Blitzstein, Marc

BLITZSTEIN, MARC (1905–1964). The first theater composer to set to music the authentic American language as spoken by all social classes from immigrant laborers to society matrons, Marc Blitzstein devoted the bulk of his career to topics of social commentary and political satire. Born in Philadelphia into a banking family with socialist leanings, he was a child prodigy at the piano. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and the Curtis Institute of Music and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin. Early works include settings of poetry by Cummings and Whitman, instrumental pieces, and short operas. One opera, The Condemned (1932), obliquely refers to the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

With The Cradle Will Rock (1936), a musical about a Congress of Industrial Organizations-type union struggle in Steeltown, USA, that draws strong portraits of the sold-out middle class, Blitzstein joined the Left wholeheartedly. (His wife, Eva Goldbeck [1901–1936], was one of the first Americans to understand Bertolt Brecht’s esthetic approach; she wrote about Brecht and translated him into English.) In I’ve Got the Tune (1937), a radio song-play, he showed the odyssey of a composer finding his true home in the protest movement. He wrote scores for the labor films Valley Town and Native Land, and incidental music for numerous plays. In No for an Answer (1941) he again approached working-class organizing issues, but in a more folk-operatic style. He was a Communist Party member from 1936 or 1938 until 1949.

During World War II, Blitzstein served in London in the U.S. Army Air Force; he wrote incidental music for troop shows, researched French Resistance music, composed an orchestral piece, Freedom Morning, and a cantata for male chorus and orchestra, The Airborne Symphony. After the war he helped organize the American-Soviet Music Society. Red Channels gave him a four-page listing; he gave private testimony, without naming others, to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1958.

His major later works include Regina (1949), an opera based on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes; Reuben Reuben (1955), a Faustian musical about the life urge overcoming the death wish; Juno (1959), a musical version of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock; Idiots First (1963), a one-act opera based on Bernard Malamud’s story; and the uncompleted Sacco and Vanzetti (1960–1964), commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

In 1952 Blitzstein premiered his English adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, which went on to a nearly seven-year run off-Broadway and re-established that work as a 20th-century masterpiece. Blitzstein left a solid repertory of humanistic work for the American stage, opening up new possibilities in subject and style, that no one has equaled since.

Dietz, Robert J. “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein in the American ‘Agit-Prop’ Era.” Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1970.

Gordon, Eric A. Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Lehrman, Leonard, ed., The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, 3 vols., New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1999-2003.

Lehrman, Leonard. Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood/Praeger, 2005.

Pollack, Howard. Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Talley, Paul M. “Social Criticism in the Original Theatre Librettos of Marc Blitzstein.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1965.

The Marc Blitzstein Website. http://www.marcblitzstein.com

Marc Blitzstein Papers, 1918- 1989, Wisconsin Historical Society. Finding Aid. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=reslist;subview=standard;didno=uw-whs-us0035an