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2015 If She Had Belonged to Herself: Female Vocality in Kurt Weill's Street Scene McKenna Tessa Milici
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
“IF SHE HAD BELONGED TO HERSELF”:
FEMALE VOCALITY IN KURT WEILL’S STREET SCENE
By
MCKENNA MILICI
A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music
Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2015
Copyright © 2015 McKenna Milici All Rights Reserved McKenna Milici defended this thesis on April 9, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Douglass Seaton Professor Directing Thesis
Sarah Eyerly Committee Member
Douglas Fisher Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
For my mother, father, and sister
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am so grateful to have shared this process with such a supportive and encouraging advisor in
Douglass Seaton, who is generous in both his time and his counsel. Our weekly meetings made this experience highly gratifying. This thesis would not have been possible without the insights and guidance from my committee members, Sarah Eyerly and Douglas Fisher, who brought fresh perspectives to the project and encouraged me to find new angles from which to pursue my questions. I would like to acknowledge the support of all the Musicology faculty at Florida State
University, with special thanks to Denise Von Glahn for her compassionate mentorship. I would also like to thank the Musicology faulty for the Curtis Mayes Research Fellow Award that made my research trip possible. I am grateful to the staff of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at
Yale University and of the Weill-Lenya Research Center at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York, especially to Dave Stein for his guidance through the materials in the wonderful collection there.
I would like to thank Laura Gayle Green for her tireless championing of all music students, Susan Pickett and Robert Johnson for their multifaceted support of my music education, and Ellen, Lachlan, and Charlie Macleay for so generously hosting me at their home in New York. To my friends and colleagues in the musicology department, thank you for the late-night conversations, therapeutic laughter, and daily inspiration. Finally, I could not have completed this project without the steadfast support from my family; I hope this thesis may capture some of my mother’s strength, my father’s poetry, and my sister’s unadulterated joy.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Musical Examples ...... vi Abstract...... vii
1. ENCOUNTERING STREET SCENE ...... 1
2. FEMALE VOICES AND SPACES OF EXPRESSION...... 25
3. VOCAL HIERARCHIES ...... 58
4. TO WHOM DO WE LISTEN ...... 71
5. VOICES HEARD ...... 86
Bibliography ...... 95
Biographical Sketch...... 103
v LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES
Example 1. Gossip Trio, mm. 13–14 ...... 26
Example 2. Let Things Be Like They Always Was, mm. 1–14...... 33
Example 3. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 108–111...... 35
Example 4. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 56–65...... 45
Example 5. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 77–81...... 46
Example 6. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 99–105...... 48
Example 7. Sankey’s entrance following Mrs. Maurrant’s aria ...... 65
Example 8. Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow, mm. 140–148 ...... 67
Example 9. There’ll Be Trouble, mm. 52–57 ...... 78
vi ABSTRACT
When Kurt Weill chose to compose a work based on Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene (1929), he set out to create a new American operatic idiom crafted for the Broadway stage. Because Weill’s writings about Street Scene (1947) are centered on the topic of genre, most of the scholarship on the work contends with this issue. Street Scene is also remarkable in the way it highlights the female experience in mid-century America. In the focus on Street Scene in the history of
American opera, questions of the roles of women and Street Scene’s relationship to American social history have been largely ignored. The characters in Street Scene exemplify a nuanced conception of male and female roles, which results in a commentary on and criticism of conventional gender dynamics. Among the topics explored in this show, gender dynamics may be the most potent.
The female characters in Street Scene negotiate vocal spaces of expression and recognition. Multiple layers of character portrayals serve to expose a treacherous space in which female vocality is policed, truncated, and devalued. This emerges in the way the thoughts of the central female characters are interrupted and in how some of the most poignant musical expressions generate no response from the other characters onstage. Examining Street Scene through the lens of music as gendered discourse illuminates the ways in which this work highlights female experience, through both the affirmation and the negation of its characters’ vocality. The New York City street of the show’s title opens a space where the audience observes the public and private expression of female experience. These elements reflect a sensitive perspective on female voice and female agency in mid-twentieth-century American culture, a perspective not explored in other contemporary music theater productions.
vii At a time when many people were concerned about a “woman problem,” Street Scene centered its narrative on women who did not fit the conventional model of womanhood. Weill belittles ostensibly upstanding female community members in the music he wrote for female ensembles. Conversely, for the characters of Mrs. Maurrant and her daughter, Rose, he contextualized their story for his audience through sympathetic musical expressions. The audience’s relationship with the leading women also hinges on the musical portrayal of the show’s male characters, including a largely one-dimensional portrayal of the jealous husband,
Frank Maurrant, and the choice to keep Mrs. Maurrant’s lover in a non-singing role.
The Maurrant women’s voices possess a heightened form of expression, allowing them to be heard more acutely and with greater significance than the spoken word could afford. Although the content of their lyrics may indicate uncertainty about their futures or their senses of self, the music empowers their voices in song. But the feminist reader elated to hear the female condition communicated so significantly in Street Scene must also recognize the ways in which the show denies its female voices and removes its characters’ agency as much as it offers them a vocal
space. Mrs. Maurrant’s neighbors consistently grant no value to her voice, whether they interrupt her speech, ignore the content of her song, or associate her with a voiceless character. Mrs.
Maurrant’s voice may transcend her pitiable circumstances, but the character herself remains trapped.
Street Scene was situated in a historical time on the verge of change in the way women were conceptualized and discussed. The conflicting arguments surrounding the “woman problem” would soon be confronted directly by second-wave feminists, ushered in by authors such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. The issues in Street Scene are the same issues to
viii which Friedan and Beauvoir responded. Street Scene reflects a social need that feminist literature would soon begin to meet.
A crucial necessity for women belonging to themselves is to feel strength in their voices, from feeling comfortable enough to express their thoughts publicly to expecting that those who hear them will acknowledge their expression. Street Scene makes ignoring the female voice
impossible. Street Scene gave its women a voice through music and its audiences a chance to
hear them better and, consequently, to understand them
ix CHAPTER 1
ENCOUNTERING STREET SCENE
I saw Street Scene for the first time in the spring of 2014 at Florida State University. Before entering the auditorium that evening, I had previously heard the soaring tenor lament “Lonely
House” performed a few times at vocal competitions and festivals, and as a fourteen-year-old vocal student I had learned “Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow.” This was the extent of my knowledge of the work. I had never read a plot synopsis, and I knew nothing of the original play by Elmer Rice. I sat in the fourth row and waited for the performance to begin.
