As an undergraduate at Yale University, Yeston majored in music theory and composition and minored in literature, particularly French, German, and Japanese.

" After graduating from Yale in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College at Cambridge University in England.

Upon earning his master's degree at Cambridge in 1972, Yeston returned to the United States to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which included a teaching position at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the country's oldest traditionally black college.

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.

In 1978, at the O ' Neill conference, Yeston and director Tommy Tune held a staged reading of Nine.

Meanwhile, Yeston and Tune turned back to Nine, which opened on Broadway on May 9, 1982 at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for 729 performances.

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 on songwriting.

Yeston also wrote In the Beginning ( originally called 1-2-3-4-5 ), a musical based on the first five books of the Bible, presented at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987 and 1988.

* Maury Yeston at the The Internet Off Broadway Database

* 2008 interview with Yeston at Broadway. com

* Roses at the Station ( Yeston )

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

In 1981 they were accepted as a team into the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, studying first with Lehman Engel and then Maury Yeston.

** Grand Hotel the Musical – Robert Wright, George Forrest and Maury Yeston ( music & lyrics )

Yeston was born in Jersey City, New Jersey.

It became an obsession ," Yeston told The New York Times in 1982.

Carr hired Jay Presson Allen to write the book and Maury Yeston to compose the score for The Queen of Basin Street, an Americanized version set in New Orleans.

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

But he also has the gift for creating ravishing melody – once you've heard ' Love Can't Happen ' from Grand Hotel, or ' An Unusual Way ' from Nine, or ' Home ' from Phantom, or any number of other Yeston songs, you'll be hooked.

Maury Yeston ( born October 23, 1945 ) is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.

Yeston noted, " I am as much a lyricist as a composer, and the musical theatre is the only genre I know in which the lyrics are as important as the music.

* 1997: Titanic – Book by Peter Stone, music / lyrics by Maury Yeston

* At the Grand Hotel ( Yeston )/ Table With a View ( Wright / Forrest )

* Twenty Two Years ( Yeston )/ Villa On a Hill ( Wright / Forrest )

8½ inspired among others: Mickey One ( Arthur Penn, 1965 ), Alex in Wonderland ( Paul Mazursky, 1970 ), Beware of a Holy Whore ( Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971 ), Day for Night ( François Truffaut, 1973 ), All That Jazz ( Bob Fosse, 1979 ), Stardust Memories ( Woody Allen, 1980 ), Sogni d ' oro ( Nanni Moretti, 1981 ), Parad Planet ( Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984 ), La Pelicula del rey ( Carlos Sorin, 1986 ), Living in Oblivion ( Tom DiCillo, 1995 ), 8½ Women ( Peter Greenaway, 1999 ), Falling Down ( Joel Schumacher, 1993 ), along with the successful Broadway musical, Nine ( Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982 ).

One of the earliest was " December Songs ", created by Maury Yeston, and commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its Centennial celebration.

Yeston also wrote a significant amount of the music and most of the lyrics to the Tony-nominated musical Grand Hotel in 1989, which was nominated for best score.

" At age five, Yeston began taking piano lessons from his mother, and by age seven he had won an award for composition.

Yeston began work on choral arrangements for 24 women.

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

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

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

Yeston wrote three new songs for the film and was nominated for the 2009 Academy Award for Best Original Song for " Take It All ".

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.

Yeston wrote six new songs for Grand Hotel and rewrote approximately half the lyrics in the show.

After Grand Hotel opened on Broadway in November 1989, Yeston, along with Wright and Forrest, was nominated for the Tony Award for best score.

" Librettist Peter Stone and Yeston knew that the idea was an unusual subject for a musical.

* Maury Yeston composed December Songs, a song cycle influenced by Winterreise on commission from Carnegie Hall for its 1991 Centennial celebration.

* Yeston, Maury, ed.

In 2011, one of his projects was completed with Thomas Meehan ( writer ), and Death Takes a Holiday ( musical ) was produced off-Broadway with a score by Maury Yeston.

* 1982: Nine – Book by Arthur Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.

Yeston serves on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Yeston noted in a 1997 interview, " My mother was trained in classical piano, and her father was a cantor in a synagogue.

At Lincoln, Yeston taught music, art, philosophy, religion, and western civilization, and started a course in the history of black music.

As a teenager, Yeston had seen the film, about a film director suffering a midlife crisis and a creativity drought, and he was intrigued by its themes.

Yeston called the musical Nine ( the age of the director in his flashback ), explaining that if you add music to 8½, " it's like half a number more.

When 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.

The show originally had male and female parts, but Yeston was not satisfied with the men auditioning, except Raul Julia.