I have now posted various materials about Maestro, including a number of YouTube reviews as well as three posts I’ve written about the film. I’ve also written a somewhat longer article at 3 Quarks Daily, based in part on two of those posts. As additional material, here’s a long conversation about Maestro that trumpeter Mark Gould initiated at Facebook:
As some of you may know, Mark Gould is a professional trumpet player who not-so-long-ago retired as principal trumpet at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Many of the commenters on that thread are professional musicians as well.
Why all this stuff about Maestro? Curiosity and calibration. I watched the film – at least twice, I’ll watch it again – and was variously pleased and puzzled. I watched those videos, including many I’ve not linked here, and read reviews and commentary to clarify things I didn’t understand about the film (curiosity), but also to clarify my own responses (calibration). Let me explain.
I am old enough that a big chunk of my life overlaps with a big chunk of Bernstein’s life. Though I never saw him in live performance, I saw him on television, I read articles and reviews, bought recordings (including one of Mahler 2), and performed some of his music (from West Side Story). He has been a significant part of my musical life. But I never read much about his private life much less have read a comprehensive biography. I had a vague sense of his sexual, shall we say, ambiguity, but little more. Thus learning that he was a closeted gay man and deeply conflicted in his private life, and its interplay with his public life, that was new to me. But some things about the private life simply were not clear to me from the movie itself. Does that matter to the overall effect of the film? Maybe, maybe not, but I was curious.
I was also curious about Bradley Cooper’s realization of Bernstein’s conducting style for Mahler 2, a work I’ve listened to many times, though not in decades. Something seemed off. I thought maybe that Cooper had in fact exaggerated Bernstein’s notoriously flamboyant style. But, no, that’s not it. Two video commentaries by young conductors made it clear that Cooper’s timing was off – not to mention this hilarious video commentary and demonstration by TwoSetViolin. Though I am a skilled musician, I don’t have much experience performing in symphony orchestras; that is likely why I didn’t pick up the mismatch.
That’s curiosity.
What about calibration? Movies are complex objects. Our experience of them may be complex as well, complex and even impenetrable as well. How did other people experience the film? It’s not that I think that somehow my experience was wrong, heaven forbid, and I’m trying to correct or revise it, I’m just trying to gauge it, calibrate it, with respect to other people’s experience. That happens in real time at a performance where audience members are residually aware of one another. After the performance friends gather together in a bar and compare notes. And so forth. When I watch the film for another time, that experience will be responsive to whatever I’ve internalized from all this secondary commentary and criticism I’ve been taking in.
Our experience may be unique, but we live as individuals in a society and are affected by others. THAT’s what’s going on here.
In my many remarks about literary criticism here on the Savanna I’ve distinguished between ethical criticism and naturalist criticism. By naturalist criticism I mean the objective analysis, description, and explanation of works of art, an activity pretty much confined to the academy (see my manifesto). By ethical criticism – a term I take from Wayne Booth, who points out the derivation from ethos – I mean evaluative criticism, where the criteria of evaluation can be aesthetic or ethnical (in a narrow sense). Ordinary reviews, whether in newspapers, magazines, in blogs or on Facebook, they’re ethical criticism.
I subscripted to The New Republic for years. Generally the first thing I would read in each issue was the movie review by long-time reviewer Stanley Kaufman. I’d read his review whether or not I’d seen the film and whether or not I intended to see it. But if he gave the film a favorable review I’d go see it (if I could). No doubt he had some influence on my taste, which is a good thing, but I didn’t necessarily agree with his opinion. But over time I came to know his style, his preference. I had him calibrated.