Over the next few hours I was enthralled by the portrayal of human experience unfolding before me through music. From the first few heart-wrenching notes of the dramatic-soprano aria
“Somehow I Never Could Believe,” to the militant pounding that underscores “Let Things Be
Like They Always Was,” I felt sincerely that this performance was moving me in the most profound ways and that the characters I saw on the stage were important beyond the limits of the theater. In an ensemble show, I heard the voices of two American women pierce through as they sang of their dreams and disappointments. At intermission a young man in the row in front of me turned around and spoke to a woman seated nearby. He explained that he had matriculated at the local community college, and he had been tasked with attending the performance and interviewing an audience member about his or her reactions. As one of his questions he inquired,
“What do you think is the most important theme in this show?” I answered his question silently to myself: “Gender and the role of women.” To me, even with the second act yet to be seen, the overriding significance of this theme was obvious, and blatantly so. This thesis will serve as an exploration of that theme in investigating how Street Scene by Kurt Weill, Elmer Rice, and
1 Langston Hughes offers a portrayal of women and female expression that not only reflects a
cultural understanding of women’s roles but is also in conversation with them.
History of the Work
Composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950) was born in Dessau, Germany, and before he reached the age of twenty he recognized his attraction to music for the theater. He found his first job as a professional musician in Dessau working as the répétiteur for the Friedrich-Theater, followed by
six months as the répétiteur and conductor for a small theater in Lüdenscheid; through these
experiences he developed his skills working with singers and orchestras. Reflecting on that
period years later, Weill wrote, “ . . . I made up my mind, at the age of 19, that my special field
of activity would be the theatre.”1 After moving to Berlin, Weill collaborated with dramatist
Bertolt Brecht on some of the shows that would become his most enduring, such as the play with
music Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) and the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
(1930), establishing himself as a successful composer for stage works. Through works like Die
Dreigroschenoper and the serious musical Der Silbersee, Weill sought a new dramatic musical
genre. “ . . . I discovered that the special requirements of the opera-house, its performers and its
audiences, forced me to sacrifice certain elements of the modern theatre, and it was at that time
that I began to dream of a special brand of musical theatre which would completely integrate
drama and music, spoken word, song and movement.”2
1 Kurt Weill, Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording, Columbia Masterworks set M- MM-683 (released 1947). 2 Weill, Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording.
2 Weill moved to America in 1935, leaving Germany as many other Jewish intellectuals
did when Hitler rose to power.3 Living in New York, Weill saw an opportunity to expand the
American operatic idiom by writing for Broadway. He wrote, “I discovered that a vast,
unexploited field lay between grand opera and musical comedy, although the ground was all
ready [sic] well prepared.”4 Weill viewed Broadway as America’s “living theatre” and felt that any new American opera should happen there. 5 His first true attempt at this, a Broadway operetta called The Firebrand of Florence, flopped. Despite favorable reviews in the press, poor audience attendance caused the show to close after only forty-three performances.6 After
Firebrand closed, Weill prepared for his next project. Before he emigrated, Weill had seen a
Berlin production of Elmer Rice’s (1892–1967) Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene, originally produced in 1929.7 Weill first met Rice at a rehearsal of Weill’s musical Johnny
Johnson in 1936. He proposed writing a musical adaptation of Rice’s play, having long thought the drama “a perfect vehicle for a musical play.”8 At that time, however, Rice and Weill concluded that it was too early for an adaptation of this kind.9 Rice had previously rejected
3 Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, trans. Caroline Murphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 235. 4 Weill, Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording. 5 Weill, Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording. 6 Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, 291. For a discussion of what factors may have caused Firebrand to be unpopular, see Stephen Hinton’s chapter on “American Opera”. Stephen Hinton, “American Opera” in Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 360–402. 7 Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, 312. 8 Kurt Weill, “Score for a Play,” New York Times, 5 January 1947: X3. 9 There are conflicting accounts on whether it was Rice or Weill who felt it was too early to write a score for Street Scene. In his New York Times article “Score for a Play,” Weill wrote, “At that time Elmer told me that he had been approached by several composers with the same idea, but that he thought it too early for a show of that type.” However, in a letter to Bill Schuman dated 28 June 1945 Elmer Rice wrote, “As I told you, Kurt spoke to me three or four years ago about the possibility of setting STREET SCENE to music. But after some discussion, he decided that
3 several proposals from various composers to turn Street Scene into a musical drama, partially due to a concern that any musical adaptation of Street Scene would supersede the play, which was still earning him a profit.10 But several years later, after a meeting of the Dramatists Guild in
1945, Weill and Rice went out for a drink and revisited the idea of turning Street Scene into a musical play. Weill reported that both he and Rice felt that the time since they had originally discussed the possibility of adapting Street Scene had created a more receptive environment for the project: “The Broadway musical scene had changed quite a bit in the ten years since we had first discussed the plan. Broadway composers had become more ‘book conscious.’ Opera was now a popular entertainment; the public had become interested in singing. Before the second drink arrived . . . Elmer and I had made up our minds to go ahead with ‘Street Scene’.”11
The two collaborators approached Langston Hughes (1902–1967) to write the lyrics for the show. Weill reflected, “In discussing the problem of lyrics for a show in which the music had to grow out of the characters we decided that the lyrics should attempt to lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry.”12 Rice contacted Hughes in
August of 1945 inquiring about the possibility of a collaboration. According to Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad, “Although Langston barely knew Rice, he had seen and enjoyed not only the first production of Street Scene in 1929 but also the motion picture of the play, starring Estelle Taylor and Sylvia Sidney.”13 The prospect of working on a play Hughes had so enjoyed attending delighted him. Eager for his contribution to be successful, Hughes wrote the
he was not quite ready to do it.” Letter from Elmer Rice to Bill Schuman, 28 June 1945. Photocopy, Series 47, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 10 Letter from Elmer Rice to Bill Schuman, 28 June 1945. 11 Weill, “Score for a Play.” 12 Weill, “Score for a Play.” 13 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941–1967, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 108.
