Marc
Blitzstein,
the son of a wealthy banker, was born in Philadelphia on 2nd March,
1905. A child prodigy, he performed as a soloist with the Philadelphia
Orchestra when he was only fifteen. He studied at the Curtis Institute
of Music and later trained with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Arnold
Schonberg in Berlin.
Blitzstein wrote plays as well as music and
joined the
Group Theatre in New York where he worked
with Harold Clurman, Lee
Strasberg, Elia Kazan and Clifford
Odets. Members of the group tended to hold left-wing political
views and wanted to produce plays that dealt with important social
issues.
In 1932 Blitzstein wrote Condemned,
a play about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
In 1937 Blitzstein worked with Orson Welles
and John Houseman on The
Cradle Will Rock, a musical about the tyranny of capitalism.
Developed within the Federal Theatre Project,
the original production, with Howard da Silva
and Will Geer, was banned for political
reasons. It eventually was performed at the Mercury Theatre (108 performances).
Another Blitzstein play, No For an Answer
(1941), was also closed down because of its political content.
Blitzstein served in the US Air Force during the Second
World War. His ballet, The Guests,
was performed in 1949. An adaptation of The
Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht
appeared in 1954 and ran for 2,611 performances.
Other work included a musical, Regina
(1949), based on the play, The Little Foxes,
by Lillian Hellman and Juno
(1959), based on Sean O'Casey's Juno
and the Paycock. Marc
Blitzstein was murdered while
on holiday on the island of Martinque on 22nd January, 1964.
(1)
Orson
Welles, interview with Barbara Leaming (30th June, 1984)
Marc Blitzstein was almost a saint. He was so totally and serenely
convinced of the Eden which was waiting for us all the other side
of the Revolution that there was no way of talking politics to him.
He didn't care who was in the Senate, or what Mr. Roosevelt said -
he was just the spokesman for the bourgeoisie! When he came into the
room the lights got brighter. He was a an engine, a rocket, directed
in one direction which was his opera - which he almost believed had
only to be performed to start the Revolution.
(2)
John
Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (1972)
Blitzstein's father was a banker and a socialist of the old school,
of whom his son once wrote that he was "as modern in social thinking
as he was conservative in musical taste". Marc's own political
conversion and its creative expression came late, after the advent
of the New Deal. The Cradle Will Rock, which its author, Marc
Blitzstein, described as "a play with music" (while others,
at various times, called it an opera, a labour opera, a social cartoon,
a marching song and a propagandistic tour de force), had been written
at white heat one year earlier - in the spring of 1936.
(3)
Hallie Flanagan, Arena (1940)
Marc Blitzstein sat down at the piano and played, sang and acted with
the hard, hypnotic drive which came to be familiar to audiences, his
new opera. It took no wizardry to see that this was not just a play
set to music, nor music illustrated by actors, but music and play
equaling something new and better than either.
(4)
Brooks
Atkinson, The New York Times (6th December, 1937)
If Mr. Blitzstein looks like a mild little man as he sits before his
piano, his work generates current like a dynamo. He can write anything
from tribal chant to tin pan alley balladry, and when he settles down
to serious business at its conclusion, his music-box roars with rage
and his actors frighten the aged roof of the miniature Mercury Theatre.
(5)
James
Mason Brown, New York Post (6th December, 1937)
The Cradle Will Rock is the most exciting propagandistic tour de force
our stage has seen since Waiting for Lefty burst like a bombshell
upon this town. The sincerity of the actors sweeps across the footlights
carrying everything before it. There is no room for humbug in this
kind of unaided acting. To reach our hearts it must come from the
hearts of its creators.
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