directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

No for an Answer: An Opera for Our Time? (Part I)

Eric Gordon

by Eric A. Gordon

Part I is based on Eric Gordon's comments printed in the program of the recent production in San Francisco by the American Conservatory Theater.

The production photos are from American Conservatory Theater Master of Fine Arts Program world premiere stage production of Marc Blitzstein's No For An Answer directed by Carey Perloff. Photos by Ken Friedman.

Born in 1905 in Philadelphia, Marc Blitzstein began composing in an avant-garde, even dadaistic idiom in the 1920s, incorporating jazz motifs into a stylishly dissonant style. He enjoyed shocking his audiences, setting erotic Walt Whitman songs, employing unknown black singers in downtown concert halls, writing esoteric music and experimental film scores. Orchestral pieces from his early period, like the Variations and the Piano Concerto, performed in recent years, reveal a muscular, energetic and highly accomplished technique. Mostly drawn to the voice and theatre, he wrote almost unproduceable works on abstract themes.

With the coming of fascism in the 1930s, and the threat to Roosevelt's New Deal policies, Blitzstein adopted a simplified populist esthetic inspired by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, whose work he had come to know in Germany in the 1920s when he studied with Arnold Schoenberg. He appropriated a Broadway idiom in an attempt to bring radical social ideas to the masses. In The Cradle Will Rock (1937), a pro-CIO fable of a union struggle in Steeltown, USA, he achieved a kind of apotheosis of the workers' theatre movement, perfecting his mastery of American vernacular speech set to music. His gift for prosody is barely equaled by any American composer before or since. This talent enabled him, in 1950, to translate the Weill/Brecht Three Penny Opera in a version starring Weill's widow Lotte Lenya that ran seven years off-Broadway.

Though derived from street theatre and the esthetics of agitational propaganda (agitprop), Blitzstein sought to elevate the form into a higher art: The music of Cradle is substantially more erudite and tricky to perform than your standard Broadway show of the period. At the same time, he used the forms of commercial theatre and music to raise public consciousness and bring workaday themes into the theatre. He would later abandon agitprop, but retain his project of making the theatre both more sophisticated musically and more attentive to social issues. The paucity of love stories in his work testifies in part to his own problems as a homosexual finding love, but more pointedly to the unnecessity he felt of adding ever more love stories to the Broadway stage when so many other issues went chronically unaddressed. Not for nothing is he remembered as the social conscience of American music.

In the wake of Cradle, a delightfully transparent theatrical cartoon, Blitzstein needed to enlarge his talent with a real opera. While the musical idiom of No for an Answer remained an eclectic blend of popular musical styles punctuated by somewhat more acerbic choruses, now Blitzstein would offer a story line and fully developed characters who grow and change. The opera concerns a community of out-of-work Greek-American resort employees, with all their-in the composer's words-"tragic episodes, comic interludes, individual love stories, plans, anguish, determinations, setbacks, triumphs." In Clara, the well-meaning liberal, he gives us the pivotal "Everywoman" middle-class theatregoing audiences can relate to: Her consciousness gradually clarifies to the political realities that surround her.

After a three-year gestation, during which he discarded as much music as he kept, the opera's début consisted of three New York performances in January 1941, during that eerie period when Europe was at war and the U.S. still remained out. The Soviets were enjoying a peaceful respite owing to their controversial non-aggression pact with the Germans. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called No for an Answer "labor drama, leaning so far to the left that it is practically horizontal." Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune saw it as: "a serious work on a noble subject by a major musical author…. He can draw laughter and tears as few living composers can." Aaron Copland wrote: "No one has ever before even attempted the problem of finding a voice for all those American regular fellows that seem so much at home everywhere except on the operatic stage," and predicted a considerable future historical importance for the work.

T .Edward Webster as Bulge sings "Penny Candy."

