Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (27 page)

Contributing to the continued problematic taxonomic status of
The Cradle Will Rock
is its musical incongruity with both the avant-garde and the conventional popular theater of the 1930s. Particularly jarring is
Cradle
’s conflicting allegiances to vernacular song forms and styles and modernistic characteristics and emblems, the latter including harsh dissonances and chords that thwart expectations. How many musicals would encourage the musically shrill hysteria of Mrs. Mister in the Mission Scene (scene 3) when she asks Reverend Salvation in 1917 to pray for war in order to support her husband’s military machine? What other musicals would permit the dissonance of the recurring gavel music that proclaims order in the Night Court before a new flashback? On the other hand, although the work is for the most part through-sung and contains proportionally far less talk than most
Singspiels
, including Mozart’s
The Magic Flute, Cradle
’s treatment of popular vernacular and its non-reliance on opera singers contributes further to the difficulty of placing the work with one genre or another.

In contrast to Gershwin, who began as a popular songwriter before transforming his popular music into art music, Blitzstein, like Copland and Weill, began his musical career as a modernist who then converted to populism. As
a student of both Stravinsky-advocate Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Schoenberg in Berlin, Blitzstein became intimately acquainted early in his career with the two primary tributaries to the modernist mainstream and reflected their values in early works such as his Piano Sonata (1927) and Piano Concerto (1931). Blitzstein’s modernist phase prior to 1933 also embraces the “art for art’s sake” ideology that he would soon come to loathe and indict in his first major populist work,
The Cradle Will Rock
.

One month after he had completed
Cradle
, Blitzstein, a prolific essayist, published an article in the left-wing magazine
New Masses
on July 14 (Bastille Day) in 1936 in which he viewed modernism as an inevitable reaction against the excesses required of “a capitalist society turning imperialist.”
¹⁸
Although Blitzstein thought that Schoenberg and Stravinsky wrote “the truth about the dreams of humanity in a world of war and violence,” he concluded this essay by asserting that these premier modernists were limited by their inability to confront the social issues of their time: “It is too much to say that the new men sought deliberately and fundamentally to battle the whole conception. They were still the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ boys, they didn’t see much beyond their artistic vision.”
¹⁹

One week later, in
New Masses
, Blitzstein praised the
Gebrauchsmusik
movement (variously translated as “utility music” or “music for use”) for its sense of direction and its topicality. At the same time, he faulted it because its exponents—principally Paul Hindemith, who at that time was only slightly less highly regarded than Schoenberg and Stravinsky—“had little political or social education.”
²⁰
The value of
Gebrauchsmusik
for Blitzstein was its spawning of men such as Brecht who possessed the necessary education and who “saw the need for education through poetry, through music.”
²¹

Earlier in 1936, in an article published in
Modern Music
, Blitzstein concluded that Hanns Eisler and Weill, two of Brecht’s musical collaborators, “write the same kind of music, although their purposes are completely at variance.… Weill is flaccid (he wants to ‘entertain’); Eisler has spine and nerves (he wants to ‘educate’).”
²²
By the time he composed
Cradle
, Blitzstein revealed in print that he shared Eisler’s ideology and had become a card-carrying member of the musical-theater proletariat led by Brecht. He ends his
New Masses
manifesto with a call to political action. Blitzstein himself had taken such action the previous month when he had completed his
Cradle
after five weeks of composing at “white heat.” “The composer is now willing, eager, to trade in his sanctified post as Vestal Virgin before the altar of Immutable and Undefilable Art, for the post of an honest workman among workmen, who has a job to do, a job which wonderfully gives other people joy. His music is aimed at the masses; he knows what he wants to say to them.”
²³

Contributing to the changes in Blitzstein’s thinking was his meeting several months earlier (probably in December 1935) with Brecht, at which the playwright and poet shared his response to Blitzstein’s song “Nickel under the Foot.” The scene was reported by Minna Lederman, the editor of
Modern Music
: “Marc said to Brecht, ‘I want you to hear something I’ve written,’ and, sitting at his piano, played and sang ‘The Nickel under the Foot.’ This immediately excited Brecht. He rose, and I can still hear his high, shrill voice, almost a falsetto, exclaiming, ‘Why don’t you write a piece about all kinds of prostitution—the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system?’”
²⁴
Cradle
’s dramatic structure follows Brecht’s suggestion to the letter, and most of the work’s ten scenes in “Steeltown, U.S.A. on the night of a union drive” focus on the metaphoric prostitution of various prototypes.
²⁵
The only incorruptible figures are Moll, who literally prostitutes herself but does not metaphorically sell out to Mr. Mister and at least has something genuine to sell, and Larry Foreman, who refuses to be corrupted by Mr. Mister and eventually leads the unions to thwart the union buster’s corrupt use of power.

