The Firebrand of Florence INTRODUCTION
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Kurt Weill Edition, Ser. I, Vol. 18 The Firebrand of Florence INTRODUCTION by Joel Galand I. EDITING A BROADWAY OPERETTA the work itself, and partly from critical consternation over what appeared to be nothing more than an old-fashioned costume operetta. One might II. WEILL, BROADWAY, AND OPERETTA IN THE 1940S have expected something more up-to-date from a composer and lyricist III. GENESIS AND PRODUCTION whose previous collaboration had been the groundbreaking Lady in the i. The Weill-Gershwin-Mayer Collaboration Dark and from a playwright who scripted for Ernst Lubitsch. Aiming for ii. Casting and Production an operetta “with great possibilities for an international market after 2 IV. CRITICAL RECEPTION the war,” they largely eschewed topical allusions, normally one of Gershwin’s stocks-in-trade. With the exception of isolated passages—the V. M USIC AND LYRICS cynical “You Have to Do What You Do Do” (No. 21b) being a case in VI. EDITORIAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS point—they also avoided the Offenbachian satire at which each had pre- i. Privileging Sources viously tried his hand: Weill with Der Kuhhandel and Knickerbocker ii. Case Studies Holiday, and Gershwin with the trio of political operettas on which he had collaborated with his brother and the writers Morrie Ryskind and VII. A FUTURE FOR FIREBRAND George Kaufman (Strike Up the Band in 1927, Of Thee I Sing in 1931, and Let ’Em Eat Cake in 1933). What humor Firebrand does possess derives largely from the deliberate anachronisms that Gershwin’s lyrics I. EDITING A BROADWAY OPERETTA and Mayer’s book introduce into their tale of the Medici. The Firebrand of Florence was not Weill’s least successful theater work. The philological problems attendant upon a critical edition of Happy End (1929), Marie Galante (1934), and A Kingdom for a Cow The Firebrand of Florence (hereafter Firebrand ) are inextricably bound (1935) all fared worse in their original productions. But several songs with the failure of its Broadway production—its only performance dur- from the first two works survived and even became popular, thanks not ing Weill’s lifetime. The genesis, production, and critical reception of only to sheet music but also to recordings, some of them featuring Firebrand all took place in less than a year, after which it effectively singers from the original casts. And A Kingdom for a Cow—or, more disappeared until some fifty years after Weill’s death. Firebrand was writ- precisely, the torso of its unproduced earlier incarnation, Der Kuh - ten in Hollywood and New York, largely between July and December handel —has enjoyed a certain amount of critical attention.3 Firebrand 1944. Rehearsals started on 22 January 1945, followed by a three-week was the only one of Weill’s Broadway musicals to suffer both critically tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theater beginning on 23 February. After and financially. By way of contrast, Johnny Johnson (1936) did not run some hasty revisions, Firebrand opened in New York at the Alvin Theater significantly longer than Firebrand (sixty-eight performances). It lost on 22 March. Had it not been such a lavish show, it might have survived money, but it enjoyed a succès d’estime, and Weill in particular received longer than it did, but the producer, Max Gordon, not wishing to throw favorable reviews, among them a lengthy encomium by Marc Blitzstein. good money after bad, withdrew it on 28 April, after forty-three perfor- Firebrand ’s short production history poses formidable problems for a mances. Four shellac sides were recorded by 9 April, but the only mem- critical edition. Consider, for example, Die Dreigroschenoper, which ber of the stage production involved in the project was conductor enjoyed some fifty new productions in its first year. Its success encour- Maurice Abravanel, and the recordings were never released. Of the four aged the printing of a piano-vocal score, orchestral parts, and libretto; numbers published as sheet music by Chappell, only “Sing Me Not a Weill even revised his holograph full score with the expectation that it Ballad” had an after-life. The original Duchess, Lotte Lenya, recorded it would be published. All of this evinces an authorial intention to transmit in 1958 without Weill’s orchestrations. In the mid-1990s, recorded high- the work in a form capable, as Stephen Hinton puts it, “of transcending lights from Firebrand based on original source material were included in [its] original theatrical incarnation.”4 In contrast, there was not enough two compilations of Weill’s Broadway music.1 Finally, the Weill cente- time for Firebrand to settle into anything more than a provisional form; nary season offered three productions, all based on a preliminary version the distinction between “text” and “script,” “work” and “event” risks of this edition. Until then, Firebrand had remained one of Weill’s most obliteration here. The same could