Fiction in film
George Clooney has built quite a reputation for himself. His good looks, coy smile, and impressive acting skills have gained him millions of fans through his portrayal of Dr. Doug Ross in the television series ER, and he has starred in many movies. He has won a slew of awards, and he’s the only person to have been nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories. But ask him to do a Boston accent, and he’s just another goofball. In the film The Perfect Storm, Clooney played the tough and ambitious captain of a fishing boat based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The tale was exciting and suspenseful, until the major characters were sitting quietly in a bar talking amongst themselves. When they tried to imitate the distinctive Bostonian “R’s” and “Aaaa’s,” all of us sitting in Boston theaters hooted.
It was the same in Mystic River, in which Sean Penn and Laura Linney played a vindictive couple in Charlestown, Massachusetts. I once sat next to Laura Linney at a dinner at Brown University (I’ll not forget that blue suede dress), and I can tell you that in person she’s pretty special (and especially pretty), but in the film, her Boston accent was terrible, and Sean Penn’s was worse. Wendy and I lived in Charlestown at that time. It was fun to see our local neighborhoods and the building we lived in on the silver screen, but we never met anyone in town who spoke like that.
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Dustin Hoffman was terrific in The Graduate playing a young man seduced by the wife of his father’s business partner, and in All the President’s Men, he was the epitome of an aggressive, ambitious investigative journalist. But he’s no choral conductor.
Hoffman stars in the 2014 film Boychoir. His character is Master Carvelle, the imperious musical director of an exclusive boychoir school, patterned closely after the renowned American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey. The fictional National Boychoir Academy is placed in New Jersey, and occupies a bucolic campus with faux-Gothic buildings. All of the boys in the fictional choir (except one, the character Stet) are played by actual members of the American Boychoir, and the daily routines of rehearsals, academics, and recreation in the two schools, both fictional and non-fictional, are very similar.
But in those scenes when Master Carvelle is rehearsing the choir, the fiction is blatant. Hoffman probably imagines that he’s imitating a conductor’s downbeat. I’m sure he watched lots of conductors on film and had expert coaching, but each time he raised a baton, I smirked like a teenager. It’s worse than Clooney’s Boston accent. And as the choir sings, Carvelle struts about among them, shouting inspirational phrases, while his prig of an assistant, Drake, beats time with his chin high in the air. There can be no conductor alive with chops enough to lead an exclusive choir who would stand for an assistant beating time for even one second. What Hoffman’s Carvelle does get right is the persona of a strict teacher, who understands the responsibility of nurturing and caring for unusual talents. His dedication to the choir is complete.
As the film starts, we meet a boy named Stet, whose mother is an alcoholic prostitute, living near poverty in a tough small town in Texas. The principal of his school, Mrs. Steele (played by Debra Winger), recognizes that while Stet is a serious troublemaker, he has a special musical gift, and she arranges for the National Boychoir to perform at her school. She tells Carvelle of Stet’s gift and he agrees to audition him, but Stet takes one look and bolts. In the same sequence, Stet’s mother is killed in a traffic accident. We meet his father, Gerard, at the funeral—a wealthy venture capitalist whose brief fling made him an unwilling father, but Mrs. Steele convinces him to take Stet to the school in New Jersey. Gerard doesn’t want the story known, and Mrs. Steele has him firmly by his weakness.
Carvelle insists that they don’t accept students who are unprepared, but Gerard’s able checkbook convinces the school’s brassy headmistress (Kathy Bates) to accept Stet over Carvelle’s objections. She even makes a comment about waiting for the check to clear. You can imagine the struggle as the story continues. Stet is an outcast with no family, while the other boys are privileged and wealthy.1 There is plenty of competition, jealousy, and backstabbing among the boys, but in the end, Stet’s talent carries him to get the big solos, infuriating his chief rival in the choir.
Movie fiction brings about all sorts of impossibilities. Stet is about to sing a solo in a concert at Woolsey Hall at Yale (yup, the very place!), and as he’s stepping on to the stage, he learns that Carvelle isn’t conducting the performance.2 You’d think a choir would know in advance who would be conducting. The choir wins a coveted concert in New York at the Riverside Cathedral (humph!). At that climactic concert, Stet sings a descant to Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” including a string of high Ds that surpassed the impossible high Cs in the aria in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment that earned Luciano Pavarotti the sobriquet “King of the High Cs.” Really, a descant? Phooey—hokum! At least they got the key correct.
