 'Home' from Phantom, or any number of other Yeston songs, you'll be hooked."^[6]

[edit] Recent years and family

Yeston's current projects include finally producing his musical version of the film, Death Takes a Holiday. The musical was workshopped starring Elena Shaddow as Grazia. Shaddow has previously performed in Nine and also performed Yeston's song cycle, December Songs, The Encore. He is also working on a film version of Nine and another musical adaptation of Frank Loesser's Hans Christian Andersen^[11]

He first married Anne Sheedy, a flutist, in 1982. In 1996, he married Julianne Waldhelm. He has three children: Jake, Max and Emma.

[edit] Work

Broadway

• Nine (1982; revived 2003)
• Grand Hotel (1989)
• Titanic (1997)

Off-Broadway

• Cloud 9, with Larry Gelbart (1981, incidental music. Theatre de Lys in NY and production in Chicago)
• In the Beginning (1987; workshopped as 1-2-3-4-5 at Manhattan Theatre Club)

Other works

• "Goya: A Life In Song" (1989; one of Barbra Streisand's pop hits, "Til I Loved You" is from the show)
• Phantom, with Arthur Kopit (1991; numerous subsequent productions)
• History Loves Company (1991, Marriott Theatre)
• December Songs, a song cycle (1991)
• An American Cantata (for Orchestra and 2000 Voices (2000), commissioned by the Kennedy Center – a choral symphony in three movements, which premiered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin
• Death Takes A Holiday (written in 2003), with a Book by Peter Stone and Thomas Meehan
• Musical adaptation of Frank Loesser's Hans Christian Andersen (2003; music arranged by, and Book by Yeston)

[edit] Awards and recognition

• Tony Award for Best Original Score (1982) (Nine)
• Drama Desk Awards for both music and lyrics (1982) (Nine)
• Nominee for Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1990 (Grand Hotel)
• Nominee for the Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1990 (Grand Hotel)
• Nominee for the Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics in 1990 (Grand Hotel)
• Tony Award for Best Original Score (1997) (Titanic)
• Nominee for Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, 1998 (Titanic)
• Laurence Olivier Award 2005 (Grand Hotel)

Yeston was also honored as Kayden Visiting Artist Designee 1998 (Harvard University) and received the Artist of the Year Award 1998, Elaine Kaufman Foundation.

[edit] Discography

• Nine (original Broadway cast (1982; Grammy Award nomination), Australian cast, 2003 revival cast, London concert and others)
• Goya: A Life In Song (original studio cast, 1989)
• December Songs (1992)
• Grand Hotel (original Broadway cast, 1992)
• Phantom (original cast recording, 1993)
• Titanic (original Broadway cast (1997; Grammy Award nomination), original Dutch cast, original Hamburg cast)
• An American Cantata (for Orchestra and 2000 Voices (2000), commissioned by the Kennedy Center)
• The Maury Yeston Songbook (2003; a compilation of 20 songs recorded by Betty Buckley, Christine Ebersole, Laura Benanti, Sutton Foster, Alice Ripley and others)
• Christmas in the Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album (lyrics)

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• New York Times, May 9, 1982, sect.2, pp. 1, 24; May 10, 1982, p. C13; May 23, 1982; pp. D3, 23; May 23, 1997, sect. 2, p. 6; April 24, 1997, p. C13; June 1, 1997, sect. 2, p. 1; June 2, 1997, p. B1, July 20, 1997, sect. 2, p. 5.
• Newsweek, May 5, 1997, p. 70-73.

[edit] External Links

• Maury Yeston at the The Internet Off Broadway Database
• Maury Yeston at the Internet Broadway Database
• 2008 interview with Yeston at Broadway.com
• Pogrebin, Robin. "A Song in His Psyche, As Hummable as Fame" New York Times, May 19, 2003
• Information about Yeston's recordings
• "Professor, Students Participate in American Cantata", The Mason Gazette, 6-29-2000
• 2003 review of "The Maury Yeston Songbook"
• 2000 review of "In the Beginning"

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