Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  Example 6.2. “Croon-Spoon” (B section, or release)

  Lawn of Mr. Mister: “The Freedom of the Press” and “Honolulu”

  During the Windsor run of Cradle, Blitzstein concluded an article, “On Writing for the Theatre,” with some remarks on the relationship between theory and practice in this work.

  When I started to write the Cradle I had a whole and beautiful theory lined up about it. Music was to be used for those sections which were predominantly lyric, satirical, and dramatic. My theories got kicked headlong as soon as I started to write; it became clear to me that the theatre is so elusive an animal that each situation demands its own solution, and so, in a particularly dramatic spot, I found the music simply had to stop. I also found that certain pieces of ordinary plot-exposition could be handled very well by music (The Freedom of the Press is a plot-song).

  “The Freedom of the Press” begins immediately (attacca subito) after Mr. Mister excuses Junior and Sister Mister, an exit underscored by the vamp that began “Croon-Spoon.” Blitzstein called this duet between Mr. Mister and Editor Daily a plot-song because the song narrates (or plots) the entire process by which Daily reinterprets the meaning behind its title: the freedom of the press can be a freedom to distort as well as to impart the truth. The plot is as follows: Daily reveals that he is willing to sell out to the highest bidder (first stanza, A); Daily expresses his willingness to change a story, that is, “if something’s wrong with it [the story] why then we’ll print to fit” (second stanza, B); and Daily learns that Mr. Mister had purchased the paper that morning (third stanza, Mr. Mister’s final A).

  Following a vigorous six-measure introduction, the form of the song is strophic in three identical musical stanzas. Blitzstein subdivides each stanza into an a-b-a-b-c-d form, in which the melody of the rapid (=160) a sections (eight measures each) sung by Mr. Mister are tonally centered in F (concluding in C minor) and the equally fast b sections (also eight measures) are answered by Editor Daily in a passage that begins abruptly one step higher in D major (“All my gift …”) and modulates to A major (on “very kind”) before Mr. Mister returns to the a section and a D-minor seventh with equal abruptness (Example 6.3 on next page).32

  When Editor Daily returns to his b section (“Just you call …”), Blitzstein has him sing a whole step higher than his original D major (in E major) for greater intensity. In the brief c section Mr. Mister departs from the relentlessness and speed of his (and Editor Daily’s) earlier material and for four measures sings, “lento e dolce” (slow and sweetly), the menacing words “Yes, but some news can be made to order” to match the menacing underlying harmony. In the d section (twenty measures) the music resumes the original tempo, starting with E major (followed by shifts to C major, G major, 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 by evolving chromaticism. Through his relentless dissonant harmonization of the Johnny-one-notes, Blitzstein creates a musical equivalent to support his single-mindedly vitriolic text.

  Because Blitzstein himself is a genuine artist, in contrast to Dauber and Yasha, he cannot resist using Beethoven for his own artistic purposes as well. He does this by making two simple rhythmic alterations that effectively disguise the Egmont horn motive. The first allusion to Egmont occurs in the second chorus of their initial vaudeville routine when Dauber sings “Your lady friend does resemble a lot / Some one, and that’s very queer.” By adding one beat to the first note of the horn motive Blitzstein accommodates the difference between the triple meter of Beethoven’s original motive and the duple meter of the vaudeville routine, a subtle but recognizable rhythmic transformation (Example 6.6b). In the second allusion, the art-for-art’s-sake passage previously discussed in Example 6.6a, Blitzstein keeps the rhythmic integrity of Beethoven’s motive but distorts it almost (but not entirely) beyond recognition in a duple context with contrary accentual patterns.

  Example 6.6. Scene Six, Hotel Lobby

  (a) “Art for Art’s Sake”

  (b) “The Rich”

  It is possible, albeit unlikely, that Blitzstein’s rhythmic distortions, which parallel his bizarre atonal harmonizations of the B (“Art for Art’s sake,” “smart for Art’s sake,” etc.) can be interpreted as a critique of Beethoven’s noble purposes in Egmont as well as an indictment of Yasha and Dauber’s art. In any event, Blitzstein’s incorporation of Beethoven into his Hotel Lobby Scene goes beyond the conventions and expectations of a musical. It also shows that a revered European master can serve Blitzstein’s artistic as well as satiric purposes.

  In contrast to Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, Blitzstein’s Cradle does not offer a grand scheme of musical symbols and musical transformations that reflect large-scale dramatic vision and character development. Unlike their counterparts in the other musicals discussed in this survey, the characters in Cradle for the most part sing their songs and then either assume a secondary role, merge into a crowd, or vanish entirely from the stage. The work is episodic within a structured frame; the characters, vividly outlined, are not filled in.38

  It is significant that Moll, the pure prostitute, and Larry Foreman, who represents the juggernaut of the oppressed, are the only characters permitted to recycle musical material. In fact, both of the Moll’s songs are reprised. The melody of “I’m Checkin’ Home Now,” the first music heard in the show, returns as underscoring for Moll’s spoken introduction to her song “Nickel under the Foot” in scene 7.39 Before her big scene Moll had sung most of “Nickel” (using other words) in her conversation with Harry Druggist in scene 2. “Nickel” returns a last time in scene 10 against a din of conversation before Larry Foreman and the chorus of union workers concludes the work with a reprise of the title song.

