directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

In Conversation with Eric Gordon,
the Man Who Wrote the Book

By Robert Wilder Blue

Eric Gordon

Marc Blitzstein resides on the fringes of American music, unknown even to many opera- and concert-goers. His better known contemporaries (Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein among them) have secured their places in posterity, but Blitzstein still hasn't been recognized for his contribution to American music. His music theater works were more connected to Broadway than to the opera house and as a result have been ignored by the musical establishment. His most famous effort, arguably, is a translation of another man's work: Kurt Weill's Three Penny Opera. But Blitzstein's was a uniquely American voice, a precursor of American composers today whose influences are as likely to come from popular music and jazz as from the Western European music heritage.

When it hit the bookstores in 1989, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein was recognized as an insightful study of an artist's life and a definitive document of an important period in American art and history. Its author, Eric Gordon, had devoted ten years to researching and writing this monumental book and in the process probably became the foremost authority on Bliztstein. When USOperaWeb spoke to Eric our first question was perhaps obvious. Why Marc Blitzstein?

"I guess you could say I'm a leftist type myself. My interest in Marc Blitzstein goes back to 1977, which was the 50th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was a highly controversial case in the 1920s and still is. Governor Dukakis exonerated them for having received an unfair trial. At the time I was living in Hartford, Connecticut, and several friends and I got together to put on a memorial tribute to Sacco and Vanzetti. Around the same time, I learned that there was an opera on the subject. I had been a long-time opera fan and this intrigued me, so I started poking around because I had never heard of such a thing. I discovered that indeed Marc Blitzstein had begun such an opera, but it was never completed. My curiosity was piqued so I looked up Blitzstein on The New York Times microfilm and learned more about him, including the details of his death and the memorial concert that took place in 1964. I found out that Aaron Copland, David Diamond and Leonard Bernstein were the musical executors of his estate, so I contacted Bernstein's office, which forwarded my inquiry to Blitzstein's sister, Josephine Davis. She was the only surviving relative in the immediate family and she and her husband and sons controlled the estate. From that contact, I got access to a couple of arias that were photocopied for me from his archives at the State Historical Society in Wisconsin. One of them, "With a Woman To Be," was in pretty good shape, the other was in sketches. Some friends worked on them for me and produced singable versions and these were recorded on tape. I was doing a radio program at the time for a college station in West Hartford and the idea was to air them. However, before the memorial or the broadcast could take place, I was kicked off the radio station for political and homophobic reasons. The arias were played at the public memorial, which took place at a ski resort in the summertime. And that was my first exposure to Blitzstein.

"The radio station took me back shortly thereafter. I used to air opera recordings and I found the New York City Opera recording of Regina starring Brenda Lewis, who as it happened was on the faculty of the Hartt College of Music there in West Hartford. Not only was she a very well-spoken person, she happened to have been a close personal friend of Blitzstein, so I taped an interview with her and aired it between acts of Regina. I also aired The Cradle Will Rock in a kind of mini-Blitzstein radio festival. The more I learned about him, I began to realize that Blitzstein was someone who was right up my alley in terms of the kind of intellectual questions he tried to address in his career and the political passion behind his oeuvre. It seemed as though someone should write a book about him. As I thought about it I realized I had the research skills, I had been a longtime opera and theater fan and I was aware of the political history of the 20th century; why shouldn't I write this book?

"I contacted Blitzstein's family again and presented myself as Marc's would-be biographer. Jo Davis invited me down to Philadelphia and took me to lunch at her club. It turned out that the family had sought out biographers before and no one had been interested. By the time I took my leave sometime that afternoon I was very flattered when Jo, who was up in years by then, said, 'Well look, I'm probably not going to remember your name so I am going to put you in my address book under "B" for biographer.'

"I set out for Madison, Wisconsin and spent a summer there with his papers. I interviewed Jo, of course, and remained in touch with the family, who were supportive. I would contact people who had known and worked with Marc - personal friends, fellow composers, performers - and I knew that in between the time I contacted them and when they consented to being interviewed they had contacted Jo to see who I was and whether it was okay to talk with me. I always sent Jo copies of whatever articles I was writing along the way, and I believe they were pleased with the quality of what I was turning out.

