Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Spears: Fellow Travelers; Blitzstein: The Cradle Will Rock; No for an Answer, excerpts

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

I like to present some sort of "labor opera" on the Sunday of the Labor Day holiday; that is, something that reflects upon some aspect of the American labor force. Well, what if you held a government job in Washington in the bad old days of the anti-communist "Red Scare" and the so-called "Lavender Scare" , and you were trying to keep a same-sex relationship your personal secret? "Fellow Travelers" was the term applied to leftists in the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. Gregory Spears's Fellow Travelers (2016) sets forth in music a gay love story in a particularly perilous time.The opera is based on the novel by Thomas Mallon. Curiously, as Fellow Travelers was in rehearsal in June of 2016, the Pulse Club massacre of gay men had just taken place. Cincinnati Opera commissioned the work and premiered Fellow Travelers in that same month. Its world premiere recording was made live-in-performance. Mark Gibson conducts the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, with singing cast.

Fellow Travelers is a twenty-first century operatic take on a sad chapter in twentieth century American history. American lyric theater composer Marc Blitzstein (1900-1962) had to live through that period. For Blitzstein, it was the triple whammy: he was a Jew, a commie, and a homosexual. The first complete cast recording of a Broadway musical was not Rogers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma in 1944. It was Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, a "labor" musical, made in 1938 with the composer himself accompanying his cast on piano and narrating the story. That world premiere electric recording in monaural sound has been digitally reprocessed from 78 rpm discs for issue on a British Pearl CD in 1998. This historic recording was last broadcast on this program on Sunday, September 3, 2000. Opera Saratoga revived Cradle in 2017, employing Blitzstein's own 1937 orchestrated version of the score. You'll get to hear excerpts from the Bridge CD release of Cradle, which I broadcast in its entirety on the Labor Day Sunday, September 1, 2019. The Pearl CD also contains excerpts from No for an Answer (1946), Blitzstein's self-styled "American Opera," featuring a young Leonard Bernstein on piano.