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Prelude to an Opening

By Leonard Bernstein

What will it be for me?
Will someone say "I love you?"
What will it be, to be
The one to say "I love you?"
Will it be all real and right?

If I should be asked offhand to identify the author of these lines, I could frantically suggest three or four, but the thought of Marc Blitzstein would probably not occur to me. One always looks for something a bit wry in his lyrics, somewhat off-beat, something that points to a familiar problem from an oblique point of reference. It is the obliqueness that so often gives a Blitzstein lyric its penetrating, wise, final, startling quality.

The lines quoted above are taken from a ballad sung by Alexandra, a sympathetic, lovely, beset creature, in Blitzstein's newest and most ambitious music-play, Regina, opening tomorrow night at the Forty-sixth Street Theatre.

In the almost three years in which he has been constantly and devotedly fashioning this work, I have been privileged to observe its progress from time to time. And each time has afforded me some new surprise, some new aspect of his musical and theatrical invention like the quality of these lines of Alexandra's. There is much in the work which carries this new flavor of sweetness and directness. But as soon as the composition has been comprehended as a whole, one realizes that one is still dealing with the essential Blitzstein, the man of the theatre.

Miss Hellman's play, The Little Foxes, on which the work is based, is about ugliness: ugly people engaged in ugly dealings with one another. Much of the talk - and it is largely talk - is of plots, schemes, percentages, jail, frustrated marriage, and death. Where, on the face of it, would so much sweetness and directness, both musically and lyrically, be apropos?

One is tempted to imagine that only the sympathetic characters could properly be given such material. Not at all. Regina herself, perhaps one of the most ruthless characters in show business, sings melodies of enormous gentility and suaveness precisely at the moments when she is being most unscrupulous and heartless. There is a kind of urbanity involved in the musical treatment of this character which results in a theatrical coup. How obvious it would have been to set her greedy, vindictive, dirty-hearted lines to insidious or bombastic music! I might say that this is the underlying technique of the whole piece: Coating the wormwood with sugar, and scenting with magnolia blossoms the cursed house in which these evils transpire.

Yes, the music reeks with magnolia, Southern gentility, splendiferous hospitality, honeyed drawls. The prelude to Scene 2 is a pure musical Dixie-fable. Regina extorts from her brother Oscar in a heavenly Brahmsian phrase. She flirts with an old beau (to make her husband jealous) in a charming dolce waltz that conceals some of the most venomous lyrics known to man. And she blackmails her two brothers in a noble Handelian recitative.

There is bitterness too, of course, in the music: bars of excruciating pain, of rancid drollery, of pure pathos. But somehow this bitterness is not the same bitterness we knew in The Cradle Will Rock and No for an Answer. In those two works we became intimate with the bitterness of sympathetic characters who were battling a vastly more powerful society: the Moll in the Cradle, for example, or Gina and Paul in No. But here the gall is largely associated with dreadful people; and the "good" people of the play have, by and large, "good," straightforward music to sing. The colored servants sing spirituals, the colored band plays New Orleans rag music, Alexandra has her song of hope, and an ensemble of sympathetic persons sings a ravishing quartet about quietness and rain.

In the Cradle and No for an Answer (which Blitzstein frankly called "operas") he has been using straight jazz, quasi-symphonic music, Mozartean recitative, romantic recitative, ballads, comic songs of a burlesque-show nature, operatic arias and ensembles - anything that suits the pur-pose at hand. Each work has shown growing perception of how to use all these forms. His last big work, The Airborne Symphony (also at heart a theatre piece), uses recitative, song, choral and instrumental sections in a more formal way, to suit the concert hall. But his development was still explicit in this work. With Regina we have a kind of apex, a summation of what Blitzstein has been trying to do. The words sing themselves, so to speak. The result is true song - a long, flexible, pragmatic, dramatic song.

(This article is reprinted from The New York Times of October 30, 1949, where it was titled "Prelude to a Musical Adaptation.")

See also Frank Loesser's 'About Regina' and Lillian Hellman's 'An American Opera'