Truth among fiction
Now that I’ve proven I’m a musical snob, there’s lots about Boychoir that’s wonderful. How thrilling for us who work hard in church music to see a feature film devoted to an aspect of our work. There are many moments of lovely singing (goofy conducting notwithstanding), and the story of Stet’s struggle, and his ultimate realization that he really wants to be at the school, and really wants to learn to sing, was touching and inspiring. The inevitable clashes between Carvelle and Stet were poignant and moving. And when Stet happened on Carvelle playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor (on the stage in empty Woolsey Hall), we learned that Carvelle had been an aspiring pianist studying at Juilliard, but his goals were crushed by a teacher telling him he had no talent. The scene reminds us that Dustin Hoffman really is a wonderful actor.3
The real McCoy
Herbert Huffman was one of the earliest graduates of the Westminster Choir College, a choral conductor, and minister of music at Broad Street Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Ohio, when he heard the Vienna Boys Choir and dreamed that the United States might be home to such an ensemble. He founded the Columbus Boychoir School in 1937, to provide exceptional training for talented young boys, building character and providing a first-class education. The school grew quickly, and the choir gained national prominence within a few years. They sang with major symphony orchestras, made recordings, and in 1945, performed in New York City’s Town Hall.
John Finley Williamson founded the Westminster Choir at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio, in 1920, and founded the Westminster Choir School in 1927. Like the Columbus Boychoir, the Westminster Choir quickly gained national prominence, touring Europe and the United States, singing for presidents, and singing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski in the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast. The school moved to Ithaca College in New York in 1929, expanding the curriculum to become a four-year program offering a degree of Bachelor of Music. The move to Ithaca allowed the choir to travel easily by train to the major northeast cities, where they were in high demand.
Charles Erdman (1866–1960) was a Presbyterian minister, a professor at the Princeton Theological School, and moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. He continued to live in Princeton after his retirement in 1936, and it was his vision that Princeton should be developed as a center for choral music. He was instrumental in bringing both the Westminster Choir College and the Columbus Boychoir School to Princeton,4 establishing permanent homes for two of the country’s great musical institutions.
The commuting director
James Litton was appointed full-time organist and director of music at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York in 1982, succeeding Jack Ossewaarde. William Trafka became assistant organist to Litton at St. Bart’s in January of 1985. In the summer of 1985, Jim Litton was offered the directorship of the American Boychoir. Jim met with Thomas Bowers (rector at St. Bartholomew’s) and Stephen Howard (president of the American Boychoir School), and they worked out a scheme having Jim cut back to half-time at St. Bart’s, while assuming the directorship at ABS. William Trafka’s job became full time, and over thirty years later, Trafka is still director of music at St. Bart’s.
Jim Litton commuted between the positions in New York and Princeton for ten years. He left St. Bart’s in 1995 and retired from the ABS in 2001. During his tenure with the school, the choir sang over a hundred performances with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis, Bach’s St. John Passion, a Christmas special with the Boston Pops under John Williams, and they made a recording of Christmas music with Jessye Norman at Ely Cathedral. Jim was an adviser during the filming of Boychoir, and in the scene with the Woolsey Hall concert, it was pure delight to see him sitting in the audience next to Dustin Hoffman.
After seeing Boychoir, I invited Jim for lunch. We spent a couple nice hours together, and it was fun to hear his stories about working and traveling with the American Boychoir. He spoke of the responsibility of providing such a specialized education to talented children, and how exciting it was to grow with the choir, performing around the country and the world. I subsequently learned that during his tenure Jim led more than “2,000 concerts in 49 states and 12 nations.” What an impressive legacy.
Nurturing the gift
In some ways, the boys of the fictional National Boychoir Academy are just boys. But we can tell they’re a little smarter than average because the pranks they pull on each other are especially savage and hurtful. We watch the small community of young boys working hard on academics and taking their musical studies and performances very seriously. The school administrators face disciplinary issues, fight among themselves, and try to balance their own musical aspirations to the needs of their students. Wooly, a young teacher played by Kevin McHale, cares deeply about the boys as he leads them in rehearsals and ear training sessions, and offers them advice as they navigate from one challenge and crisis to another.
