“Viva Maestro!”, a 2022 documentary written and directed by Theodore Braun, is a paean to the LA Phil’s own Gustavo Dudamel.
Except he’s not only ours — removed from it. He’s the director of the Paris Opera, music director of Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and a worldwide ambassador for the unifying, transcendent power of music.
Dudamel, a native of Venezuela, got here up in El Sistema, the publicly financed, arts and community-building classical music-education program founded in 1975 by Venezuelan educator, musician, and activist José Antonio Abreu (1939-2018).
In actual fact, the documentary can be a paean to Abreu and the electrical spirit and sense of responsibility that he passed on to one among his star pupils. Says Dudamel: “Abreu helped me to grasp the universe of possibilities and find out how to use those possibilities to do something special.”
“Wunderkind!” “Conductor of the People!” “Rock Star!” run the headlines.
But for all his charm and charisma, Dudamel is a perpetually restless artist, ever in search of perfection. As he rehearses the Simon Bolivar Orchestra for Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5,” he appears supremely confident but backstage confides: “It takes me an extended time to feel … not comfortable, because comfortable isn’t good. Tension is nice. And I feel that [tension] is the key of the spirit of the piece.”
An interlocutor presses, “Why is the ‘Fifth’ so difficult?
“Because I can’t conduct,” Dudamel responds with a smile, and turns away.
The film follows Dudamel and his various orchestras during 2017 and 2018 — years during which the repressive regime of President Nicolàs Maduro tightened its grip on Venezuelans.
Though heretofore loath to enter the political arena, when violinist Armando Cañizales is killed within the demonstrations by Venezuelan security forces, Dudamel issues a press release: “My entire life has been dedicated to music and art as a way of remodeling societies. I raise my voice against violence. I raise my voice against any type of repression…I urgently call the President of the Republic…to take heed to the voice of the Venezuelan people…Enough is enough.”
“I’m the leader of a program,” he explains. “It’s not only Gustavo. It’s thousands and thousands of young people.”
He follows up with a Recent York Times op-ed entitled “A Higher Way for Venezuela.” The federal government is asking for the election “of a national constituent assembly to rewrite the Structure.
“This isn’t the reply. All Venezuelan residents have an obligation to do what we are able to to reverse the present situation, to defend our fundamental democratic values and to forestall more bloodshed.”
In response, President Maduro promptly cancels Dudamel’s National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela tour. Concert after concert in Asia — Hong Kong, Taipei, Guangzhou — are axed. “You’re shutting down beauty,” says Arturo Marquéz, internationally acclaimed similarly Mexican composer and an in depth colleague and friend of Dudamel’s. The nice conductor and native son finds himself not welcome in his homeland.
Devastated but undeterred, Dudamel organizes an orchestra of children from Mexico, Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Puerto Rico. He conducts them himself, in Mexico City. “Music is an important human right, not elitist, nor far-off from day by day life, but somewhat an important a part of our growth as human beings.
The musicians’ longing to return to Venezuela is palpable. At a lunch, Dudamel tells them, “Maestro Abreu once quoted Neruda to me: ‘They will cut the flowers. But they will never stop the spring.’ That’s what we’re going through — as a family, a project, as products of El Sistema. You’re the foundation. The foundation stays when the tree is cut. Once I asked the Maestro, ‘What happens after you?’ he replied, ‘The kids.’ ”
Dudamel recounts the last telephone conversation he had with Abreu. “I used to be sharing with him — ‘We were with all the youngsters in Mexico, maestro. Your idea is there. It has spread around the globe.’ He was so completely happy and so touched. ‘Keep me posted,’ he said. He understood that I couldn’t be there [at Abreu’s deathbed]. I regret that I used to be not there with him. And I’ll regret that each one my life.”
But Dudamel never sits still for long. “I feel we want a lovely combination,” he tells his manager about an idea he’s developed for Chile. “We want to ask musicians from the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, possibly five young members of the Youth Orchestra, from the LA Phil, the Vienna and Berlin Phil. All of them are available to play but in addition to show. Because that’s El Sistema.”
Dudamel’s philosophy, work, and life constitute a powerful rebuke to those that maintain that art is a frivolous whim in these dark times.
More importantly, they’re an exultant cry of hope.
As he raises his baton in Santiago, Gustavo Dudamel — ours, Venezuela’s, the world’s — proclaims, “All honor and everlasting glory to José Antonio Abreu.”
The orchestra launches into Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 4.” The composer attempted suicide while writing it, but you’d never comprehend it from the opening fanfare; the rapt, utterly absorbed faces of the musicians; and the conductor: curls flying, heart on fire, his body a lit fuse of passion.
They will cut the flowers. But they will never stop the spring.