4 lyrics for two songs within a day of receiving a copy of Rice’s play, instead of waiting for Rice
to start his book.14 This first submission fit what Weill and Rice had in mind, and by early
October Hughes had signed a contract to be the lyricist for Street Scene. After Weill died,
Hughes discussed his involvement with the project and what he believed Weill and Rice were looking for when they approached him:
That I, an American Negro, should be chosen to write the lyrics of Street Scene did not seem odd or strange to Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice. They both wanted someone who understood the problems of the common people. Certainly, Negroes understand these, for they are almost all common people. They wanted someone who wrote simply. I write simply because I myself am simple, and my people are not yet highly sophisticated nor greatly cultured. The characters in the original dramatic play of Street Scene are simple uncultured people. Weill wanted a poet. I am glad he considered me one. He wanted someone who knew city life. I grew up in Mexico City, Kansas City, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York – all big metropolitan centers. So when Mr. Weill and Mr. Rice asked me to consider doing the lyrics for Street Scene, I did not need to ask them why they thought of me for the task. I never did ask them. I knew.15
Together the three men worked on their “Broadway-Opera” for most of the year 1946.16
Plot Summary
The vocal score specifies that “the action takes place on a sidewalk in New York City” on an
evening in June, and the events unfold over two days.17 The opening numbers introduce several
of the tenants of a walk-up apartment “in a mean quarter of New York”18 (“Ain’t it Awful, the
Heat?” and “I Got a Marble and a Star”). Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Fiorentino, and Mrs. Olsen pass the
14 Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, 110. 15 Langston Hughes, “My Collaborator: Kurt Weill,” Kurt Weill Newsletter 13(1) (Spring 1995), 8. Originally published in a German translation as “Meine Zusammenarbeit mit Kurt Weill” in the program for the 1955 production of Street Scene by Städtische Bühnen in Düsseldorf. 16 Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, 312. 17 Kurt Weill, Elmer Rice, and Langston Hughes, Street Scene: An American Opera Based on Elmer Rice’s Play, Piano-vocal score edited by William Tarrasch (New York: Chappell, 1948), n.p. 18 Street Scene, vocal score, 5.
5 time on hot days gossiping about their neighbor Mrs. Maurrant, a mother of two, who is having an extramarital affair with Mr. Sankey, the collector for the milk company (“Gossip Trio/Get a
Load of That”). When Mrs. Maurrant enters, the women stop their gossiping and turn their attention to Mr. Buchanan, another resident, whose pregnant wife soon goes into labor (“When a
Woman Has a Baby”). At this point Mrs. Maurrant sings one of the show’s most operatic arias,
“Somehow I Never Could Believe,” expressing her sadness at the way her life has turned out and reflecting on unfulfilled dreams with a bittersweet optimism that tomorrow might be brighter than today. The source of her unhappiness is her husband, a jealous and brutish man who works as a stagehand on the crew at a local theater. Mr. Sankey enters, making his way to the drugstore to pick up some ginger ale for his wife, and Mrs. Maurrant fabricates a feeble excuse to follow him, rousing her neighbors to another flurry of gossip. When Frank Maurrant appears, he speaks to his neighbors with frustration and contempt, and when his wife returns, he greets her only with words of jealousy and suspicion. He is a man threatened by change, a sentiment he declares in the antagonistic aria “Let Things Be Like They Always Was.” Mr. Maurrant clearly suspects his wife of infidelity, and his insecurity about a lack of control over his family extends to his adult daughter, Rose, who has stayed out inexplicably late.
As evening falls, the apartment residents make their way inside, and Sam Kaplan, a bookish law student, reflects on the ironic loneliness of living in a crowded apartment building
(“Lonely House”). Rose Maurrant comes home from her job at a real estate office, fending off the advances of Mr. Easter, her married employer, who had taken her out for dinner and dancing after work. Both she and Mr. Easter agree, however, that she would be happier away from her life here, Mr. Easter offering to get her work on Broadway (“Wouldn’t You Like to Be on
Broadway?”), and Rose expressing a desire to fall in love (“What Good Would the Moon Be?”).
6 Mrs. Jones’s boorish son enters and makes a pass at Rose, inciting Sam to rush to her defense, only to be knocked down by the stronger Jones. Rose and Sam end the first act sharing their dream of escaping seedy tenement living (“Remember That I Care”).
Act II begins early the following morning. The younger Maurrant boy, Willie, plays on the street with neighborhood children (“Catch Me If You Can”); Mrs. Buchanan has given birth in the night with assistance from Mrs. Maurrant; Mrs. Hildebrand, a single mother of two, whose husband left her for another woman, prepares her family for eviction from the apartment; and
Rose prepares to leave for a funeral. Aware of the rumors swirling around her family, Rose takes her father aside and suggests that things might be better if he could be kinder and more compassionate to her mother. He rejects this, defending his role as a husband who has provided for his family. He then tells his wife he is going out of town, but when she asks him when he will return, he is skeptical of her motivations for inquiring. The tension bubbles up in a trio among
Frank Maurrant, Mrs. Maurrant, and Rose (“There’ll Be Trouble”). Dejected by the lack of compassion from her husband, Mrs. Maurrant turns to her son as the source of her comfort and pride (“A Boy Like You”). In a moment alone with Sam, Rose tells him about Mr. Easter’s offer to help her with a Broadway career. Horrified by this prospect, Sam declares his love for Rose and offers to elope with her. Rose is enchanted by this idea, and they both sing about the possibility of leaving (“We’ll Go Away Together”). Rose leaves for the funeral, and Sam sits on the apartment stoop. Mr. Sankey enters and is beckoned into the apartment by Mrs. Maurrant, who insists that her husband has left town. Mr. Maurrant unexpectedly returns early and, despite
Sam’s attempts to warn Mrs. Maurrant, shoots both her and Mr. Sankey before fleeing down the street. The neighborhood rushes out upon hearing the gunshots, and the dying Mrs. Maurrant is carried down from her apartment on a stretcher, as the chorus sings a lament, and Sam attempts
7 to console Rose (“Choral Scene and Lament/The Woman Who Lived Up There”). Later that
afternoon two nursemaids walk past the apartment gossiping about the crime of passion that has
already filled the newspapers (“Lullaby”). Frank Maurrant is quickly caught by the police and
brought face to face with his daughter; only then does he learn that his wife did not survive. Rose
begs to know why he killed her mother, and he responds by saying, “I must o’ been out of my
head, Rose. It might not of looked like it to you, but I loved her, too”19 (“I Loved Her Too”).
After Mr. Maurrant is taken away by the police, Sam renews his desire to run away with Rose,
but this time she refuses him. Fearing they would eventually become just as unhappy as her
parents, she urges Sam to go on with his career in law, and she packs a suitcase and leaves to
make her own way in the world (“Don’t Forget the Lilac Bush”). The show ends with the
residents of the apartment returning to their daily lives with a reprise of the opening number,
“Ain’t It Awful, the Heat?”
