The Music of Justice and Sex: Marc Blitzstein
When no less than Leonard Bernstein laments the passing of a fellow composer into near obscurity and describes him as “the greatest master of the setting of the American language to music,” one has to ask, who is this guy?
This guy was Marc Blitzstein. During the decades of the Depression and into the mid-twentieth century, when American musical theater was riding high on tuneful revues and the Americana of Gershwin, Kern, and Rogers and Hammerstein, Marc Blitzstein was writing theater scores, operas, and songs which addressed injustice, oppression, workers’ rights, and yes, the gay male experience—though this last was often sub rosa.
Blitzstein made no secret of his leftist politics, and he was, in fact, briefly a member of the Communist Party. His sympathies for labor issues and workers’ struggles were most famously expressed in his The Cradle Will Rock, a show whose story and controversial performance rocked the Broadway musical theater world on June 16, 1937.
Originally commissioned by President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (the WPA), that same WPA got cold feet at the show’s raw leftist script and songs. The government sent security personnel to padlock Broadway’s Maxine Elliot Theater on the night of the show’s premier, locking out cast, crew and audience. The show’s director, the always plucky Orson Welles, hastily secured the Venice Theater nearby. Everyone—cast, crew, audience—marched along the street to the new venue. There, the show was performed without costumes, sets, or orchestra, with Blitzstein providing the music at a piano and the cast performing from seats in the audience, standing up for their scenes and songs. The audience cheered. The show’s gutsy performance was a resounding success.
Where The Cradle Will Rock expressed Blitzstein’s political sympathies, other works flirted with his homosexuality. As a leftist and thus a staunch anti-fascist, Blitzstein enlisted in the army during World War Two. Assigned to the US Eighth Army Air Force’s Film Division in London, Blitzstein was commissioned to score the Army Air Force’s film depicting the history of aviation. The result was The Airborne Symphony, an orchestral and choral work which had its American premier after the war.
Under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, The Airborne Symphony premiered in April 1946. The three-part work examines aviation from its birth and its eventual role in modern warfare. The third section features the “Ballad of Hurry Up,” where a male chorus representing a crew of bombardiers is hastily getting into flight gear, from underwear through flight jackets and helmets, for a scheduled mission. But the mission is called off at the last minute, and as the men sing they remove their gear, article of clothing by article of clothing, down to the “long handled drawers.” LGBTQ historian Eric A. Gordon calls this “a musical striptease, obvious to any gay listener but closeted (in 1946) against a straight audience’s perception.”
Among New York’s theater and music citizens, many of whom were themselves gay, Blitzstein’s homosexuality was no secret. Nor were his sexual preferences. He was known to be a patron of the infamous Everard Baths in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood, and by all accounts he favored the sexual company of laborers and working-class men. In this he was much like New York’s earlier troubadour of gay male experience, the poet Walt Whitman, some of whose poems Blitzstein set to music in his Calamus song cycle.
Despite the success of The Cradle Will Rock, and The Airborne Symphony, as well as his operas and song cycles generally well received by the public and championed by leading musical lights such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, Blitzstein’s life was marked by depression, and ended badly. Vacationing in Martinique in 1964, he fell victim to a vicious gay bashing, murdered by three sailors who it is believed he may have propositioned.
After his death, Blitzstein’s work suffered a decline in popularity, to the dismay of Bernstein and Copland. Now, though, music scholars are giving the work a second hearing, finding beauty and bravery in Blitzstein’s compositions, and indeed, his life. ▼
Ann Aptaker is the author of short stories and the Lambda & Goldie award winning Cantor Gold series. The next in the series, A Crime of Secrets, will be released in July 2023.