Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Blitzstein: The Cradle Will Rock; No For An Answer; The Airborne Symphony

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

A "labor opera" is what is called for on this Sunday of the Labor Day holiday weekend. The quintessential one is Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1938). Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) is usually credited with being the first musical to have its own original cast recording. To be historically correct, however, it was actually The Cradle Will Rock that first got the treatment.

Blitzstein called his dark musical a "play with music." He wrote both book and lyrics for it, as well as the music. Cradle looks at the plight of common American laboring folk in hard times. As a play, much of Cradle is keenly satirical. Some of it is pure agitprop. Because of his long association with the political Left in the United States, Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) was a notorious figure. His hot potato of a musical almost didn't come off in its premiere Broadway production. Yet The Cradle Will Rock did not completely disappear from the annals of American musical theater.

It was revived at Theater Four in New York City in 1964. Blitzstein's friend Leonard Bernstein was musical consultant for the revival and its subsequent recording, which I broadcast in its CRI compact disc reissue on the Labor Day Sunday of 1990. This Sunday I invite you to give ear to the original cast recording, as it has been digitally reprocessed for release in the Pearl label's series of historically significant recordings of the earlier part of the twentieth century.

Together with Cradle in the same 1998 Pearl two-CD package are two other of Blitzstein's musical theaterworks. Blitzstein did in fact get his next Broadway show No For An Answer (1940) billed as "An American Opera." It has a less politically provocative story, telling of the domestic aspects of the hard life of Greek immigrant laboring people. The original cast recording of excerpts from No For An Answer includes the young Leonard Bernstein on piano.

A concert work on the monumentally Mahlerian scale is Blitzstein's The Airborne Symphony (1946). "Cantata" is perhaps a better term for this composition, written in London during Blitzstein's wartime service in the US Air Force. For the symphony's recorded debut after the war, Bernstein conducted the New York City Symphony Orchestra. Robert Shaw, then at the start of his choral directing career, directed the RCA Victor Chorale. Shaw also served as narrator for the piece, alongside two singer soloists (tenor and baritone). I last gave this three-part Blitzstein presentation on the Labor Day Sunday of the year 2000.