Street Scene Opens on Broadway
In casting the four leading roles, Weill sought performers with voices substantial enough to handle the more operatic vocal writing but who could also act well enough to convey the realism of Rice’s story. Weill worked with director Charles Friedman along with Rice to cast Polyna
Stoska (soprano) and Norman Cordon (bass) as Anna and Frank Maurrant, and Anne Jeffreys
(soprano) as their daughter Rose. Stoska had sung with New York City Opera, and Cordon had appeared at the Met.20 Only Jeffreys did not have a formal background in opera; she had trained
as a singer at a young age but then shifted her focus to pursue a career in film. While under
19 Street Scene, vocal score, 253. 20 Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 261–62.
8 contract with RKO, she was granted permission by the studio to appear in a performance of
Tosca at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After seeing her in a matinee performance, Weill and the conductor for Street Scene, Maurice Abravanel, approached Jeffreys backstage and offered her the role of Rose Maurrant, which she accepted.21 The role of Sam Kaplan was originally offered to Richard Manning (tenor), who had performed a small role at the Met in The Barber of
Seville, but during Street Scene’s short and largely unsuccessful try-out in Philadelphia it became apparent his voice could not be heard over the orchestra,22 and he was replaced by Irish-
American tenor Brian Sullivan.23
During the Philadelphia previews Weill wrote a few pages of notes on Street Scene for
Rice, Hughes, Friedman, and Dwight Wiman (the producer), arguing that they had not yet fully blended the elements of drama and musical comedy as they had intended. He made recommendations for how to better achieve “the flowing technique we had in mind.”24 Several musical numbers were cut, and by the time the show opened, Weill felt he had achieved the synthesis he long imagined possible. He wrote in a letter to the cast on opening night, “Dear
Friends, the show we are giving to-night is to me the fulfillment of an old dream – the dream of a serious, dramatic musical for the Broadway stage which might open up a new field of activity for
21 Anne Jeffreys: An Oral History Interview with Peggy Sherry for the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Weill-Lenya Research Center, Series 60, 3. 22 William Thornhill, “Kurt Weill’s Street Scene” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1990), 27. Elmer Rice recalled the tryout in Philadelphia as a fiasco. “The three- week tryout in Philadelphia was cataclysmic. The reviews were tepid, the attendance pitiable. Night after night we played to an audience of a few hundred scattered in the vastness of the Schubert Theatre . . . Without doubt, those were the longest three weeks I have ever lived through. However, we kept working away just as though everything were going smoothly.” Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 412. 23 Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 262–63. 24 Kurt Weill, “Notes on Street Scene,” 21 December 1946, MSS 30, Box 68, Folder 8, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
9 singers, musicians, writers and composers.”25 The show premiered with much greater success at
the Adelphi Theatre in New York on 9 January 1947.26 Reviewers praised the adaptation of
Rice’s play, and although the publicity for Street Scene had carefully avoided any mention of the word “opera,” billing it instead as a “dramatic musical,” the press congratulated Weill on creating a new American opera for Broadway.27 Although the production was a critical success
and ticket sales were initially high, the revenue was not substantial enough to offset production
costs, forcing the show to close several months after it opened.28 Kim Kowalke has pointed out
that although Street Scene’s 148 performances constituted a short run compared with other
musicals, it was “an unprecedented string of consecutive performances for an opera!”29
Weill championed the significance of Street Scene in heralding a new era for Broadway composers:
It has been my opinion for a long time that the Broadway stage can become an important outlet for the American composer and might even become the birthplace of a genuine American “musical theatre” or, if you wish, an American opera. That this theory has been widely accepted lately, is to me one of the most gratifying results of the success of “Street Scene.” I never could see any reason why the “educated” (not to say “serious”) composer should not be able to reach all available markets with his music, and I have always believed that opera should be a part of the living theatre of our time. Broadway is today one of the great theatre centers of the world. It has all the technical and intellectual equipment for a serious musical theatre. It has a wealth of singers who can act, excellent orchestras and conductors, music-minded directors, choreographers and designers. Above all, it has audiences as sensitive and receptive as any audiences in the
25 Kurt Weill, Letter to Street Scene cast, 9 January 1947, MSS 30, Box 47, Folder 14, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 26 Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, 364. 27 Olin Downes, “Opera on Broadway: Kurt Weill Takes Forward Step in Setting Idiomatic American to Music,” New York Times, 26 January 1947, X7. 28 For more on this, see the series of letters exchanged between Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes, and Maxim Lieber from 19 April 1947 – 22 April 1947. Photocopies in Series 40, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. Originals in Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. 29 Kim H. Kowalke, “Street Scene: A Broadway Opera,” in the program for the 1978 production of Street Scene by New York City Opera.
10 world. In watching the audiences at “Street Scene” I noticed that, when the first vogue of “sensationalism” was over, we started building an audience of our own, and there seem to be enough people who like music and drama equally to support a musical play of operatic proportions like “Street Scene” (which, at the time of this writing, has played to more than 200,000 people.) It is now up to us, the composers in America, to continue this movement which so far has expressed itself only in isolated efforts.30
Street Scene Studied
When Kurt Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, died in 1981, the couple’s papers were made available to
scholars through the newly established Weill-Lenya Archive at Yale University and the Weill-
Lenya Research Center at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. With these
materials now available, scholarly interest in Weill and Lenya flourished. The first international
conference on Kurt Weill was held in New Haven in 1983, and the first volume of the
semiannual publication the Kurt Weill Newsletter was issued that same year. David Drew’s Kurt
Weill: A Handbook was published in 1987; based on decades of research it was the first major
overview of Weill’s compositional output and a foundational source for much subsequent
scholarship.
Because Weill’s writings about Street Scene are centered on the topics of genre and the
creation of a new American idiom, most of the scholarship that examines Street Scene contends
with these issues. Whether by arguing that elements of the show belong to one genre or another,
or by investigating how Street Scene held special significance for Weill, scholars seek to discuss
Street Scene on Weill’s own terms. In his program notes for the 1978 production of Street Scene by New York City Opera, “Street Scene: A Broadway Opera,” Kim H. Kowalke provides an overview of the show’s history and the genre issues it raised. Larry Stempel’s contribution to A
30 Kurt Weill, “Broadway and the Musical Theatre,” The Composer’s News-Record, no. 2 (May 1947): 1. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/broadway-and-the-musical-theatre.
11 New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill focuses exclusively on what he argues is an unsuccessful
attempt at a hybrid genre. One of the most extensive investigations of the show is William
Thornhill’s dissertation, “Kurt Weill’s Street Scene,” in which Thornhill carefully traces the
development of the show and situates the work in Weill’s oeuvre; the dissertation does not
include much discussion of topical issues.
More detailed examinations of Street Scene can be found in Foster Hirsch and Stephen
Hinton’s chapters on the show in their respective books on Weill’s stage works. In Kurt Weill on
Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, Hirsch’s chapter “Street Opera” traces the development of the show, and he includes numerous quotations from letters and personal accounts to enhance this discussion. He also addresses the question of genre, but as only one of several topics of interest.