The choir arrives at Riverside (Cathedral) in their snazzy bus for their long-coveted New York debut and goes through customary warm-ups under Drake’s haughty direction. Just before they’re to enter the church, Carvelle sits side-saddle on a folding chair in front of them, and using the softest tone and expressions of the entire film, delivers a pep talk to the young singers. He acknowledges that the career of the boy soprano is short, just one or two years at the highest level, and he refers to their gifts as a mystery. “You wake up one morning and it’s not there anymore. Some of you will become altos, some of you will become baritones, some of you will become dentists.” He goes on to say that whatever you choose to do, there will be other gifts, and whatever they are, you must nurture them.
A few days after the triumphant concert (with the tacky descant), Stet is standing alone in the school’s gymnasium singing random notes and looking concerned, realizing that his voice is changing. He confides in Wooly, saying he thought he would have had more time and wondering if he might be a good alto. Wooly responds with a beautiful statement about artistic gifts, “You’ll never sing like you did. That voice wasn’t yours to keep. You borrowed it for a little while, and then it went somewhere else.”
Great music-making is about what the musician has to offer to the listener. Whether you’re singing, playing the organ, or any other instrument, you honor your audience by caring for your talent, nurturing it, and sharing it freely.
The career of a boy soprano is one of the shortest in music, but every artistic gift is just that, a gift. Some musicians take their gifts for granted and assume that everything good is coming their way. You know the type? I’m talking about the person who whines that everyone else gets the good gigs. I’m talking about the person who laughs at someone else’s innocent question. I’m talking about the person who assumes everyone knows how great he is. Facebook is a great revealer of the petulant musician.
Backstage backstabbing
New York’s Metropolitan Opera is the largest performing arts institution in the world with hundreds of musicians on staff and many hundreds more in technical and administrative departments. Its annual budget is over $300,000,000. It may be the most prestigious stage in the world, with more than 200 performances of opera each year. While most musicians savor the privilege of performing there and delight audiences with their grace as well as their musical talents, others use it as a stage for monumental collapses of dignity.
Joanna Fiedler (1945–2011) was the daughter of Arthur Fiedler, the legendary leader of the Boston Pops Orchestra. She wrote a memoir about her father, Arthur Fiedler: Papa, the Pops, and Me. She served as director of public relations for the National Symphony, was editor of program books for the New York Philharmonic, and from 1975 until 1989, she was chief press liaison for the Metropolitan Opera. I am just finishing reading her 2001 book, Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music, a scathing, gossipy tattle about the ugly side of artistic temperaments. Jealousy, rage, vindictiveness, and even murder pepper the pages of this colorful book.
Internationally renowned stars bicker among themselves, set each other up for falls, and fling temper fits when they feel they’re not getting their way. One well-known singer changed and cancelled rehearsals, banned certain conductors from working with her, even demanded that other singers not look at her, to the extent that the Met’s general manager fired her from a production and cancelled all of her upcoming engagements, all this from a talented and beautiful woman with an agile and clear voice. Dustin Hoffman’s Master Carvelle could have given her a stern talking to about nurturing her gifts and her responsibility toward her audiences.
Carrying the torch
Perhaps I’ve been a little hard on the Hollywood stunts in Boychoir—it’s unseemly to be the one snickering in the audience because you know a little more about the subject than those around you. (Although when Wendy and I saw Boychoir in a theater near home, an esteemed colleague organist was sitting behind us!) I’m grateful that the creative powers in Hollywood thought enough of the concept of the exclusive choir to dig into the subject. I have no sense that the movie was a great success. While the film has done well in Canada and overseas, here at home it opened in a limited number of theaters, played for just a few weeks, and vanished for more than a year until I was finally able to purchase a DVD.
I know I’ve been something of a spoiler, telling so much of the story here, but I promise I haven’t given away the ending. For anyone in the field of the performing arts, Boychoir is worth a viewing. It’s easy to find online. Maybe you’ll agree with me that there’s a hokey factor—after all, giving a good downbeat is a particular and unique skill. But the positive takeaway about the importance of caring for a musical gift and the importance of carrying oneself with dignity and humility is very well taken. Dustin Hoffman may not portray a performing musician well enough to convince a performing musician, but he plays a mighty strong mentor. ν
Notes
1. The boys in the American Boychoir School are from varied backgrounds, and according to James Litton, most have received significant financial aid.
2. The fictional performance is conducted by the actual conductor of the ABS, Fernando Malvar-Ruiz.
3. Dustin Hoffman is also quite a pianist. Jim Litton relates that Hoffman himself played the Rachmaninoff prelude during filming.
4. The Columbus Boychoir School was renamed the American Boychoir School
in 1980.
