29 Facts About Maury Yeston

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

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

Maury Yeston received a third Grammy nomination for the revival of Nine in 2004, which won a Tony Award for Best revival of a musical.

Maury Yeston was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for two of his new songs in the film version of Nine.

Maury 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.

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

Maury Yeston attended the Yeshiva of Hudson County through grade eight.

At Jersey Academy, a small private high school in Jersey City, Maury Yeston broadened his musical study beyond classical and religious music and Broadway show tunes to include jazz, folk, rock and roll, and early music.

Maury Yeston took up folk guitar, played vibraphone with a jazz group, and participated in madrigal singing.

At Lincoln, Maury Yeston taught music, art history, philosophy and Western Civilization, and founded Lincoln's course in the history of African-American music.

Maury Yeston then pursued a musicology doctorate at Yale, teaching the same African-American music history course there that he had taught at Lincoln.

Maury Yeston subsequently published another theory book with Yale University Press, Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches, and was twice cited by the student body as one of Yale's ten best professors.

When Maury 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.

Maury Yeston decided that, instead of having the band play the overture, he would have all the women sing it.

Once Liliane Montevecchi joined the cast, Maury Yeston was so impressed with her voice that he wrote Folies Bergere just for her.

In 1981, while collaborating on Nine, Tune asked Maury Yeston to write incidental music for an American production of Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine.

Maury Yeston was engaged to write the music and lyrics, with a book by Jay Presson Allen.

Maury Yeston took time off from Yale to work on the project and had already written several jazzy songs, but Carr was unable to put together the financing for the show, and the project was postponed.

The musical won five Tony Awards, including best musical, and Maury Yeston won for best score.

Maury Yeston wrote three new songs for the film and was nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Take It All" and the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, "Cinema Italiano".

Maury Yeston then turned to writing a musical version of Gaston Leroux's novel, The Phantom of the Opera.

Maury Yeston had completed much of Phantom and was in the process of raising money for a Broadway production when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced plans for his own musical version of the story.

Maury Yeston's Phantom is more operetta-like in style than Lloyd Webber's, seeking to reflect the 1890s period, and seeks to project a French atmosphere to reflect its Parisian setting.

Maury Yeston said Oscar Hammerstein had done that for him and he wanted to do that for me.

Also in 1989, Tommy Tune, who had directed Nine, asked Maury Yeston to improve the score of Grand Hotel, a musical that was doing badly in tryouts.

Maury Yeston wrote eight new songs for Grand Hotel and revised much of the existing 1958 lyrics.

Maury Yeston saw the story as unique to turn-of-the-century British culture, with its rigid social class system and its romanticization of progress through technology.

In 1999 Maury Yeston was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write and orchestrate a three-movement orchestral work for the millennium celebration, An American Cantata: 2000 Voices, which was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leonard Slatkin at the Lincoln Memorial in July 2000, with a chorus of 2000 voices and tenor soloist Norm Lewis.

Maury Yeston served on the board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Dramatists' Guild Council, the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and the editorial board of Musical Quarterly; he is a past president of the Kleban Foundation, an advisor to the Yale University Press Broadway Series.