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March 2, 2005 marked the centennial of one of the most significant 20th Century American composers of musical theater, opera and concert music — Marc Blitzstein. Musical importance and fame often do not coincide, and they certainly did not in the case of Blitzstein, even though Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson championed him. One work of Blitzstein's – his English translation of Berthold Brecht's lyrics for "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera – is known better (and has probably earned more) than all of his catalogue put together. In terms of his original musical theater works, Marc Blitzstein is most famous for a 1936 show created under the auspices of the governmental WPA, The Cradle Will Rock, whose content was so politically controversial that it could not open until it found a new producer (Orson Welles) two years later. The story of that show's problems became the subject of a notable film directed by Tim Robbins in 1999.
Perhaps the foremost musical proponent of Blitzstein today is composer Leonard J. Lehrman, who has devoted a great deal of his life to the study and performance of Blitzstein’s music, and to completing works left unfinished at the composer’s death in 1964. Lehrman is responsible for a newly-released concert CD of Blitzstein works, The Marc Blitzstein Centennial Concert (Original Cast Recordings) featuring many rarely heard Blitzstein songs performed by a varied cast of singers and musicians. It is one of many Blitzstein Centennial-related performances and recordings this year. Playback caught up with Lehrman recently to discuss Blitzstein and the hundredth anniversary activities.
Playback: In this centennial year of Blitzstein, why are he and his music still important?
Lehrman: He is important on several different levels. The most famous thing that he ever did was the translation of Kurt Weill & Bethold Brecht's The Threepenny Opera which is still the standard classic version. "Mack the Knife" from that score was the most popular song of 1959 and probably made more money than everything else he ever did put together. The second level is what he did for American Musical Theater and the third level is what he did for American Concert Music. They often overlapped because he was a pioneer in inventing the American Musical Theatre with a social consciousness.
Which is best exemplified in The Cradle Will Rock.
Well, The Cradle Will Rock is his masterpiece in a genre that he called "a play in music." It was inspired by and dedicated to the German playwright and lyricist Berthold Brecht. It is the piece of Blitzstein's that has had more performances than any other. He also wrote Regina, based on Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, which ran for seven weeks on Broadway and was, technically, a failure. But it has become one of the most popular of all American operas in opera houses around the world. I think there are over a hundred productions of The Cradle Will Rock and, of course, the film. Regina has had about 75 productions. There's a production that is happening this summer with Lauren Flanigan at the Bard College Festival and one at the Kennedy Center with Patty Lupone. The amazing thing about Blitzstein is that, while some things that he did like The Threepenny Opera, The Cradle Will Rock, and Regina are pretty well-known. some of his most exciting, interesting, and best music is very little known. Ned Rorem called Tales of Malamud, and, specifically, the one-act opera, Idiots First, the work the work that Blitzstein was working on when he died, Marc's best work. When it was first produced in New York in 1978 in my completed version, it won an off-Broadway award for most important event of the season. It is based on a Jewish story by Bernard Malamud. In fact, when Jose Ferrer performed an excerpt from it at the Mark Blitzstein Memorial Concert in April 1964, the New York Times critic, Harold Schoenberg, said that he sang with a Yiddish accent that would have made "a row of blintzes stand up and salute."
He was clearly a person who was compelled to make music that reflected his political concerns.
The opera Blitzstein believed to be his magnum opus was a work on a subject that obsessed him almost his whole life — The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrant anarchists who were arrested in 1920 in Massachussets for a crime they did not commit. After a long campaign to free them, they were executed in 1927. Blitzstein wrote his first choral opera about them, called The Condemned, that has never been produced. Then in 1959 he reworked a number of other pieces of his, including The Condemned. He received a commission from the Ford Foundation with an option for the Metropolitan Opera to put on an opera to be called Sacco and Vanzetti. It triggered a tremendous reaction from the right wing in this country, denouncing the Met, and Blitzstein for his alleged Communism. He actually had left the Communist Party years earlier. The opera disappeared when he died. It was found in the trunk of his car when it was being sold. The task of completing it fell to me with the approval and blessing of Leonard Bernstein.
Blitzstein was murdered in 1964 in Martinique. Do you think that he would have been more appreciated had he lived longer?
I remember vividly my first meeting with Bernstein in December in 1969, when he talked about Blitzstein with tears in his eyes. He said, "This would have been his time – the late 1960s. He'd have come alive in this generation of new social consciousness that doesn't remember him."
–Jim Steinblatt
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