He analyzes several of the numbers from the show in depth, and his insights here are valuable.
Hinton’s chapter on Street Scene in Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform synthesizes much
of the material from the aforementioned sources. Hinton also covers the history and development
of the show, and he addresses the issue of genre, especially in terms of what other music
influenced Weill’s writing. Additionally, he discusses unifying elements in the show, as well as
topics of realism, the celebration of urban living, and the pastoral. Hinton also directly engages
with Stempel’s argument and complicates some of Stempel’s criticisms. Other scholarly work on
the show examines why it was not successful in Europe, or how the city of New York is
conceived in the work. There has been almost no attention to the significance of how Street
Scene portrays the life of the mid-century American woman. In the focused attention on Street
Scene in the history of the development of American opera, questions of the role of women and
Street Scene’s relationship to the social period in American history have been largely ignored.
12 Although neither Weill, nor Rice, nor Hughes ever published any thoughts on how
women specifically are portrayed in their show, the many reviews found in news clippings
indicate some ambiguity in how their characters were perceived by the audiences that attended
the performances. As Stacy Wolf observes about the perspective of musical theater critics,
“Reviewers fill in production details and situate the musical in context, often unconsciously
revealing unspoken cultural and theatrical expectations, since they write from their historical moment. In fact, the most illuminating and provocative comments are often those expressed nonchalantly.”31 The reviews for Street Scene do this in the way the leading characters were
described.
Reviewer John Chapman included a characterization of Mr. and Mrs. Maurrant in his
description of the leading singers: “It will suffice here to say that the burden of the story is
admirably carried by Norman Cordon, late of the Met, as the drunken, murdering stage-hand; by
Polyna Stoska, a soprano of unusual accomplishment, as Cordon’s gentle, affection starved
wife.”32 Howard Barnes in The New York Herald Tribune penned a similar description: “The central tragedy, in which the forlorn Mrs. Maurrant is caught by her jealous husband with the milk collector is savagely realistic . . . Miss Stoska is particularly appealing as the doomed wife and mother.”33 Through these descriptions, the reviewers, whether intentionally or not, revealed which characters they found more sympathetic. In the case of Mrs. Maurrant, a character we know to be an adulteress before she ever sets foot onstage, this is particularly interesting. Olin
31 Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 16. 32 John Chapman, “New Shows Have Creative Qualities Which Recent Drama Lack,” 12 January 1947, 85. Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 33 Howard Barnes, “The Theater: Broadway’s Bull Market In Musicals,” The New York Herald Tribune, 19 January 1947. Photocopy of clipping, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
13 Downes, who called her a “saddened and frustrated wife,” was moved by the music Weill wrote
for her. Downes remarked on her “singing in extended aria form of her daily and unbearable
woes: an effective operatic touch in the grander manner.”34 Other descriptions were more of a condemnation of Mrs. Maurrant, referring to her as “the unfaithful wife”35 or “the mother who
stooped to folly.”36 To William Hawkins she was both “the cheating wife” and “the hemmed in
wife.”37 There are also different characterizations of her significance in the context of the show.
One newspaper dedicated a whole page to photos of the production, and a caption under a photo
of Polyna Stoska describes Mrs. Maurrant as “Street Scene’s tragic heroine.”38 In another news clipping, she is only described as the object of someone else’s action: “Normon Cordon as the jealous Maurrant, Polyna Stosko [sic] as his pathetic, unfaithful wife whom he kills.”39
The way Frank Maurrant was described offers a similarly ambiguous reflection on how
the character was perceived. Many reviewers summarized him in one word: “jealous.”40 William
Hawkins also offered only a negative portrayal of Mr. Maurrant as “the domineering and
34 Olin Downes, “Opera On Broadway: Kurt Weill Takes Forward Step in Setting Idiomatic American to Music,” New York Times, 26 January 1947. Photocopy of clipping, Series 50, Weill- Lenya Research Center, New York. 35Ward Morehouse, “‘Street Scene’ Offered at the Adelphi, Impressive in New Musical Form,” January 1947. Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 36 B.F., “Music Ascendant,” 18 January 1947. Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 37 William Hawkins, “‘Street Scene’ Has Opera Touch.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 38 “This is ‘Street Scene’ – 1947.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 39 “Street Opera,” Newsweek, 20 January 1947. Photocopy of clipping, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 40 “Street Opera,” Newsweek; B.F., “Music Ascendant”; and Robert Coleman, “New ‘Street Scene’ Musical Hit”. All photocopies of clippings, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
14 drunken stagehand.”41 Other reviews were more sympathetic to Mr. Maurrant’s situation. Ward
Morehouse wrote Norman Cordon sang “the role of the husband, sodden with drink, tortured by suspicion, and turned suddenly into a madman with a gun,”42 as if the character of Mr. Maurrant
could not have helped murdering his wife given such circumstances. A review in Variety
highlighted Mr. Sankey’s culpability in the tragic ending, describing the plot as “centered around
a love-starved housewife and her errant lover, and the unhappy husband who kills them both.”43
The review by Elinor Hughes offered a more complex description of the Maurrant couple:
“There is the Maurrant family in center stage, the sullen, suspicious husband who has only
harshness and discipline for his family and no longer knows how to tell them of his love: the
unhappy wife whose infidelity is a reaching out for kindness and gentleness rather than vicious
or evil impulse.”44 But Olin Downes felt the portrayal of Frank was incomplete: “We would have liked more complete revelation, in text and music, of the character of the desperate murderer,
Maurrant.”45
These reviews, many written in response to the same opening night performance, show how varied the reactions were to the portrait of domestic problems presented on the stage.
Several reviews commented that the characters had not been significantly changed from the original figures Rice created, but a review written by Edward J. Smith alludes to how Weill’s music affects the reception of Rice’s characters:
41 Hawkins, “‘Street Scene’ Has Opera Touch.” 42 Morehouse, “‘Street Scene’ Offered at the Adelphi, Impressive in New Musical Form.” 43 “Plays on Broadway: Street Scene,” Variety, 10 January 1947. Photocopy of clipping, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 44 Elinor Hughes, “‘Street Scene’ Becomes an Opera with Striking Results,” Boston Herald, 4 May 1947. Photocopy of clipping, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 45 Olin Downes, “Opera On Broadway: Kurt Weill Takes Forward Step in Setting Idiomatic American to Music.”
