Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon

7 The Deadly Vacation of Marc Blitzstein

87 7 The Deadly Vacation of Marc Blitzstein Whenever marc Blitzstein undertook stage works on themes of crime and punishment, trouble lay ahead. His first attempt was a two-act ballet, Cain (1930), in which the world’s first murderer is slain by Lamech, one of his descendants. Lamech is cursed by Jehovah and receives the mark of Cain as onlookers bury their faces in fear. Jehovah raises His voice again and curses the entire people; as they lift their heads, all their brows are seen to bear the mark of Cain. in the introduction to the scenario, Blitzstein moralizes , “Thus murder, begun in our world by Cain, is perpetuated through the ages: we are all the sons of Cain.” To his great disappointment, the score was rejected by Leopold Stokowski and remained unperformed until 2008, when it was included in the American Composers Alliance’s “Festival of American music.” Blitzstein’s second musical setting of a crime subject was The Condemned (1932), a short choral opera inspired by two of his labor heroes, sacco and Vanzetti, who are embodied in the title character, sung in fourpart male voices; the remaining roles are taken by the Wife, the Friend, and the Priest, each performed in multiple voices. The three comforters attempt to bring solace on the day of execution, but the Condemned’s own inner strength enables him to face his death with equanimity: “i need no heaven. The earth shall one day be enough. All men are my brothers.” Although The Condemned was never produced, it led by indirection to Blitzstein’s conception of a larger work, a full-scale opera presenting the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Blitzstein’s biographer, Eric A. Gordon, relates that during the composer’s visit to Rome in 1959, Italian music critic 88 · Musical Mysteries Fedele D’Amico, having remembered The Condemned, gave him an anarchist pamphlet describing Sacco and Vanzetti as “two victims of AmericanDollar Justice.” The tract moved Blitzstein to study the history of the case, and he concluded that it had the makings of an opera. It was while he was still considering alternative means of treatment that the Ford Foundation announced its grant of $950,000 to four opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, for the production of new American works. Blitzstein obtained a Ford Foundation grant of $15,000, payable over two years, for his proposed opera, Sacco and Vanzetti, optioned for production by the Metropolitan. Cries of outrage were heard from conservative journalists when the historical theme of the commissioned work became known. one of the strongest invectives was hurled by George Sokolsky, who made apparent reference to Blitzstein’s 1958 testimony in an executive session of the House Committee on un-American Activities that he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1938 and 1949. The columnist could not understand how the Metropolitan Opera had agreed to stage an opera “about a pair of anarchists . . . written by one who at a telling period in the history of his country was a Communist which means that he had submitted to the discipline of the Kremlin—a government which since 1917 was an enemy of his country.” Fully predictable, these expressions of right-wing anger were a minor irritant; Blitzstein’s problems with Sacco and Vanzetti were artistic rather than political. Perhaps it was simply too late in his career for him to shoulder a major operatic assignment on his own. The undertaking of a vast musical drama was particularly daunting because Blitzstein insisted on writing his own libretto, a task that he had recently performed with difficulty. In a 1951 letter to his close friend Mina Curtiss, written while working on his Broadway opera Reuben Reuben, he lamented, “Why the hell can’t I have a collaborator at this point?” The opera took Blitzstein six years to complete and closed during a Boston tryout in 1955. Now, the subject that Blitzstein was to dramatize and score was the most formidable he had ever chosen; the complexity of the Sacco and Vanzetti life histories and of the related trials would require extensive study and pruning of source material by Blitzstein before he could make substantial headway in penning words or music. It is small wonder that the two-year grant period expired without delivery of Blitzstein’s work product to the Metropolitan, and in November The Deadly Vacation of Marc Blitzstein · 89...