be said, of course, for most Broadway obscure works, available only to those able and willing to study the musicals of the time. The composer’s involvement usually ended after the archival materials. first production, sometimes even once he had submitted the music to the Firebrand ’s quick demise poses something of a critical conundrum, orchestrator/arranger. If a show survived beyond its first production—for at least at first glance. After all, this production boasted a score by instance, in a version licensed for stock and amateur productions—it did Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and a book adapted by the esteemed so in a form dictated more by practical exigencies than by any philologi- playwright Edwin Justus Mayer from one of his most successful works, cal principles of Werktreue. More often, a show’s individual numbers The Firebrand (1924), a tragi-comedy about Benvenuto Cellini’s lived on as standards in the popular repertoire, in arrangements, harmo- amorous entanglements with the Medici. The reasons for the flop were nizations, and presentational contexts quite divorced from the original. complex, stemming partly from weaknesses specific to Max Gordon’s One solution to the dilemma is to do away with the concept of work production, such as casting and direction, partly from structural flaws in altogether, replacing it with the notion of “script” or “social text.” This 14 has certainly been the tactic of scholars who, influenced by the anthropo- may explain why nearly one fourth of this 650-page score is in the hand logical approaches of the New Historicism, have proposed replacing of a professional arranger, Ted Royal. To be sure, in some of his other scores with performances—even those diverging considerably from their Broadway works, Weill also assigned the orchestration of certain num- textual sources—as the point of departure for critical approaches to bers to assistants. Usually one can argue that these are exceptional pas- Broadway musical theater. Scores, according to this view, are merely “raw sages for which Weill desired a more specific Broadway sound than the material for a vibrant vernacular performance culture with its origins in one he had already so successfully appropriated. Cases in point would be popular musical theater, refocused and intensified by the requirements of Royal’s orchestration of the charm song “Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied the mass media.”5 Of course, similar considerations ultimately hold for in a Bow” from Street Scene and Irving Schlein’s of the boogie-woogie many sorts of texts, particularly theatrical ones. Thus, the Shakespeare that closes the “Women’s Club Blues” from Love Life. In the case of scholar David Scott Kastan, no doubt influenced by Jerome McGann’s Firebrand, informed as it is by traditional operetta, one can only con- critique of the “Romantic ideology” supposedly lurking behind editorial clude that pressures of time rather than considerations of style prompted appeals to final authorial intentions, has argued that the tradition of Weill to relinquish, at least in part, control over this dimension of his Shakespeare editions, going back to the First Folio of 1623, distort the work. historical context of plays that “were not autonomous and self-contained For such scores as Die Dreigroschenoper or Lady in the Dark, which literary objects, but provisional scripts for performance.”6 Flawed quartos were prepared for publication or enjoyed an extensive performance his- were as much a part of the social context of theatrical productions as tory during which the composer remained actively involved, it is possible their more privileged counterparts, and traditional source valuation to glean evidence about the form in which Weill wished his text to be proves problematic for authors who had little control over or concern transmitted for future use. We possess no such evidence for any number about what became of the provisional scripts they turned in. in Firebrand. Given these difficulties, this edition endeavors to transmit These ideas are stimulating and provocative, but it is not easy to grasp within the main text a version of the work that could actually have been how they apply in practice to the creation of a musical edition that is performed—in this case during the Boston run—rather than an arbitrary both critical and performable. Such an edition, after all, cannot merely collation of all extant material. Within those constraints, however, a cer- commemorate all documentable performed variants and let it go at that. tain amount of flexibility is possible. During the rehearsals and perfor- Moreover, it is one thing to assert that Broadway musicals, like most mances of Firebrand, almost every number underwent significant theater pieces, are socially conditioned through and through. It is alteration in the form of cuts, reorchestrations, transpositions, or the another to claim that composers merely provided provisional scripts and wholesale reordering of musical sections.