15 The cast, for the most part, is magnificent. As Anna Maurrant, the lovely, loveless wife of a powerful and sullen man, Polyna Stoska makes a contribution which should catapult her to instant stardom. Miss Stoska’s acting realizes every iota of the sweetness, charm, and simplicity of this affection-starved woman. But her acting, magnificent as it is, becomes overshadowed by the sheer splendor of her lyrico-spinto voice. For powerful, rich, warm, and easy-flowing tones, she is without a peer on the American stage today. The Metropolitan has no one to equal, let alone surpass her. 46
Here the reviewer shows why those who saw the characters from Rice’s play faithfully transplanted to Weill’s dramatic musical missed a crucial point. Rice’s Anna Maurrant is not the same as Weill’s Anna Maurrant, because the former does not sing “Somehow I Never Could
Believe.” The power of Stoska’s soprano and the grandeur of an aria in an operatic style that lasts upwards of seven minutes – these factors become the most important in an audience’s understanding of Mrs. Maurrant. Thus the musical adaptation of Street Scene achieves different levels of characterization which Rice’s drama did not have at its disposal. These layers of character portrayal, through spoken dialogue, underscored dialogue, and sung text, offer a site for analysis of how female characters express themselves that has yet to be explored.
New Areas of Inquiry
Street Scene is remarkable in the way it highlights the female experience in mid-century
America. Street Scene challenged the accepted stratified roles of women, and this underlying
challenge still resonates today. In this thesis I will explore how the characters in Street Scene
exemplify a nuanced conception of male and female roles broader than the characters
themselves, which results in a commentary on and a criticism of conventional gender dynamics.
Among the numerous topics explored in this show, the gender dynamics may be the most potent.
46 Edward J. Smith, “Street Scene.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
16 This thesis will examine the characters, constructed primarily through textual and more
importantly musical portrayals, and their relationships in the Broadway opera. Much of the
show’s libretto is based faithfully on the text of Rice’s play, but Langston Hughes also wrote the
lyrics for many of the show’s more significant numbers, exploring aspects of the characters that
Rice did not include in his own script. Weill set material from both Rice and Hughes to music,
and therefore the musical portrayals of the characters in this show depend on the collaborative
work of all three creators. By focusing on the gender dynamics throughout the show, I will
demonstrate how the female characters in Street Scene negotiate vocal spaces of expression and recognition. I will begin by clarifying the ways in which the multiple layers of character portrayals serve to expose a treacherous space in which female vocality is policed, truncated, and devalued. I hear this in the way the thoughts of the central female characters are interrupted and in how some of the most poignant expressions of emotion through music generate no response from the other characters onstage. By examining Street Scene through the lens of music as gendered discourse, I then intend to illuminate the ways in which this work highlights the female experience, through both the affirmation and the negation of its characters’ vocality. The score specifies that the action takes place on a sidewalk in New York City, and the stage that creates the street of the show’s title opens a space where the audience observes the public and private expression of female experience. These elements reflect a sensitive perspective on female voice and female agency in mid-twentieth-century American culture, a perspective not explored in other contemporary music theater productions at the time.
17 Historical Context
Street Scene premiered just after the end of WWII when the country was heading into the economically prosperous era of the 1950s. This time also represents an ambiguous period in the advancement of women’s rights and a time in which a certain domestic role of women was simultaneously being questioned and solidified. As Angela Howard and Sasha Ranaé Adams
Tarrant have documented, the postwar period has long baffled historians seeking a cohesive feminist movement, a movement that would have faced resistance from the political fundamentalism and antifeminism that flourished following the wars. Howard and Tarrant hypothesize feminism either “died,” “went underground,” or became “scattered into single issue movements.” 47 The energy that propelled first-wave feminists to achieve women’s suffrage had dissipated, and unfortunately the way suffragettes had framed their movement contributed to the limited role in which women now found themselves.48 Part of the success of the suffrage movement stemmed from the public affirmation that a woman’s right to vote could be self- contained and would not upset other social institutions. Germaine Greer’s comments on how
British suffragettes negotiated this applies to American history, as well: “In the old days ladies were anxious to point out that they did not seek to disrupt society or to unseat God. Marriage, the
47 Angela Howard and Sasha Ranaé Adams Tarrant, eds., Redefining the New Woman, 1920– 1963, vol. 2, Antifeminism in America: A Collection of Readings from the Literature of the Opponents to U.S. Feminism, 1848 to the Present (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), xiii. 48 Although the limits of first, second, and third-wave feminism are points of debate, a general consensus is that first-wave feminism refers to the women’s suffrage movement and the fight for property rights. Second-wave feminism was a movement in the 1960s through 1980s that broadened the scope of women’s advocacy to include issues of family, workplace rights, reproductive rights, and issues of domestic violence and rape; the second-wave feminist movement was epitomized by the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade and the unsuccessful attempt to get the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution passed. Third-wave feminism refers to current feminist concerns regarding more diverse issues, especially those that prioritize the intersectionality of gender, race, and queer identities; third-wave feminists often champion feminism on a global and multicultural level in order to redress feminism’s history as a largely white middle-class social movement.
18 family, private property and the state were threatened by their actions, but they were anxious to
allay the fears of conservatives, and in doing so the suffragettes betrayed their own cause and
prepared the way for the failure of emancipation.”49
The Second World War temporarily disrupted the clear place of women in the domestic
sphere, as Rosie the Riveter encouraged women to take up the factory and manual labor jobs that
had been vacated by men who enlisted. Once the war ended and servicemen returned home to
their jobs, not only were women summarily fired or pressured to leave, but there was a sense of
urgency in getting women back into the homes they had left during a time of national crisis. “Just
as Rosie the Riveter’s flexed bicep advertised women as workers in the early 1940s, June
Cleaver’s apron told women that their realm was the kitchen . . . White middle-class heterosexual
women were supposed to be homemakers and mothers and to find complete satisfaction in those
roles.”50 The roles of men and women were no longer acceptably flexible.
Woman in the 1940s was as much an abstract concept as she was an individual person,
and as a concept she was the source of significant concern and debate. As early as 1941
propagandistic representations of the significance of homemaking could be found in mainstream
media. A nine-page photographic essay in the September issue of Life Magazine celebrated the
noble work of the housewife: “Just for love thirty million women work to make America’s
homes the best in the world.”51 The photos document the activities and responsibilities of the
American housewife during a typical day, praising her for balancing the demands of her “job”
(“Hers is a 24-hour-a-day job, including Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Asleep or awake she
49 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 2. 50 Wolf, Changed for Good, 27. 51 “Occupation: Housewife,” Life Magazine (22 September 1941): 79.
