Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

14. Edith J. R. Isaacs, “An Industry without a Product—Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22 (February 1938): 99.

15. George Jean Nathan, “Theater,” Scribner’s Magazine 103 (March 1938): 71.

16. That’s Entertainment Records ZC TED 1105.

17. In citing the German premiere in Recklinghausen (1984), the first Cradle performance in continental Europe, Gordon notes that Gershon Kinsley, the director and pianist of the 1964 production and recording, “rescored it for chamber ensemble, including synthesizer.” Gordon, Mark the Music, 539.

18. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music,” 27.

19. Ibid.

20. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

21. Ibid.

22. Blitzstein, “New York Medley, Winter, 1935,” Modern Music 13/2 (January–February 1936): 36–37.

23. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

24. Minna Lederman, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music, 1924–1946), I. S. A. M. Monograph, no. 18 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983), 67.

25. Its published text and original conception called for the ten scenes to form an unbroken chain. Despite this, it became traditional to divide the work into two acts with a break after scene 6, a division observed in the Tams-Witmark Music Library rental score.

26. Blitzstein, “Author of ‘The Cradle,’” 7.

27. The quotation is taken from Brecht’s essay “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre.” See Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and trans., 85.

28. Brecht explores these ideas in “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre (Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny).” See Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and trans., 33–42.

29. The “Croon–Spoon” portion of Scene Four is found in The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938), 52–58 (the piano-vocal score for this song is included) and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 132–33.

30. The word “nerts,” another expression for “nuts” (as in “crazy”) was, like spoon, also used in the early 1900s. The New Dictionary of American Slang, ed. Robert L. Chapman (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 298.

31. In the event that devotees of Bing Crosby (1901–1977), perhaps the best-remembered and best-loved crooner, are reading this note, it should be mentioned that Crosby (and many other crooners) did not share Junior’s poor sense of pitch. Blitzstein might be indicting the content of Crosby’s songs and the legion of Crosby epigones, but not crooners in general or Crosby in particular. In fact, Gordon notes that Blitzstein had considered Crosby for the film Night Shift (1942) and that several years later he gladly worked with the crooner on the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. Gordon, Mark the Music, 216, 250, 274.

32. At the risk of further complicating this analysis, it should be noted that the F center of Mister Mister’s melody in the A sections (harmonized by a D-minor seventh) is neither major nor minor but in the Lydian mode (F major with a raised fourth degree of the scale or B instead of B).

33. The harmony here begins by alternating between E major (the key in which Daily began his second B section) and D minor. After the considerable harmonic maneuvering described in the text, this section ends up with a strong cadence back to D minor and circles back to the vamp that introduced Mr. Mister’s first a section.

34. Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 226–27. The rocking “Hawaiian guitar” accompaniment also serves as a relaxed and understated version of the accompaniment heard earlier in “Let’s Do Something.”

35. Cradle, 87–96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 141–46.

36. Max Unger, Notes to Beethoven’s Overture to Goethe’s “Egmont” (New York: Eulenburg, 1936), ii (with a musical illustration for this measure). It is tempting to speculate that Blitzstein had Thayer’s interpretation (reiterated in Unger’s notes) fresh on his mind. In any event the popular Eulenburg edition appeared the same year that Blitzstein wrote his Cradle.

37. Cradle, 96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 145–46.

38. In his survey of Blitzstein’s theatrical work through 1941, Robert Dietz notes three recurring ideas in the midst of Cradle’s otherwise autonomous ten scenes: the multiple appearance of the Moll’s music (scenes 1, 2, 7, and 10); the reprise of the title song, first sung in scene 7, to conclude the work three scenes later; and an ominous three-chord motive in the orchestra. This last motive first appears in scene 5 to underscore Bugs’s explanation to Harry Druggist how an explosion will kill Gus and Sadie, and reappears in scene 9 when Mr. Mister explains to Dr. Specialist that Joe Hammer’s “accident” was due to drunkenness. Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein,” 297–98.

39. Only the Moll, however, will sing the musical line first given to dreams in scene 7 (and repeated with new words to conclude the next two stanzas): “Oh, you can dream and scheme / and happily put and take, take and put … / But first be sure / The nickel’s under your foot.”

40. Quotation in Daniel Kingman, American Music, 458. For other examples of negative criticism based at least in part on Blitzstein’s political agenda see Samuel Lipman, Arguing for Music—Arguing for Culture (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 157–63, and Terry Teachout, “Cradle of Lies.”

41. In his memorial tribute Copland wrote that “the taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner druggist were given voice for the first time in the context of serious musical drama …. No small accomplishment, for without it no truly indigenous opera is conceivable.” Copland, “In Memory of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964),” Perspectives of New Music 2/2 (Spring–Summer 1964): 6.

42. Perhaps alone among recent assessments is Hitchcock’s, that “it was not so much the message as the music that was significant in Blitzstein’s art.” Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 227.

Chapter 7: Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus

1. To cite two examples out of many, Gerald Mast, in his otherwise comprehensive Can’t Help Singin’ (1987), offers neither an explanation nor an apology for his conspicuous neglect of Weill, while Joseph P. Swain in The Broadway Musical (1990), a more selective study of sixteen musicals,