"I think many writers would take a life like Blitzstein's and sensationalize it in ways that would be, to my mind and obviously to the family's mind, very unsavory. The main point was his artistic career and work, not his politics primarily nor his sexuality primarily. So I got the okay in that sense. While I was working on the book, a number of people assumed that I would begin with his death and the details of his murder in a back alley in Martinique and unravel this mystery. At that time, the appearance of Copland's purported autobiography, a very closety treatment actually written more by Vivian Perlis (now superceded by a more full-fledged biography) really answered that question for me in terms of the kind of treatment I wanted to give my subject. I was resolved to treat Blitzstein-the whole man-just as if I were talking about a heterosexual person, with spouse and family life and so forth.

"One reviewer whom I happen to know personally as a pretty major homophobe actually had the audacity to write that I was promoting Blitzstein's life because he was gay. But you cannot point to a single syllable of the book that suggests that. I was not promoting him as a gay cultural hero. I was resolved to write a full-bodied portrait of my subject who happened to be gay. Having said that, it's not to say that someone's sexuality is not part of his creative process - of course it is. In Blitzstein's case, and one could say in Copland's as well, there are very few love stories in the work. The few that exist are frustrated and failed and peculiar and there are really no happy endings. While there are some love poems, they are sort of tainted or suspect or odd or thwarted, and I think that is certainly not an accident. In his twenties Blitzstein had set erotic and suggestive poems by Walt Whitman, so he was already part of the erotic counterculture. He certainly wasn't a celibate or aesthetic, but with all the problems in the world, he did not need to lend his talent to giving the American theater one more love story. I think he decided there were more important things. If you remember the 'Croon Spoon' scene from The Cradle Will Rock, he satirized the tendency of American theater to play on peoples' fantasies of love, especially in celebrity culture, and distract them from real issues and problems with tabloid delusions.

"In Reuben Reuben there is a love story; in fact the central character, Reuben, is saved by love. It was really the downfall of that work. Marc did everything in that piece-the book and the lyrics as well as the music. It's a lush, gorgeous score. There's enough music in that show for three musicals. The book stinks, frankly. It should be taken apart and rewritten and recast, as is being done now with older works from the '30s and '40s. But that love story is preposterous. I just don't think it came out of his personal experience. Most people will know nothing of Reuben Reuben, of course. It is basically a story of a man who has aphonia, who clams up when confronted by fear or discomfort. It's like a Billy Budd story in a way. And love brings him through to salvation. The irony of it is that in the 1950s when this country was under the tight grip of McCarthyism and there were so many political statements Marc wanted to make, he was himself tongue-tied. And when you add to that his desire to write a love story, which didn't fit his personal experience either, he was additionally tongue-tied. So it was a doomed project from the beginning, although I repeat that the music is perhaps his most gorgeous score. I think it should be looked at again."

What effect did the Red Scare of the 1950s and the resulting House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings have on Blitzstein? "I think it affected people in very different ways. For Blitzstein, it really was less than the stories one commonly hears about people in film, television and radio. The theater was less affected, and Blitzstein, not being seriously invested in television, radio or film, suffered much less than many. There was room in the New York theater for people like Blitzstein, Zero Mostel, Howard da Silva, and any number of people you might name who were not excluded completely from the hysteria, but wouldn't have been hired by the mass media. Marc had a closed session with the HUAC and was supposed to be called for a public session but never was. I imagine he would have maintained a strong first- and fifth-amendment stand. By the late 1950s (his testimony was in 1957) the walls were beginning to crack. Later, I worked with Earl Robinson on his biography and in his case it hit him much harder. He was living in Hollywood and writing film scores for major studios. He suffered what he called the "graylist." In other words, he wasn't actually fired from jobs, but he didn't get calls either.

"Perhaps in some ways it strengthened Blitzstein. His identification with the Communist Party had ended in 1949, or so he claimed - the only evidence available is his HUAC testimony. In the book, I speculate that because it is the same year as the debut of Regina, he had come to resent the Party's control over themes and ideas and presentation. I'm just imagining the circumstances here, because he probably would have been a member of a creative artists group within the Party, and might well have played for them excerpts from the opera and asked for comments. The reviews in the Party press of Regina were not damning but they certainly were not supportive or enthusiastic in the way they had been earlier with The Cradle Will Rock, when he was their darling. Don't forget that 1949 was the period of very heavy repression of artists in the Soviet Union. Prokofiev and Shostakovich were victims of investigations and censure from party hacks who were the intellectual inferiors of those artists. Blitzstein must have realized that he had his own path to follow. He didn't give up his basic core beliefs or ideas, but at a point he didn't need the Party affiliation - their guidance was more misguidance. And it could be that during the Blacklist period he was strengthened in his convictions and in the sense that his core beliefs were correct, rather than being scared away. The fact that the monolith of the U.S. government and culture was poised against the Left would only convince him that he was on the right path. As you can see in the film, Cradle Will Rock, that kind of anti-intellectualism already in the pre-war years had brought about the demise of the Federal Theater Project.

