Maury Yeston Takes His Own Winter Journey

The first preview of the musical Titanic by Maury Yeston took place on March 29, 1997. Amongst the cast members in that show were Victoria Clark (now on Broadway in Kimberly Akimbo) and Ted Sperling (best known as a music director and conductor). There was no way each of them could envision that 25 years later they would all reunite on a new recording of a work Yeston had written for Carnegie Hall’s Centennial eight years earlier.

December Songs is a song cycle inspired by great works by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and others. Since Yeston is best known as a Broadway composer and lyricist (Nine, Grand Hotel), the work wasn’t going to be a fully classical composition, nor was it going to be musical theater. Andrea Marcovicci gave the world premiere performance in 1991.

Clark sings the song cycle in a new PS Classics recording featuring a large orchestra led by Sperling and orchestrations by Larry Hochman. In listening to December Songs it is hard to believe it wasn’t written specifically for the Tony Award-winning Clark (The Light in the Piazza).

Recently I spoke via Zoom with two-time Tony Award winner Yeston about December Songs, its inspiration, Clark and more. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. If you want to see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

I want to start by asking you about something you told the New York Times in 2003 in an interview with Robin Pogrebin. You said, “I’m a man of infinite patience. I write things and sometimes they don’t see the light for years and years and years.” Accepting that point of view in 2003, it is 19 years later and December Songs is newly recorded with beautiful Larry Hochman orchestrations and you have Victoria Clark singing. Has your patience paid off as it relates to December Songs? 

Absolutely. Absolutely. And by the way, with 37 in the band. There are orchestras and then pit orchestras are one thing. 37 great professional New York musicians and some of them were almost on the verge of tears because they sounded so wonderful. The tears were we don’t get to do this much anymore because there’s electronic machines that create violins and things like that. You just don’t have that experience very much anymore. It was quite, quite thrilling. 

I was commissioned to write the December Songs by Carnegie Hall. They commissioned a whole bunch of people: a new symphony, a string quartet, a piano concerto and a cello concerto and I guess they decided to go slumming. They wanted a group of cabaret songs that had Andrea Marcovicci, which was wonderful. They commissioned me to write a series of what they thought were going to be cabaret songs or whatever I wanted to, which I thought was rather wonderful because this was a commission that I felt in some ways was supposed to honor and reference what Carnegie Hall had done for 100 years.

I thought I could do nothing better than to write a song cycle in the tradition of the great masters like Franz Schubert. I thought, if there’s anything I’ve ever learned to do, it’s try to learn from the great ones. So when I began to write December Songs I resolved that I would tell my story as inspired as I can by them. Another way of saying that is steal from the best. 

I’m going to write it for Andrea, a modern woman. Instead of wandering the snows of the Vienna woods [as in Schubert’s Winterreise] she’ll be wandering the snows of Central Park. And instead of losing her mind and descending and devolving into quasi-insanity, she’ll get over the guy. That was my guide. That was my task.

I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t even performed in my lifetime. I wrote it because I was so inspired and so on fire. I just feel so lucky that we did it. It’s been recorded about eight or nine times in English, once in French, once in Polish and once in German. And, of course, this wonderful performance by Victoria Clark, which I think is just for the ages. She’s extraordinary. 

It sounds like it was written for her. I can’t imagine anyone else – and I love Andrea Marcovicci. It is such a perfect blend of artist and material. 

Vicki and I have, of course, the most wonderful relationship. I was actually the director of undergraduate studies in music at Yale after I had gotten my Ph.D. and joined the faculty. For quite a number of years I was in charge of the music majors. I taught the introductory course in harmony counterpoint. Vicki and I go back to when she was in that class. What’s crazy about that is that three years of each other who else was in that class? Tommy Krasker who founded PS Classics. Ted Sperling, who was the conductor, was also in that class. So it’s like a reunion of me and Tommy and Vicki.

