His classical works include December Songs, a classical crossover song cycle commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its centennial celebration; An American Cantata: 2000 Voices (a three-movement classical choral symphony commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for its millennium celebration); Tom Sawyer: A Ballet in Three Acts, a full-length story ballet commissioned by the Kansas City Ballet for the opening of the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City; a Cello Concerto, premiered by Yo-Yo Ma; and other pieces for chamber ensembles and solo piano.
Yeston's interest in musical theatre began at age ten when his mother took him to see My Fair Lady on Broadway.
"[7] After graduating from Yale in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College, Cambridge University on a two-year Mellon Fellowship where he continued his studies in musicology and composition.
[9] Upon earning his master's degree there, Yeston returned to the United States to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to teach for a year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the country's oldest traditionally black college.
While there, he enrolled in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, traveling to New York City each week, where he and other aspiring composer/lyricists, including Ed Kleban, Alan Menken, and Howard Ashman,[10] were able to try out material for established Broadway producers and directors.
[7] While teaching at Yale, Yeston continued to attend the BMI workshop principally to work on his project, begun in 1973, to write a musical inspired by Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½.
He also expanded Call from the Vatican for Anita Morris once he discovered she could sing a high C.[17] In 1981, while collaborating on Nine, Tune asked Yeston to write incidental music for an American production of Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine.
[18] Tune was also engaged to work on the musical La Cage aux Folles, based on the 1978 film of the same name, and the producer, Allan Carr, was seeking a composer.
In 2009, a film version of Nine, directed by Rob Marshall and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard, was released.
[22] After the success of Nine, Yeston left his position as associate professor at Yale, although he continued to teach a course there every other semester alternating between songwriting and Schubert Lieder.
"[9] 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.
[23] After various revisions and tryouts, it was finally produced under its current title at Maine State Music Theatre in 1998 and has been revived regionally since then.
[9] The album was produced by Phil Ramone and included the song "Till I Loved You" (a 1988 cover by Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100.[25]).
[9][15] Also in 1989, Tommy Tune, who had directed Nine, asked Yeston to improve the score of Grand Hotel, a musical that was doing badly in tryouts.
December Songs was written as a commissioned piece for the 1991 centennial celebration of New York's Carnegie Hall, where it was premiered by cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci.
[4] The work crosses over the lines from classical music to Broadway to cabaret[9] and has been recorded in German (Dezemberlieder) by Pia Douwes,[27] French (Décembre) by Isabelle Georges,[28] Polish (Opowieści Zimowe, Edyta Krzemien),[29] and six times in English, including as December Songs for Voice and Orchestra (2022), featuring orchestration by Larry Hochman with Victoria Clark as soloist.
The collision with the iceberg dashed all of these dreams simultaneously, and the subsequent transformation of character of the passengers and crew had, it seemed to me, the potential for great emotional and musical expression onstage.
[31] 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.
The New Yorker offered a positive assessment: : "It seemed a foregone conclusion that the show would be a failure; a musical about history's most tragic maiden voyage, in which fifteen hundred people lost their lives, was obviously preposterous.... Astonishingly, Titanic manages to be grave and entertaining, somber and joyful; little by little you realize that you are in the presence of a genuine addition to American musical theatre.
"[32] The show won Tony Awards in the five categories in which it was nominated, including Best Score and Best Musical and ran for 804 performances and 26 previews, toured America for three years, and has had international productions, including in the UK, Japan, Korea, China, Australia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Hungary, and has toured across America.
[33] In 1999 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,[34] 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.
"[35] The piece was praised by the Washington Post, comparing its score to Copland and Randall Thompson and singling out in particular the second movement, which has a text from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Memphis speech he gave the day before his death, I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land.
"[36] Orchestrated by Yeston, the piece celebrates the evolution of the idea of individual liberty and equality, along with our inherent and universal entitlement to it, as our civilization's greatest intellectual achievement of the past 1,000 years.
But he also has the gift for creating ravishing melody – once you've heard 'Love Can't Happen' from Grand Hotel, or 'Unusual Way' from Nine, or 'Home' from Phantom, or any number of other Yeston songs, you'll be hooked.
"[9] Broadway World praised "The genius of Yeston's songs – intricate yet emotional, cerebral yet romantic, clever yet unendingly melodic [and] his immense breadth of style – from the hilarious to the deeply moving.