19 is always ‘on call.’ She is the executive, laborer and watchman of the plant.”52), and
demonstrating that she miraculously still had energy at the end of the day to greet her husband
(A subheading on the penultimate page: “At work day’s end she turns into hostess and party girl
for husband.”53)
Still, some felt there was a “woman problem” to be addressed. A contributor named
Frances Levinson described this phenomenon in a June 1947 issue of Life Magazine, just a month after Street Scene had closed:
Any woman of 1947 trying to plan a way of life for herself does not lack for advice. She can pick up a current magazine, go into the nearest book shop and find a welter of literature scarcely dry from the presses. In these she will discover herself castigated, pitied, praised, worried over and analyzed into scientifically positive but completely contradictory generalizations.54
One of Levinson’s conclusions regarding this “woman’s dilemma” was that millions of
American women were not happy, and two popular explanations for this were that “women are unhappy because they are still tied to the home” (the feminist view) and “women are unhappy because they have ventured too far from the home” (the antifeminist view).55 Levinson reviewed various suggestions for the “bored housewife” or “idle woman,” one of which was that the woman should find part-time work.56 The opposing view was that women in the workforce or, perhaps even more threateningly those women who pursued education, were abandoning their
52 “Occupation: Housewife,” Life Magazine, 83. 53 “Occupation: Housewife,” Life Magazine, 84. 54 Frances Levinson, “American Woman’s Dilemma,” Life Magazine, 16 June 1947, transcription in Angela Howard and Sasha Ranaé Adams Tarrant, eds., Redefining the New Woman, 1920–1963, vol. 2, Antifeminism in America: A Collection of Readings from the Literature of the Opponents to U.S. Feminism, 1848 to the Present (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 220. 55 Levinson, “American Woman’s Dilemma,” 222. 56 Levinson, “American Woman’s Dilemma,” 219.
20 vital roles as mothers and caretakers of the home. A concerned reader to the editor of Eugenics
Review wrote:
What we say is that we have noticed that the student habit in women aborts the sexual instinct and consequently removes from the field of reproduction the very best type of mother. That is the emotional and psychological aspect. On the economic side we find that the better off people become, the lower falls their birthrate, so that the prospect in that direction is no more comforting than that seen in the other just mentioned.57
But the concern on the one side that women were abandoning their maternal posts did not stop the consistent criticism of the limited role of women. By the mid-1950s this disillusionment was prevalent enough that Democrat presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson felt the need to reassure the 1955 graduating class of Smith College of the significance of “the humble role of housewife.”58 Concerned that the group of educated women he spoke to would view domestic life as unfulfilling and beneath them, Stevenson used his commencement address to assert that the vocations of marriage and motherhood were the most important responsibilities a modern woman could undertake, and that in truth “Western marriage and motherhood are yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society.”59 As Stacy Wolf astutely observes, during this time period “Sexuality, the family, and national security were all subconsciously linked . . . The stability of the family, then, not only guarded against foreigners from other countries with other values but also protected society from perceived threats from within.”60
57 S. H. Halford, “Deterrents to Parenthood,” The Eugenics Review 37 (1943): 141–42, http://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/pmc/articles/PMC2986073/. 58 Adlai E. Stevenson, “Women, Husbands and History,” in What I Think (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956): 182. 59 Stevenson, “Women, Husbands and History,” 187. 60 Wolf, Changed for Good, 28.
21 The rhetoric ushering the American woman back into the home was effective. In 1950 the
average age of women getting married was 20 years old (the lowest it would be between 1890
and present day),61 the percentage of women attending college fell from 47% in 1920 to 35% in
1958, and then 60% of women who did attend college terminated their studies in order to get married.62 The number of marriages in the United States reached a record high in 1946, and the return of young men from the war to a prosperous economy helped women feel comfortable to stay in the home, leading to a particularly high birthrate (the “baby boom”) that contributed to a national conscientious feeling of responsibility to create nurturing homes in which to raise families.63
Musicals And Operas In Context
In her book Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, Stacy Wolf views
musicals in conversation with the changing role of women in American society. Wolf observes
that the majority of musicals rely on a deeply embedded heteronormative narrative in which
couples are formed and united in marriage by the end of the show. Marriage is the ultimate
resolution of the conflicts that have arisen throughout the musical. In Oklahoma! (1943) Laurey
may refuse to ride in Curly’s surrey in Act I, but she’ll marry him in Act II; Guys and Dolls
(1950) ends with a double wedding that signals the reformation of two gamblers; even the
independent Annie Oakley learns “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” and chooses marital bliss
over winning a shooting competition in Annie Get Your Gun (1946). Wolf acknowledges that
61 Matthew W. Brault, Diana B. Elliott, Rose M. Kreider, and Kristy Krivickas, “Historical Marriage Trends from 1890–2010: A Focus on Race Differences” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, San Francisco, CA, 3–5 May 2012) 18. 62 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 2. 63 Christian Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” The Journal of American Culture 13(4) (1990): 57–69.
22 “Even musicals that buck the trend of the heterosexual couple’s formation . . . muse on love and
heterosexual relationships.” Street Scene is one such show: Rose rejects marriage as a resolution, and the show’s central marriage between Anna and Frank serves as a primary source of conflict.
One of Wolf’s purposes in Changed for Good is to trace how musical theater “has changed, continually reviving its representation of gender and heterosexual romance to navigate social ills and conflicts.”64 The musicals Wolf highlights as “bucking” the trend of heterosexual couple formation include Stephen Sondheim’s cynical Company and the primary queer relationship between Elphaba and Galinda in Wicked by Stephen Schwartz, as well as other musicals that all premiered decades after Street Scene.
In commenting on the time period of Street Scene, Wolf speaks to the enduring legacy of
Rodgers and Hammerstein: “The compositional, theatrical, and performance conventions that
Rodgers and Hammerstein and their colleagues developed in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s
remain the touchstones against which book musicals are measured.”65 Oklahoma! provides a perfect example. When Street Scene opened in 1947, Oklahoma! was in the middle of its record- breaking five-year run on Broadway. The portrayal of domestic and romantic relationships in
Street Scene is unlike that in Oklahoma! and other integrated musicals from this time period.
Laurey spends a majority of Oklahoma! exhibiting how little she desires Curly’s affection. She
rejects him after “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” warns him not to show her affection in
“People Will Say We’re in Love,” and openly declares in “Many a New Day” how little his
flirtation with another woman affects her. All of this is obviously a pretense that will not obstruct
their union by the end of the show, because audiences recognize Laurey’s “no means yes” as a
natural part of feigning disinterest that respectable women exhibit in order not to seem too eager.
