Maury Yeston (born October 23, 1945) is an American composer, lyricist and music theorist.
Yeston has written the music and lyrics for several Broadway musicals and is also a classical orchestral and ballet composer. Among his Broadway musicals are Nine in 1982, Titanic in 1997, for both of which he won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Score and was nominated for Grammy Awards, and Grand Hotel in 1989, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for best score and two Drama Desk Awards for his music and lyrics. He composed, in addition, the incidental music for the Broadway production of The Royal Family in 2009. He received a third Grammy nomination for the revival of Nine in 2004, which won a Tony Award for Best revival of a musical. He also was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for two of his new songs in the film version of Nine (Take It All and Cinema Italiano).
His musical version of the novel The Phantom of the Opera, titled Phantom (1991), has received more than 1,000 productions worldwide. His off-Broadway musicals include Death Takes a Holiday (2011), nominated for eleven Drama Desk Awards and the Revue Anything Can Happen in the Theatre. His classical works include the song cycle December Songs; An American Cantata (a three movement choral symphony); Tom Sawyer: A Ballet in Three Acts; a Cello Concerto, premiered by Yo-Yo Ma; and other pieces for chamber ensembles and solo piano.Yeston, Maury. "Classical Works", accessed July 2, 2023
Earlier in his career Yeston was Associate Professor of Music and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Yale University for eight years, authoring two scholarly books on music theory published by Yale University Press (The Stratification of Musical Rhythm and Readings in Schenker Analysis), and subsequently presided over and taught the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York City for more than two decades beginning in 1982. Yeston has won two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards and an Olivier Award, and was inducted into The American Theater Hall of Fame in 2023.
Life and career Early years Yeston was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father, David, was born in London, England, and founded the Dial Import Corporation, an importing and exporting firm, which his mother, Frances Haar, helped to run. Yeston stated 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, Harold Arlen, 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."Playbill, May 31, 1997, pp. 18–20 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.
As an undergraduate at Yale University Yeston majored in music theory and composition, writing an atonal sonata for piano, incidental music for a production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and a cello concerto that won Yale's Friends of Music Prize,"Maury Yeston: Bio", MauryYeston.com. Retrieved May 29, 2023 and minored in philosophy and literature, particularly French, German, Italian 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." After graduating from Yale Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College, University of Cambridge on a two-year Mellon Fellowship where he continued his studies in musicology and composition. There, he belonged to Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club and wrote several classical pieces, including a set of atonal songs for soprano and a chamber piece (Trilogues for Three String Quartets) in addition to a musical version of Alice in Wonderland, 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.Vitaris, Paul. "The Unsinkable Maury Yeston." Show Music the Musical Theatre Magazine Spring, 1997, pp. 17–23 Upon earning his master's degree there, Yeston returned to the United States to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to teach for a year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the country's oldest traditionally black college. At Lincoln, Yeston taught music, art history, philosophy and Western Civilization, and founded Lincoln's course in the history of African-American music.
He then pursued a musicology doctorate at Yale, teaching the same African-American music history course there that he had taught at Lincoln. While there, he enrolled in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, traveling to New York City each week, where he and other aspiring composer/lyricists, including Ed Kleban, Alan Menken, and Howard Ashman,Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: were able to try out material for established Broadway producers and directors. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale in 1974, with his dissertation published as a book by Yale University Press: The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (1976), Soon afterwards, his cello concerto was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma and the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra with Gilbert Levine conducting. He then joined the Yale Music Dept. faculty where he taught for eight years, ultimately becoming Yale's Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music."Maury Yeston: Bio", MauryYeston.com. Retrieved August 19, 2023 He subsequently published another theory book with Yale University Press, Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches (editor, 1977), (both of his books are noted for their discussions of rhythmic structure and Schenkerian analysis)Swed, Mark. "Goya Composer Yeston Combines Colors from His Musical Pallette", Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1988, retrieved April 29, 2023 and was twice cited by the student body as one of Yale's ten best professors.
Musical theatre career Nine and La Cage 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. As a teenager, Yeston had seen the film and became intrigued by its themes. Yeston told The New York Times in 1982:
"I looked at the screen and said 'That's me.' I still believed in all the dreams and ideals of what it was to be an artist, and here was a movie about... an artist in trouble. It became an obsession". Yeston called the musical Nine (the age of the director in his flashback), explaining that if you add music to 8½, "it's like half a number more."
In 1978, at the O'Neill Conference, Yeston and director Howard Ashman held a staged reading of Nine. Unbeknownst to him, Katharine Hepburn was in the audience, and after seeing it and liking it, she wrote to Fellini saying she had seen a wonderful show based on his movie. When Yeston went to ask permission to make the show a musical, Fellini told him he already received a letter from Hepburn and gave him permission. Mario Fratti had written the book, but the producers and director Tommy Tune decided his script did not work and brought in Arthur Kopit in 1981 to write a new book. The show originally had male and female parts, but Yeston was not satisfied with the men auditioning, except Raul Julia. They had liked a lot of the women who had auditioned, so Tune suggested casting them all. Yeston began work on choral arrangements for 24 women. Yeston decided that, instead of having the band play the overture, he would have all the women sing it. Once Liliane Montevecchi joined the cast, Yeston was so impressed with her voice that he wrote Folies Bergere just for her. He also expanded Call from the Vatican for Anita Morris once he discovered she could sing a high C.
In 1981, while collaborating on Nine, Tune asked Yeston to write incidental music for an American production of Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine.In Depth Interview: Maury Yeston Part I: Getting Tall. BroadwayWorld, May 7, 2010. Tune was also engaged to work on the musical La Cage aux Folles, based on the 1978 film of the same name, and the producer, Allan Carr, was seeking a composer. Yeston was engaged to write the music and lyrics, with a book by Jay Presson Allen. Their stage version of the film was to be called The Queen of Basin Street, set in New Orleans; it was hoped to be staged in 1981. Mike Nichols was set to direct and Tommy Tune to choreograph. Yeston took time off from Yale to work on the project and had already written several jazzy songs, but Carr was unable to put together the financing for the show, and the project was postponed. Carr searched for executive producers and found them in Fritz Holt and Barry Brown, who immediately fired the entire creative team that Carr had assembled, except for Yeston, who later withdrew from the project.Suskin, Steven. "On the Record: Ernest In Love, Marco Polo, Puppets and Maury Yeston", Playbill, 10 Aug 2003, accessed June 25, 2013 These creatives, other than Yeston, eventually filed lawsuits, but only Yeston collected a royalty from La Cage.Laurents, p. 118Christiansen, Richard. , Chicage Tribune, May 25, 1986, accessed June 25, 2013
Meanwhile, Yeston and Tune turned back to Nine, which opened on Broadway on May 9, 1982, at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for 729 performances. The cast included Raul Julia as Guido. The musical won five Tony Awards, including best musical, and Yeston won for best score. A London production and a successful Broadway revival of Nine followed in 2003, starring Antonio Banderas and winning the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. In 2009, a film version of Nine, directed by Rob Marshall and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard, was released. Yeston wrote three new songs for the film and was nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Take It All" and the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, "Cinema Italiano"."Maury Yeston", Golden Globe Awards. Retrieved September 10, 2023
Phantom and next 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 alternating between songwriting and Schubert Lieder. He then 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."