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Song Stories- Maury Yeston Reveals How He Made TITANIC Sail On!
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Nov 3, 2022
How did some of your favorite songs come to be? BroadwayWorld is getting the story behind the song in exclusive interviews from your favorite Broadway composers. Below, watch as Maury Yeston explains how he found the voice of Titanic in writing its opening and closing numbers.
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Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World
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On Tuesday evening, February 20th, Manhattan Concert Productions will present Broadway classics in concert
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This star-studded event will feature songs from some of Broadway's most beloved
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award-winning composers and writers who we caught up with here at Sardi's
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right before the legendary night. Farewell, farewell, bless me, Titanic, from your birth I'm free
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As you plow the deep In your arms I'll keep
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Safety west may you marry me
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Fortune's wits sing the speed through thee Fortune's wits sing the speed through thee
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How I came about to write Titanic is the same way I come to write about everything
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Let me tell you an anecdote. Peter Stone, the great Peter Stone
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who wrote every musical, in fact, I think, except maybe for three. He said to me once, he said
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yes, how long do you think you're going to live? And I said, well, that's a terrible question
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He said, well, no, you can be. I said, can I be generous? He said, yes. I said, all right, all right, I have the number
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He said, right, divide by five, that's the number of new musicals you're going to write. So when I set out to write a show So it important to me to think why is this show important And what is it going to mean to audiences not now but audiences in the future
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And so when I thought about Titanic, and I thought about the dreams of the immigrants
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third-class passengers who were aboard that ship, and who will sing, let all our children's
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children know that this day long ago we dreamt of them and came aboard this ship
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course, to go to America for a better life. And you know what? I hope anybody who walks
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out of the Carnegie Hall after hearing this song or anything from Titanic will be there
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in the street in the world that we are now and find that it's more relevant than ever
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And the dream is still here and we have to preserve it for those who dream to come here
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I always like to say, only because I think it's true, no matter how much you write in
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in your show, ultimately the opening is the last thing you doctor
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And the reason is that you cannot get the opening pitch perfect and exactly right until you know that to which you need to open
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And so we were in the final stages of literally putting our rehearsal
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period together and I realized I haven written anything that sums this up What was this dream of Titanic Because we all know somebody dreamed it up
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so that it would save lives in the same way that Jonas Sault did his vaccine
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And I wrote something called In Every Age, and I wrote it for the end of the show
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And when I played it for Peter Stone and the cast, Peter said, we have to sing at the beginning too
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because it's exactly what we're doing. I've got to sneeze. Let me do that again
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Let me do that again. So once I had the idea then that I had to write something that's going to sum up why did we build this
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What is the lesson of this? The answer is we dream. In every age we build pyramids
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We build Gothic churches. We mean well, but sometimes we fail. But we fail nobly, and we have to keep on dreaming
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And when I played it for Peter Stone and Richard Jones and the cast, Peter said
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I think it's wonderful and I think it's how we should end the show, but I think we have to begin the show with it too
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And he said, because we're now stating exactly what the evening is about
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This is a ship that not only carried people's dreams, the ship was a dream itself, to be its own lifeboat
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And unfortunately, our dream fell short, but we still dreamed
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