"Perhaps I'm speaking in the spirit of Marc Blitzstein when I say that the fundamental aphonia in the country, the thing we really can't speak about, is the issue of class. The debate on class in America has been so dampened that anytime anyone raises the issue the response is 'Oh, class warfare-we can't have that.' In the last presidential campaign, some of Al Gore's ideas elicited the response 'Oh, you can't say that! You can't raise class issues.' That was really what Blitzstein's project was for most of his life - not in a dogmatic manner, because there were certainly works of his that indicated broader humanitarian concerns, such as his settings of Shakespeare and e.e. cummings and so forth. I don't want to box him in too tightly, but certainly it was the main project of his life.

"There is absolutely a parallel today. And you can go back to the Puritans, the Salem witch hunts. This is America, after all. The argument of artistic freedom has become debased on all sides now. People have always been sexual explorers and since the beginning of art artists and others have commented on the body. But the increasing emphasis on sex and pornography and the fascination with sex could be seen in one light as part of the conspiracy to suppress what are really much larger issues, things we're not supposed to talk about. When you raise these issues there is the response that it is oh so reminiscent of the '60s or the '30s, as if those issues don't exist today. But they are here in perhaps stronger force than ever. Anyone can see that the class divide is certainly as strong today as it has ever been in this country. It's a cliché, but true: the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. And then you get immigrant-bashing and suppression of women's rights. All this is happening under our eyes today, but you can't talk about class!"

Is Blitzstein's life more interesting than his work? "You could say that about many artists or even people in general. But, in Marc's case, I don't think so. The Cradle Will Rock and Regina get revived all the time and his translation of [Kurt Weill's] Three Penny Opera is done all the time. I personally am carrying the torch for Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's play, Juno and the Paycock. I think it is a wonderful work and properly revived, with its pungent and sophisticated orchestration, would reveal itself in all its glory. There have been attempts, but I think that restored completely, it would be one of the three works on which Blitzstein's reputation rests. I don't think that the strength of those works lies in the larger-than-life quality of their creator. I think that the themes he embraced go way beyond the creator."

Blitzstein's opera Regina (based on Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes) is an American masterpiece on the brink of rediscovery. Hellman was against Blitzstein making Little Foxes into an opera but granted Blitzstein the right to do it nonetheless. Blitzstein must have found the story irresistible and the characters, especially Regina, perfect as opera archetypes. The prospect of assaying the title role (played in the theater and on the screen by Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis, respectively) ought to have sopranos lining up; one can only imagine the opera's popularity today had the tempestuous Greek-American soprano Maria Callas discovered the role. Major new productions will be seen during the coming seasons at Florida Grand Opera and New York City Opera (with Lauren Flanigan) and Chicago Lyric Opera (with Catherine Malfitano) and will surely reestablish the opera's place in the repertory. Regina is a truly American opera that tells an American story in an American musical language.

Read an excerpt from Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein that relates the story of the creation and premiere of Regina.

More on Marc Blitzstein
USOperaWeb Autumn 2001 feature
http://www.marcblitzstein.com
http://fsweb.wm.edu/amst370/2001/sp4/cwr.html

More on Lillian Hellman
http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/hellman-per-fbi.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/hellman_l.html
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/qu/blquhelm.htm

The complete text of The Little Foxes
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~spires/Concord/foxes.html

More on HUAC
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/documents/huac/
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhuac.htm
http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/huac.htm

More on Federal Theatre Project
http://fsweb.wm.edu/amst370/2001/sp4/ftp.html
http://home.uchicago.edu/~mewells/research.html
http://www.gmu.edu/library/specialcollections/ftpphoto.html

More on 'Three Penny Opera'
http://www.kwf.org/pages/d7main.html
    http://www.musicalheaven.com/t/threepenny_opera.shtml

More on Sean O'Casey
http://www.salem.mass.edu/sextant/v4n2/maciver.html
http://www.encyclopedia.com/articlesnew/09457.html

Complete text of Juno and the Paycock
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~spires/Concord/juno.html

Mark the Music, The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein
Eric A. Gordon's book, Mark the Music, The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein is the definitive biography of Blitzstein and would be indispensable for anyone with an interest in its subject. First-printing copies of the book may be obtained directly from Eric by contacting him at ericarthur@aol.com.