‘Goya’ Composer Yeston Combines Colors From His Musical Pallette

According to Maury Yeston, whose latest musical, “Goya . . . A Life in Song” will be previewed in a special benefit at the Hollywood Bowl Monday, American music has given the world two great gifts: jazz and the musical.

“They both take a lot of different styles and a lot of different elements from our culture and mush them together,” he says.

But no one on Broadway since Leonard Bernstein has mushed them quite like Yeston does.

Like Bernstein, Yeston, the composer and lyricist of the 1982 Tony Award-winning musical “Nine,” is a composer with one foot in the world of serious music, the other on the Broadway stage.

In Yeston’s case, he happens to have an academic background in arcane music theory: He was a professor at Yale (where he still teaches a course every other semester), and he has written important, highly technical, books on rhythmic structure and on Schenkerian analysis.

But like every other American teen-ager of his generation, Yeston grew up with popular culture. And he finds it absurd to close the door to it.

“How can there be a door between popular and serious music,” he asks, “when you were raised on ‘Get a Job Sha Na Na Na Na Na Na’? And you liked it. And then suddenly there’s Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments or Schoenberg’s Variations for Band, and you like that too. So you like both of those things. It’s like two mints in one.”

Still, the Yeston who greets a visitor to his parents’ apartment in Manhattan (he continues to live in New Haven) seems much more the live wire of Broadway than of musicology.

He jokes about his mother’s coffee table display of his music theory books and “Nine” . . . along with a medical report by his brother, a doctor. He mugs for the photographer. He does something very few artists would dare during the first minute or two of an interview--he wisecracks about politics.

It’s hard, in fact, to find the professor at all in Yeston, until, announcing that it’s time for show and tell, he runs out of the room. Returning with an art book on Goya, he launches into a fascinating half-hour account of the painter’s life and work.

“Goya,” it turns out, is an unusual project, even for a composer with a whole resume of unusual projects. Besides “Nine,” the musical based upon Fellini’s film “8 1/2,” Yeston also wrote the first version of “La Cage aux Folles.” It died when the producers couldn’t come to a contractual agreement.

He beat Andrew Lloyd Webber to the idea of making a show out of “Phantom of the Opera,” but couldn’t get funding for it once Lloyd Webber announced his project.

And he has a new show, “One Two Three Four Five,” based on the lives of the next-door neighbors of the “stars” of the first five books of the Bible, opening on Broadway in the fall.

The curiosity of “Goya,” however, is that it is not a show at all, at least right now, but a soon-to-be-released concept record album, produced by Phil Ramone and written for opera star Placido Domingo.

Yeston says that two years ago he got a call from Allan Carr saying that Domingo wanted to do a Broadway show about Goya. But with Domingo booked into the 1990s, there was little chance of his committing himself to singing a Broadway run, although someday he might.

The appeal for Yeston, who was not at the time told that Gian Carlo Menotti was writing an opera for Domingo--also about Goya--was the appropriateness of Goya’s life for the modern lyric stage.

“To do a musical you need a larger-than-life character,” the composer says. “And Goya, with his 82 years of romance and suffering and craziness and revolution, is certainly that.

“Plus, if you’re going to try to find a role for somebody of the vocal stature of Placido Domingo, once again there are grand themes of which to sing.”

But what made Goya seem especially suited for Yeston was the sheer scope of the Spanish painter’s life and work.

Not only was Goya a flamboyant character, a Don Juan who invaded the beds of the Spanish aristocracy whom he painted as official court painter, but, as Yeston points out, “the life of Goya is inextricably connected to the whole history of Europe, with the progression going from the world of C.P.E. Bach and Haydn straight through to the explosion of Romantic art.”

The wildly swinging stylistic moves of Goya’s work provide Yeston the opportunity to make equally wild swings in the music and lyrics. He, for instance, represents Goya’s amorous adventures across Spain and Italy, as a grand musical theater piece; formally it’s a Classical-period rondo.

But the old, deeply depressed Goya who painted “Dog,” a painting Yeston describes as so radical it is almost a precursor of abstract expressionism, sings a rock song called “Dog in the Quicksand.”

“It’s an incredible moment of terror,” the composer explains. “It needed the grit of rock.”

Given the stylistic range of Goya, it also afforded Yeston the chance to use different kinds of performers, and participating in the album are pop star Gloria Estefan (who also will appear at the Bowl) and Dionne Warwick.

But for Yeston that is not only just one more example of having two mints in one, but it also says something important about our postmodern age.

“I think the essence of postmodernism is that we’re not trying to convince you that we live in a uniform age in which there’s one way of looking at the world and there’s one style,” he says, “but rather that the characters like Goya contain contradictions.

“In order to depict them you really have to shift your point of view rather than have a single point of view.

“So that gives Gloria Estefan permission to be Gloria Estefan and not have to sing grand opera on our album, and it gives Placido Domingo permission to be Placido Domingo and to show his range.”

It also gives Maury Yeston permission to be Maury Yeston.