Biography

Jeanine Tesori is preeminent among women composers active in the realm of the Broadway music, with a long list of awards and critical and popular successes to her name. Tesori has also taken up the more specifically classical genres of theatrical incidental music, in which she worked with acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner, and opera. Tesori was born Jeanine Tesoriero in Port Washington, New York, on Long Island, on November 10, 1961. Her father was a physician, but her grandfather was a conductor and composer, and when she began taking piano lessons at four, her family noticed that she could already play by ear. Tesori abandoned her classical training in favor of sports during her teens but often traveled into New York to hear musicals with friends, and as a pre-med student at Barnard College, she switched her major to music. Making a living as a Broadway pit musician in, among other shows, Chess, Tesori married Keith Levenson and used the name Jeanine Levenson for a time. The pair wrote a musical called Galileo, about the Italian scientist, that they tried to promote nationally. That marriage ended in divorce, as did a later marriage to conductor and arranger Michael Rafter. Persisting with her compositional activity as she scrambled to make a living, Tesori scored dance music for the 1995 revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. She achieved a breakthrough with her off-Broadway musical Violet (1997), which earned good reviews and led to more opportunities, not only in musical theater (arranger credits for The Sound of Music in 1998 and Swing the following year) but for the chance to write music for a Lincoln Center production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. That score won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play in 1999, the first in a long series of honors for Tesori that has included five Tony award nominations. Tesori's musicals have included Thoroughly Modern Millie (2000), Shrek the Musical (2008), Fun Home (2011, based on the memoir of cartoonist Alison Bechdel), and Soft Power (2018, with a book by playwright David Henry Hwang). She has written incidental music for several Kushner plays, including Caroline, or Change (2004), and the playwright's translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (2006). Tesori's film music credits include songs for Shrek the Third, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, and Mulan II. She made her first venture into opera with A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (2011), with a libretto by Kushner; the opera had its premiere at upstate New York's prestigious Glimmerglass Festival. Tesori returned to opera in 2019 with Blue, utilizing a libretto by Tazewell Thompson that addressed the issue of police brutality against young African Americans well in advance of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.