Everything about Maury Yeston totally explained
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. 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. He was the Director of the BMI Music Theatre Workshop in
New York City for two decades beginning in 1982.
Life and career
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." At age five, Yeston began taking piano lessons from his mother, and by age seven he'd 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.
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." 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. 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." In 1988 Yeston recorded a studio recording of a musical called .
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. 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'd 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." 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."
He first married Anne Sheedy, a flutist, in 1982. In 1996, he married Julianne Waldhelm. He has three children: Jake, Max and Emma.
Work
Broadway
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
"" (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)
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.
Discography
Nine (original Broadway cast (1982; Grammy Award nomination), Australian cast, 2003 revival cast, London concert and others)
(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)Further Information
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