  Although Cradle has been called “the most enduring social-political piece of the period” and has generally received high marks as the musical equivalent of Waiting for Lefty, its didacticism has unfortunately overwhelmed its rich intrinsic musical and dramatic qualities.40 If other musicals of the time rival The Cradle Will Rock as a work of social satire, few musicals of its time (for example, those by Brecht and Weill the previous decade or E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen in the next) and few works since combine Blitzstein’s call for social action with a vernacular of such musical sophistication and, yes, artistry.41 In contrast to many avant-garde works eventually absorbed into the mainstream, The Cradle Will Rock, despite its intent to reach a wider public, has managed to sustain its anomalistic status remarkably well. After more than seventy years it continues to resist artistic classification within a genre. It also continues to offend its intended audience of middle-class capitalists through its messages, its devastating caricatures of clergy, doctors, and even university professors, and its occasionally difficult and unconventional score. With due respect to Blitzstein’s sincere didacticism, Blitzstein’s Cradle—cult musical, historical footnote, and agent of social change—might, even as it agitates and propagandizes, someday achieve the recognition it deserves as a work of musical theater art (for art’s sake).42

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LADY IN THE DARK AND ONE TOUCH OF VENUS

  The Broadway Stranger and His American Dreams

  Within a year after Kurt Weill (1900–1950) emigrated to America his Johnny Johnson (1936) had appeared on Broadway. By the time he ended his brief but productive American career with Lost in the Stars (1949), the German refugee had managed to produce no less than eight shows in his adopted homeland, including two certifiable hits, Lady in the Dark (467 performances) and One Touch of Venus (567 performances). At the risk of minimizing such a notable achievement, it must be said that Weill’s hits did not run significantly longer than the disappointing 315 performances suffered by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), which closed only a few months after Oklahoma!’s five-year run.

  Furthermore, while all three of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1940s hits, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific, have gone on to form part of the nucleus of the Broadway repertory, Weill’s two contemporaneous hits have nearly vanished. With the escalating success of Street Scene (1947) and Lost in the Stars and the championing of his previously neglected European music from both sides of the Atlantic, however, Weill’s critical and popular star continues to rise. At the same time, with the notable exception of the perennially popular Threepenny Opera (Off-Broadway 1954–1960), the once-popular Broadway Weill remains largely overlooked in the Broadway survey literature as well as in Broadway revivals.1

  Weill, like Bernstein to follow, entered the world of Broadway after rigorous classical training. In contrast to Bernstein, Weill made his mark as an avant-garde composer before succumbing to the siren song of a more popular musical theater. The trajectory of Gershwin’s career perhaps better exemplifies the more usual evolutionary pattern of the Tin Pan Alley composer who harbored more lofty theatrical ambitions. Unlike most of his Broadway colleagues (including Gershwin), Weill, years before his arrival in America, had established himself as a reputable classical composer from Germany in what Stravinsky called the “main stem” of the classical tradition. At fifteen he began studying theory and composition as well as piano, at sixteen he was creating “serious” compositions, and by seventeen he was acquiring skills in instrumentation, orchestration—unlike most Broadway composers Weill would score his own shows—and score-reading. In 1918 he enrolled at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik to study composition with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of Hänsel und Gretel. Conducting and counterpoint studies with equally distinguished teachers would continue.

  At twenty, Weill was accepted as one of Ferruccio Busoni’s six composition students at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. After composing an impressive series of instrumental as well as stage works, Weill made his pivotal decision to devote his career to the latter in 1926. The next year he began his most famous collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, a collaboration that over the next six years yielded the works by which Weill remains best remembered and most appreciated, at least in classical circles: Die Dreigrosche
noper (The Threepenny Opera) (1928), Happy End (1929), and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) (1930).

  Those who saw the collaborations with Brecht as the summit of Weill’s creative life concluded that when Weill immigrated to America after a two-year Parisian interregnum, he traded in his artistic soul for fourteen years of hits—and still more misses—in the cultural wasteland of Broadway. Even writers sympathetic to his American musicals recounted the compromises that Weill was forced to make to reach the lowest common Broadway denominators.2 Just as politicians frequently do not survive a change of party allegiance or a conspicuous change of mind on a sensitive issue, composers who abandon the trappings of “high culture” for the commercial marketplace can be expected to pay a price for their pact with Mammon. Schoenberg’s idea that great works are inherently inaccessible to general audiences and that audiences who like great works cannot possibly understand them, died a slow and lingering death.