Forgive them, teacher!

His father, Samuel Bernstein, was a fishmonger and hairdresser. Jenny, his mother, was Ukrainian, but you won’t see that in “Maestro,” the film starring Bradley Cooper, a nominee for eight Oscars. He studied at Harvard, was the youngest music director in the history of the New York Philharmonic, and the FBI investigated him for being a communist, but you won’t see that in Bradley Cooper’s film. He was a friend of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy. Two days after the Democratic president’s assassination, he led a televised performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony with the New York Philharmonic in his honor. You won’t see that in Bradley Cooper’s film either, nor will you know from that film that writer and journalist Tom Wolfe portrayed him on an afternoon when the Black Panthers and a group of wealthy ladies were making pastries in his New York apartment ate. Leonard Bernstein composed the music for the film “The Silent Law” by Elia Kazan; In 1957, he premiered the musical West Side Story, and in less than a year it ran more than three hundred performances, but you don’t see that in Bradley Cooper’s film. He directed Luigi Cherubini’s Medea at La Scala and ten performances of Bellini’s The Sleepwalker, all starring María Callas, but you won’t see that in Bradley Cooper’s film. In the lectures he gave at Harvard and Cambridge he applied Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories to musical structures, but you don’t see that in Bradley Cooper’s film either. In 1964, Verdi’s “Falstaff” premiered at the Metropolitan in New York, in a production directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli. Recording “West Side Story” for Deutsche Grammophon with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras gave him some headaches due to the Spanish tenor’s accent. Two hours of film dedicated to the most important director, composer and musician of the 20th century and you will have only one idea: he had a devoted wife, Felicia. And apparently that’s enough for Cooper.