Undoubtedly, the ideological nature of
The Cradle Will Rock
has obscured its artistic significance. That the work deserves its frequently designated status as an agit-prop musical is evident by the degree to which it was imitated by life. Only a few months after its opening, America seemed to heed its call to action with the formation of a strong national steel union, Little Steel. If
Cradle
’s pro-unionist and anti-capitalist stance now seems dated, its central Brechtian theme, the indictment of a passive middle class that sells out to the highest bidder, continues to haunt and disturb. As Blitzstein wrote: “‘The Cradle Will Rock’ is about unions but only incidentally about unions. What I really wanted to talk about was the middleclass. Unions, unionism as a subject, are used as a symbol of something in the way of a solution for the plight of that middleclass.”
²⁶

With the exception of “Nickel under the Foot,” which observes Brecht’s call for an epic theater and “the strict separation of the music from all the other elements of entertainment offered,” Blitzstein, in contrast to Brecht and Weill, created a work in which music and words were inseparable from the axis of the work.
²⁷
Despite this aesthetic discrepancy, the integrated songs of
The Cradle Will Rock
remain faithful to Brecht’s larger social artistic vision. Consequently, the
Cradle
songs, like those of Brecht and Weill, both embrace the didactic element espoused by Brecht’s epic theater and reject the “hedonistic approach” and “senselessness” common to operas (and of course musicals as well) before
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
of 1930.
²⁸

Scene Four, which contains four songs (“Croon-Spoon,” “The Freedom of the Press,” “Let’s Do Something,” and “Honolulu”) opens on the lawn of Mr. Mister’s home, where his children, Junior and Sister Mister, are lounging on hammocks.
²⁹
The stage directions describe Junior as “sluggish, collegiate and vacant; Sister is smartly gotten up and peevish.” Unlike most of the characters in Blitzstein’s morality tale, Junior and Sister Mister have nothing to sell and therefore cannot be indicted for selling out. But they do possess vacuous middle-class values that Blitzstein targets for ridicule in their duet that opens the scene, “Croon–Spoon” (
Examples 6.1
and
6.2
), a spoof of the type of trivial and ephemeral popular song on recordings, dance halls, and non-didactic Broadway shows.

Blitzstein’s opinion of the idle rich, who spend their time singing songs that do not convey a message of social significance, is apparent from the opening lyrics to “Croon–Spoon” when Junior sings, “Croon, Croon till it
hurts
, baby, / Croon, My heart
asserts
, baby, / Croonin’ in
spurts
, baby, / Is just the
nerts
for a tune!”
³⁰
True, Blitzstein permits Junior to begin on a note that belongs to a chord in the key of the song, an F
(the third of the tonic D major triad). But this F
is the last note in a tonic chord that Junior manages to assert in his opening seven-measure phrase (one measure less than the nearly ubiquitous eight of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs). The “conventional” theater song (e.g., “Anything Goes”) would present four eight-measure phrases to create an A-A-B-A or thirty-two-bar song form. Blitzstein’s altered phrase lengths (A[7]-A[7]-B[6+6+2]-A[7+4] measures) within the A-A-B-A structure manage to acknowledge convention at the same time he defies and ridicules it.

In contrast to Junior Mister, who concludes his first A section a half-step too low for the accompanying harmony (E
against a D-major chord), Sister Mister, in her complementary seven-measure phrase (the second A of the askew A-A-B-A), manages to conclude correctly on a tonic D in the melody. Blitzstein, however, subverts the harmonic implication of Sister’s more self-assured D (again on the word “spoon”) with harmony that will rapidly depart from the home tonic. The B section, which begins in F
minor (
Example 6.2
) and consists of two nearly melodically identical six-bar phrases followed by Sister Mister’s two-bar patter that leads back to the final A section, is remarkable for the C
in measure 17 (on “-la-” of “pop-u-la-tion”) and measure 23 (on “nev-” of “nev-er”), a lowered or blue fifth that is relatively rare in Broadway songs (and even somewhat unusual in jazz before the 1940s).