Maury Yeston

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

He has written the music and lyrics for several Broadway musicals and is a classical orchestral and ballet composer.

After graduating from Yale in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College, Cambridge University 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.

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 history of African-American music.

He then pursued a musicology doctorate at Yale and 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, were able to try out material for established Broadway producers and directors.

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, about a film director suffering a midlife crisis and a creativity drought, and he was intrigued by its themes.

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 with Sir 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.

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) and was twice cited by the student body as one of Yale's ten best professors.

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.

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.

Earlier in his career, Yeston was an 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 Theater Hall of Fame in 2023.

Yeston was born in Jersey City, New Jersey.

His father, David, was born in England and founded the Dial Import Corporation, an importing and exporting firm, which his mother, Frances Haar, helped to run.

The family loved music; his mother was an accomplished pianist, and father sang English music hall songs at home.

"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 told The New York Times in 1982.

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."

His musical version of the novel The Phantom of the Opera, titled Phantom (1991), has received more than 1,000 productions worldwide.

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, 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."

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, 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."

Other works include December Songs, a classical crossover song cycle commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its centennial celebration; An American Cantata: 2000 Voices (a three-movement choral symphony commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for its millennium celebration); Tom Sawyer: A Ballet in Three Acts, a full-length story ballet commissioned by the Kansas City Ballet for the opening of the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City; a Cello Concerto, premiered by Yo-Yo Ma; and other pieces for chamber ensembles and solo piano.

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).

He composed, in addition, the incidental music for the Broadway production of The Royal Family in 2009.

His off-Broadway musicals include Death Takes a Holiday (2011), nominated for eleven Drama Desk Awards.