March 2: Marc Blitzstein

Composer Marc Blitzstein, best known for his anti-capitalist opera, The Cradle Will Rock, and his English translation and adaptation of Bertoldt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, was born on this date in 1905 (as was Weill in 1900). Blitzstein was a child prodigy who trained with Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg;an openly gay (yet married) man; and a communist “so totally and serenely convinced of the Eden which was waiting for us all on the other side of the Revolution,” said Orson Welles, who directed The Cradle Will Rock, “that there was no way of talking politics to him.” The first production, in 1937, was banned by the Works Progress Administration, which had funded it. In response, the cast and musicians walked with their audience to an adjacent theater and performed it without costumes or sets. Blitzstein’s other works included Sacco and Vanzetti, an opera that composer (and a Blitzstein biographer) Leonard Lehrman completed after Blitzstein was murdered during a visit to Martinique in 1964.

“A talented composer who might have become wealthy and famous by going the commercial route, either in Hollywood or on Broadway, instead commit[ed] himself to a career of relative penury in order to write works that [would] influence his country in a progressive direction.” —Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music

Entry corrected March 1, 2017