Blitzstein had written a Zeitoper-an opera written for its own time. A tortuous "people's" campaign ensued to raise the funds for a full Broadway production, for which he intended to augment the piano accompaniment with a score for small orchestra. In March 1941, a recording was released, only the second musical in history to be given a cast recording-the first had been his own Cradle. Paul Robeson shortly sang the number "The Purest Kind of a Guy" from No on a disk with Earl Robinson's labor ode "Joe Hill" on the flip side.

On a fundraising trip to Hollywood in June 1941, Blitzstein gave six solo performances of his work to receptive but only moderately generous audiences, including Orson Welles and others of the theatre crowd he had so recently worked with in New York. While he was in California, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, permanently altering the character of the war. As Blitzstein explained in a letter to the New York Times that fall, he was shelving the opera for now, because "During this emergency we believe the stress should be on plays reflecting the growing unity of all anti-Fascist forces….But No for an Answer is presumably a work of art, not a pamphlet; and the validity of its content holds, if not its immediacy."

So this Zeitoper on the class war in America fell victim to its Zeit: The main enemy had changed away from our domestic industrial royalists; and by now unemployment was no longer the compelling theme it had been during the Depression.

The composer served in World War II as an entertainment specialist based in London. His principal war composition was the Airborne Symphony for orchestra, male chorus and soloists. As a Communist Party member (from 1939 to 1948), Blitzstein believed that the victory over fascism should rightly lead at home to a renewed sense of democracy and a continuation of the New Deal's promise. With the Cold War and McCarthyism, such hopes withered. Casting for a project wherein he could express the Left's still noble aspirations, Blitzstein hit upon Lillian Hellman's 1939 play The Little Foxes. The 1949 opera Regina, based on that work, is produced regularly in American opera houses, and has to date received two complete recordings.

Bobbie (played by Jessica Diane Turner) sings "Dimples/Fraught" to Paul (Ryan Farley, left), and Jimmy (Neil Edward Hopkins).

Blitzstein' last musical, Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, was ahead of its time in 1959. Properly reintroduced, Juno should one day take its place among his best works. At the time of his death in 1964, he was working on musical adaptations of Bernard Malamud stories and on a full-length operatic treatment of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

Blitzstein could certainly wax romantic about workers in No for an Answer. But there is something suspect in criticizing a piece of art as "dated." In fact, every work is dated: La Bohème in its sentimentality about starving artists, La Traviata in its treatment of Parisian courtesans, West Side Story in its stereotypes of gangs and minorities. If such works as The Cradle Will Rock and No for an Answer are "period" pieces, the militant demonstrators protesting the World Trade Organization and allied mechanisms of global capital, seem to be warning us today that indeed we are still "in the period."

In this artist's thoroughly American, streetwise oeuvre, we rarely find every one of life's problems neatly wrapped up in a bow by the final curtain. A Brechtian sense of the tragedy of modern life, but ultimately tempered by hope, stamps Blitzstein's vision. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Claude-Michel Schönberg, and others in the evolving musical theatre of ideas, owe a debt to their forerunner Marc Blitzstein.

No for an Answer: An Opera for Our Time? (Part II)

Part II was written post-production.

The cast of No For An Answer

I'm afraid that in my biography of Blitzstein I may have sounded a more tentative note about No for an Answer than I now feel it deserves. The opera "may never entirely rise above its period; but presented honestly and with a bit of judicious cutting, its power could be made to ring again, giving a modern public the opportunity to appreciate the stirring and often sensitive music it contains."

I might have been more enthusiastic, and certainly had I seen a production such as ACT's at the time of writing, I would have been. The piece does ring, and I believe ACT's audiences were mature and sophisticated enough to make the appropriate mental adjustments for the period in which it was written-as surely we do with Bohème, Traviata and West Side Story. Although the political language is not that familiar to us today, outside of some rarefied Marxist-Leninist circles that may yet persevere, the issues are not so substantially different. Today, Blitzstein might have written about steel plants closing in Michigan, or maquiladora plants in Mexico, or sweatshops in Malaysia-or Los Angeles. There is certainly no shortage of daily horror stories about industries, companies, and governments that continue to treat working people in the most inhumane fashion.

