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

to confront the social issues of their time: “It is too much to say that the new men sought deliberately and fundamentally to battle the whole conception. They were still the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ boys, they didn’t see much beyond their artistic vision.”19

One week later, in New Masses, Blitzstein praised the Gebrauchsmusik movement (variously translated as “utility music” or “music for use”) for its sense of direction and its topicality. At the same time, he faulted it because its exponents—principally Paul Hindemith, who at that time was only slightly less highly regarded than Schoenberg and Stravinsky—“had little political or social education.”20 The value of Gebrauchsmusik for Blitzstein was its spawning of men such as Brecht who possessed the necessary education and who “saw the need for education through poetry, through music.”21

Earlier in 1936, in an article published in Modern Music, Blitzstein concluded that Hanns Eisler and Weill, two of Brecht’s musical collaborators, “write the same kind of music, although their purposes are completely at variance.… Weill is flaccid (he wants to ‘entertain’); Eisler has spine and nerves (he wants to ‘educate’).”22 By the time he composed Cradle, Blitzstein revealed in print that he shared Eisler’s ideology and had become a card-carrying member of the musical-theater proletariat led by Brecht. He ends his New Masses manifesto with a call to political action. Blitzstein himself had taken such action the previous month when he had completed his Cradle after five weeks of composing at “white heat.” “The composer is now willing, eager, to trade in his sanctified post as Vestal Virgin before the altar of Immutable and Undefilable Art, for the post of an honest workman among workmen, who has a job to do, a job which wonderfully gives other people joy. His music is aimed at the masses; he knows what he wants to say to them.”23

Contributing to the changes in Blitzstein’s thinking was his meeting several months earlier (probably in December 1935) with Brecht, at which the playwright and poet shared his response to Blitzstein’s song “Nickel under the Foot.” The scene was reported by Minna Lederman, the editor of Modern Music: “Marc said to Brecht, ‘I want you to hear something I’ve written,’ and, sitting at his piano, played and sang ‘The Nickel under the Foot.’ This immediately excited Brecht. He rose, and I can still hear his high, shrill voice, almost a falsetto, exclaiming, ‘Why don’t you write a piece about all kinds of prostitution—the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system?’”24Cradle’s dramatic structure follows Brecht’s suggestion to the letter, and most of the work’s ten scenes in “Steeltown, U.S.A. on the night of a union drive” focus on the metaphoric prostitution of various prototypes.25 The only incorruptible figures are Moll, who literally prostitutes herself but does not metaphorically sell out to Mr. Mister and at least has something genuine to sell, and Larry Foreman, who refuses to be corrupted by Mr. Mister and eventually leads the unions to thwart the union buster’s corrupt use of power.

Undoubtedly, the ideological nature of The Cradle Will Rock has obscured its artistic significance. That the work deserves its frequently designated status as an agit-prop musical is evident by the degree to which it was imitated by life. Only a few months after its opening, America seemed to heed its call to action with the formation of a strong national steel union, Little Steel. If Cradle’s pro-unionist and anti-capitalist stance now seems dated, its central Brechtian theme, the indictment of a passive middle class that sells out to the highest bidder, continues to haunt and disturb. As Blitzstein wrote: “‘The Cradle Will Rock’ is about unions but only incidentally about unions. What I really wanted to talk about was the middleclass. Unions, unionism as a subject, are used as a symbol of something in the way of a solution for the plight of that middleclass.”26

With the exception of “Nickel under the Foot,” which observes Brecht’s call for an epic theater and “the strict separation of the music from all the other elements of entertainment offered,” Blitzstein, in contrast to Brecht and Weill, created a work in which music and words were inseparable from the axis of the work.27 Despite this aesthetic discrepancy, the integrated songs of The Cradle Will Rock remain faithful to Brecht’s larger social artistic vision. Consequently, the Cradle songs, like those of Brecht and Weill, both embrace the didactic element espoused by Brecht’s epic theater and reject the “hedonistic approach” and “senselessness” common to operas (and of course musicals as well) before The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny of 1930.28

Two Scenes: Lawn of Mr. Mister and Hotel Lobby

Lawn of Mr. Mister: “Croon-Spoon”

Scene Four, which contains four songs (“Croon-Spoon,” “The Freedom of the Press,” “Let’s Do Something,” and “Honolulu”) opens on the lawn of Mr. Mister’s home, where his children, Junior and Sister Mister, are lounging on hammocks.29 The stage directions describe Junior as “sluggish, collegiate and vacant; Sister is smartly gotten up and peevish.” Unlike most of the characters in Blitzstein’s morality tale, Junior and Sister Mister have nothing to sell and therefore cannot be indicted for selling out. But they do possess vacuous middle-class values that Blitzstein targets for ridicule in their duet that opens the scene, “Croon–Spoon” (Examples 6.1 and 6.2), a spoof of the type of trivial and ephemeral popular song on recordings, dance halls, and non-didactic Broadway shows.

Blitzstein’s opinion of the idle rich, who spend their time singing songs that do not convey a message of social significance, is apparent from the opening lyrics to “Croon–Spoon” when Junior sings, “Croon, Croon till it hurts, baby, / Croon, My heart asserts, baby, / Croonin’ in spurts, baby, / Is just the nerts for a tune!”30 True, Blitzstein permits Junior to begin on a note that belongs to a chord in the key of the song, an F (the third of the tonic D major triad). But this F is the last note in a tonic chord