Victoria Clark is a perfect example of the intersection of classical music, popular music, and particularly musical theater, because she’s a genius actress. Vicki is the sort of person who can say “I am longing to be loved” as an actress and get infinite meaning every single time she says that phrase differently or sings that phrase differently. She is an exquisite dramatist. I know that from having had the pleasure of writing some of the funniest material in the world. In her performance of Mrs. Bean in Titanic, she’s just hilarious. At the same time she makes us cry because she’s in the middle class and her husband is just a businessman. All she wants to do is interact and rub elbows with the rich people and go to the big dances. She breaks your heart out of her yearning and longing to do it.

I don’t know if you subscribe to the adage that write what you know, but if write what you know is something that you believe, is there a part of you and your own experience that has informed what December Songs became? 

It was very helpful to know what Schubert had done and what Schumann had done and what Brahms has done. To see that and know I don’t want to do that. But I want to be in that family. I want this music to know that it comes from a tradition. One of the great things about tradition is that you have to move it forward. I knew that I would be doing that just by doing something new from my point of view. Also to be able to stretch every muscle I have, whether it’s got to sound more like a musical theater song sometimes or whether it’s going to be a theme in variations sometimes or even have a jazz influence. I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was to make the music right for this moment in the story and it will all work out. 

Every time I listen to it I feel like this isn’t just something that was written in 1991. This is something that could have been written today and that maybe there’s a greater emotional response to it because of what the last handful of years have been like. How does it resonate with you today?

I feel the same way about it. I don’t even feel like it sounds like it was written yesterday. I think it sounds like it was written tomorrow.

Regret is regret. Heartache is heartache. But at the same time, hope is hope and recovery is recovery. I don’t know who it was who said nothing moves me more than unrequited yearning. That hooks into my heart always, because it’s so characteristic of all of us. Sometimes we deeply yearn for something that we had and don’t have or that we can’t have. But there’s something about that sense of yearning. 

I feel like I’m on my own cutting edge of the future because the song cycle can bring everything to the table that a musical can. Whatever Broadway’s going through in terms of how much it costs and what you have to do and how you market it and all that stuff, there’s something about the world of pure composition in the form of a song cycle that attracts me and and gives me an opportunity just to do my work.

The luxury I had in December Songs was a blessed year to really think about it and to approach it, not merely as a dramatist, but as a composer and also as a composer who has been schooled by musicology about how did Beethoven do this? How does Schumann do this? So you learn from your betters and take great inspiration.

There’s an old music theory book from the 18th century. It takes the form of a great maestro who’s teaching a young composer. In one place in the book, the composer says, “Maestro, is borrowing permitted in music?” And Maestro says, “Yes. As long as you pay back with interest.” I think that’s my M.O. I borrow and learn where I can and try to pay back with interest by bringing something to it that wasn’t there before. I feel so strongly that my whole process of writing December Songs has been that. I think that’s why it feels kind of rich.

I want to conclude by asking you about who you are today and what you see for the future by paraphrasing one of the lyrics from the last song on December Songs. Maury, is it amazing to still be here and a relief for you as we near 2023? 

Unquestionably. We all live and we all go through relationships, broken relationships, new relationships, illnesses, recoveries from illnesses, disappointments in a career. Miracles happen to you in a career. Yes. It’s amazing to still be here. It really is.

I just feel like the 13-year-old who discovered that I could make up stuff. That part is perennially filled with wonder of it all. It never ceases to amaze me. I very rarely have a feeling of relief in having done something. What I feel is an inspiration. This whole experience with Vicki and December Songs with Larry and Ted and Tommy, it has just catapulted me with more inspiration to just launch into something else. So, yeah, I feel like Vicki feels at the end of it and I’m looking forward to the rest of my life and my career. 

To watch the full interview with Maury Yeston, please go here.

Main photo: Maury Yeston (Photo by Mark Seliger/Courtesy PS Classics)