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

among other less clearly defined harmonies), and Mr. Mister and Editor Daily sing the main refrain. “O, the press, the press, the freedom of the press … for whichever side will pay the best!”33

After “The Freedom of the Press,” the music stops for the first time in the scene, and in spoken dialogue Editor Daily quickly agrees with his new boss that Junior “doesn’t go so well with union trouble” and would be a good candidate for a correspondent’s job “out of town, say on the paper.” Junior and Sister enter to a brief and frenetic dance and jazzy tune, “Let’s Do Something.” Editor Daily, now firmly ensconced as a stooge of his new boss, proposes the “something” that might satisfy Mr. Mister and appear palatable to Junior: “Have you thought of Honolulu?”

Example 6.3. “The Freedom of the Press”

(a) a section

(b) b section

In his survey of American music, H. Wiley Hitchcock writes that the first twelve measures of “Honolulu” illustrate “Blitzstein’s subtle transformation of popular song style,” in which “the clichés of the vocal line are cancelled out by the freshness of the accompaniment.”34 Hitchcock singles out the “irregular texture underlying” the “hint of Hawaiian guitars” in the first eight measures (a four-measure phrase and its literal repetition), the “offbeat accentuation of the bass under the raucous refrain,” which produces a phrase structure of 3+4+1+3+4+1, and an “acrid” harmony (in technical terms, an inverted dominant ninth) on the word “isle.” If the first four measures are labeled A and measures 9–12 B (Example 6.4) the overall form of the song looks like this:

The irregularity of the form and the unpredictability of the less frequent B entrances go a long way to save “Honololu” from the banality it is trying to satirize, just as the unconventional phrase lengths and unorthodox relationship between melody and harmony earlier spared “Croon-Spoon” from a similar fate.

Hotel Lobby: “The Rich” and “Art for Art’s Sake”

If “Croon–Spoon” and “Honolulu” ridicule the vapidity of ephemeral popular music and some of the people who sing these tunes, the songs in the Hotel Lobby Scene (scene 6) convey a more direct didactic social message about the role of artists and their appropriate artistic purposes. Blitzstein saves his sharpest rebuke for the artists themselves, the painter Dauber and the violinist Yasha who meet by accident in a hotel lobby in scene 6.35 Like the other members of Mr. Mister’s anti-union Liberty Committee, Dauber and Yasha have sold themselves to the highest bidder, in this case to the wealthy Mrs. Mister. The painter and the musician, like the poet Rupert Scansion to follow, have come to the hotel to curry favor with their patroness in exchange for a free meal and perhaps a temporary roof over their heads.

Blitzstein presents Dauber and Yasha as caricatures of artists who, in their espousal of art-for-art’s-sake, have rejected nobler socially conscious artistic visions. The audience learns immediately that they are second-rate artists who fail whenever they are forced to rely on their talent alone. Then, in the course of their initial exchange (a combination of song and underscored dialogue), Dauber and Yasha learn that both of them have appointments with Mrs. Mister. In the ensuing tango (shades of Brecht and Weill), appropriately named “The Rich,” they expose the foibles and inadequacies of the “moneyed people” in such lines as “There’s something so damned low about the rich!” and “They’ve no impulse, no fine feeling, no great itch!” The answer to the question “What have they got?” is money; the answer to the question “What can they do?” is support you. Clearly Dauber and Yasha hate the rich as much as Blitzstein does.

Example 6.4. “Honolulu”

(a) A phrase

(b) B phrase

At this point, the object of their scorn, Mrs. Mister, enters to the accompaniment of the horn motive from Beethoven’s Egmont Overture based on Goethe’s play of the same name: “you know: ta, ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, yoo hoo!” (Example 6.5). In Blitzstein’s satire of Gebrauchsmusik, Goethe’s tale of a great man who loses his life in his efforts to overcome the tyrannical bonds of political oppression is demeaned: Beethoven’s heroic horn call now serves as the horn call on Mrs. Mister’s Pierce Arrow automobile. This horn also includes the violin answer that was interpreted by nineteenth-century Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer as depicting the moment when Egmont was beheaded.36 Clearly, the Pierce Arrow usurpation of Beethoven’s horn motif constitutes a sacrilegious use of an art object.

That Mrs. Mister expects Dauber and Yasha to pay a price and kiss the hand that feeds these untalented artists becomes clear near the end of the scene, when she asks them to join her husband’s Liberty Committee, formed to break the unions led by Larry Foreman, a heroic figure analogous to Egmont. This is the same committee of middle-class prostitutes of various professions who were mistakenly rounded up in scene 1 and taken to night court in scene 2 before the flashbacks began in scene 3. Dauber and Yasha are only too eager to oblige, and when Mrs. Mister asks them, “But don’t you want to know what it’s all about?” they reply that they are artists who “love art for art’s sake.”

Example 6.5. Scene Six, Hotel Lobby

Entrance of Mrs. Mister and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture

It’s smart, for Art’s sake,

To part, for Art’s sake,

With your heart, for Art’s sake,

And your mind, for Art’s sake—

Be blind, for Art’s sake,

And deaf, for Art’s sake,

And dumb, for Art’s sake,

Until, for Art’s sake,

They kill, for Art’s sake

All the Art for Art’s sake!37

As shown in Example 6.6a, Blitzstein’s choice to state each of these lines with a nearly monotonal melody reinforces the pervasiveness of Dauber’s and Yasha’s political vacuity. The fact that Blitzstein reharmonizes the B on the downbeat of each measure with increasingly dissonant chords bears some similarity to the notorious nineteenth-century “Art” song by Peter Cornelius, “Ein Ton,” in which a single pitch is harmonized to an almost absurd degree