It was a distinct privilege, as Blitzstein's biographer and as someone involved professionally in the arena of social change, to be invited up to San Francisco a few weeks before the opening to meet with the student performers and talk with them about Blitzstein's times. I felt enormously gratified to see well-thumbed copies of my book in the director's and the students' hands. I hope that I was able to convey to them some of the passion Blitzstein felt about his theme, and to suggest that, all things considered, we are perhaps not in so different a period today. I like to believe that the earnestness of the emerging performance might have sprung in part from my sense of urgency about this material.

The judicious cutting I thought necessary for a production was indeed done. The opera moved along at a steady pace (I never expected it to!), with a pretty clear sense of where it was going. I make a point of this because I had always felt that in this piece Blitzstein lavished too much attention on minor characters, not giving us quite enough on the ones at center stage. I was wrong in the sense that his conception was, in fact, to offer a kind of group portrait, with a few characters standing out to present the story line. The individuals only exist because of the group. The production brought this out.

Clara is in many ways the central character, as we "see" the story through her eyes and grow with her, as she becomes radicalized to the workers' reality. Thus I found it disappointing that between the first run-through which I'd seen early in October and the final performance version, her aria "In the Clear" had been reduced from two stanzas to one. I felt this as a distinct loss.

Another loss that I felt, although this is possibly more intellectual than theatrical in the end, is the strict time-sequencing of scenes in this version. From a historical viewpoint, Blitzstein introduced some technical tricks in No for an Answer: presenting certain scenes cinematically as flashbacks, and others as events going on at the other side of the stage simultaneously. This had never been done on the musical stage, so far as I know, certainly not in opera. His innovativeness for 1941 thus could not be appreciated. I do believe that today's audiences would still find that of interest, and as theatrically engaging as the composer intended.

Jed Orlemann (left) as Joe Kyraikos and Adam Ludwig as Nick Kyriakos

From student performers one could expect a range of talents. Fortunately, the opera is cast for singing actors, not for operatically trained performers. The Brechtian style well suited the vocal resources available here. The standouts included Adam Ludwig as Nick Kyriakos, T. Edward Webster as Bulge, Julie Fitzpatrick as Clara, Jed Orlemann as Joe Kyriakos, Ryan Farley as Paul Chase-but hey, that's just about all the principals. The two characters who are supposed to be professional singers, Bobbie and Jimmy, were ably cast-Jessica Diane Turner (playing the role originated in 1941 by Carol Channing) and Neil Edward Hopkins. To me the substitution of Cutch, the choral director, by a female performer made no appreciable difference. If anything, Stevie being played by a woman, as Alex's sidekick, was an improvement. However, it was disappointing that a strong performer for the stoolpigeon role of Mike could not be found in a male. Renée Penegor was OK: She worked hard at it, but it wasn't right.

Is No for an Answer in the end truly an opera? Perhaps if one stretches definitions, as indeed Blitzstein tended to do. But I see it more as a play in music along the lines of Cradle-which, of course, has also been called an opera! It hardly matters, these fine points which perennially eluded Blitzstein's work. It has to be taken on its own terms as a unique expression of a vital and important American composer's talents and times, as perhaps a higher point esthetically than the better-known Cradle in Blitzstein's middle period.

Now, if I were asked to state what the future could be for this work, I'd be more optimistic. It's not for major opera houses-it's too intimate, and certainly not with just the piano accompaniment. Nor for Broadway-the audience wouldn't exist for it. But for regional theatre and for student productions, absolutely. The work is inherently and historically interesting enough. Long may No for an Answer ring out with its wonderful music and its truths too seldom heard in the theatre.

Eric A. Gordon, Ph.D., is the author of Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (St. Martin's, 1989), and co-author of Ballad of an American: The Autobiography of Earl Robinson (Scarecrow, 1998). He is Southern California Director of the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring, a Jewish fraternal organization founded in 1900.