64 Wolf, Changed for Good, 9. 65 Wolf, Changed for Good, 10.
23 Christian Mendenhall writes an exceptional summary of how the majority of book musicals that
became the popular form on Broadway participated in ushering women back into the home as
represented by the union of marriage. Mendenhall observes musicals from 1943 to 1964
performing “certain ritual functions within post-war American society,” specifically “the liminal
journey of a woman, the female romantic lead, from worker to homemaker.”66 Mendenhall makes a list of leading ladies who begin their journeys in some form of employment and end a married woman: Oklahoma!’s Laurey is a farmer, Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls is a missionary and social worker, The Music Man has Marion the librarian, and the eponymous heroine in Hello, Dolly! does just about everything. By the end of the show, every single one of these women is a wife. These musicals all reaffirmed the myth of the American Dream, in which the woman as housewife was an essential piece.
But Street Scene is not only significant because Rose the real estate office employee walks away from Sam’s marriage proposal, or for its portrayal of the not-so-happy life that awaited Anna and Frank Maurrant following their marriage. Beyond the depiction of what path an American woman’s life might take, Street Scene also offers portrayals of the female voice and female expression that engage with its cultural context in ways that are both progressive and problematic, reflecting an awareness of the female condition that would not fully enter mainstream thought until works like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique were published years after the final curtain fell on the first run of Street
Scene.
66 Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” 57.
24 CHAPTER 2
FEMALE VOICES AND SPACES OF EXPRESSION
We first see Mrs. Maurrant when she appears at her upstairs apartment window to toss a dime down to Willie for an ice cream cone, the same window that will mask her murder in the show’s penultimate scene. Before the audience has a chance to get to know her, the three women on the stoop of the apartment introduce her for us. The number is the “Gossip Trio,” sung by the three secondary female characters who return throughout the show, always commenting on the activities of the Maurrant family. Mrs. Jones, a surly New Yorker, is the both the most vocal and most critical; Mrs. Fiorentino is a German woman whose Italian husband teaches music lessons in their apartment; and Mrs. Olsen is a Scandinavian woman who has a young baby that constantly demands her attention.
In the trio Mrs. Olsen reveals that Mr. Sankey has been to visit Mrs. Maurrant today, and the women sing their disapproval: “You wouldn’t think a married woman with a grown up daughter / Would be fooling round with men like she hadn’t oughta. / Whatcha think of that,
Whatcha think of that?” The trio is marked Allegro agitato and is characterized by rapid sixteenth notes with staccato articulation markings in the orchestra. The vocal line for the trio is similarly manic. The result is a kind of patter song with no lyricism, and this absence of lyricism heightens the contrast we later hear between the musical style of Mrs. Maurrant’s aria and the style of her neighbors. At the moment Mrs. Fiorentino and Mrs. Olsen sing “Whatcha think of
67 that?” the notes are not particularly high for trained singers (B♭4 and G5), but Weill wrote only a sixteenth note before the singers descend to the next three sixteenth notes a fourth (for
67 In this paper I will use Scientific Pitch Notation to refer to notes, in which C4 signifies middle C.
25 Mrs. Olsen) and a fifth (for Mrs. Fiorentino) below (example 1). The brevity of the note, coupled
with the thick consonants “What-cha” that have to be articulated, results in a musical moment that sounds more like a chirp than a melody. It anticipates the hen-pecking song for the women’s
Example 1. Gossip Trio, mm. 13–14
ensemble in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, “Pick A Little, Talk A Little,” that would
appear on Broadway ten years later. On the original cast recording Hope Emerson, who
portrayed Mrs. Jones, does not even sing her lines, but rather speaks her way through them. The
trio ends with the three women singing, “I said to myself: Now what a disgrace! / And both of
‘em are married too. / A woman ought to know her place and act like decent women do. / Ain’t
she got no shame?” This is followed by an almost comical vocalization in which the three
women speak a tutting “ts ts ts ts ts” in rhythm on four sixteenth notes and an eighth note. Their
line about how “decent women” should behave obviously refers back to themselves; they clearly
consider themselves the decent women whose behavior should be replicated by Mrs. Maurrant, if
she knew what was good for her. The music highlights the irony of this statement in the way that
it ridicules the content of the trio’s speech. By hearing three treble voices patter along with little
26 nuance and no melody to hold onto, the audience recognizes that these “decent women” are little
more than spiteful gossips.
The vocal style of the gossip trio is in sharp contrast to the two numbers that frame it.
Before the trio, the apartment janitor comes up from the cellar singing a lazy blues piece, “I’ve
Got a Marble and a Star,” and following the gossip trio, expectant father Mr. Buchanan sings a
similarly languid, easy arietta, “When a Woman Has a Baby.” The sonorous appeal of the men’s
solos contrast starkly with the gossip trio, which is the first number in the show that contains
only female voices.68 The effect is to establish an association between the stoop women and an unappealing expressive musical style.
This negative association emerges in an altered form in the only other ensemble that exclusively features female voices, the “Lullaby” sung by two nursemaids at the beginning of
Scene II, following the murder of Mrs. Maurrant and Mr. Sankey. The score specifies that “Two young nurse-maids in smart uniforms appear, each wheeling a baby carriage.”69 They recognize the house number from a newspaper article that has already published illustrations of the crime scene. One of the babies in their charge begins in cry, and so they sing a beautiful and soothing lullaby, but the content of the lyrics is absurdly inappropriate:
Sleep, baby dear. The picture is right here. Drowse, tiny tot. It shows how they got shot. Rest little chick.
68 We also hear sections of only female voices in the opening chorus number “Ain’t it Awful, the Heat?” but this is in the context of a large chorus in which we hear a large variety of voices, including some solo lines from characters who do not reappear again in the show (such as two Salvation Army Girls). Although the opening chorus is the first time the voices of Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Fiorentino, and Mrs. Olsen are heard, they sing the same material that is picked up by the rest of the chorus. Nothing about the opening chorus establishes an expressive mode specific to the stoop women. 69 Weill, Street Scene, 243.
27 Maurrant came home too quick. Doze, pussy cat! He got them with his gat. Oh boy, that guy Maurrant looks mad! No wonder with that wife he had! And here is Sankey, scantily clad. Trying to climb through the window frame; But he got bumped off just the same! Look at the blood all over his mug! Sleep, lady bug; Sleep sweet and snug; Sleep, my lady bug-bug.
The melody repeats, and in the second verse the nursemaids turn their attention to the parents of the infants in their care, describing a home of infidelity and domestic violence over syrupy sweet melodies. In the full orchestral score, the clarinets are marked dolce espressivo, the horns and strings are both muted, and there are parts indicated for triangle, harp, and celeste which enhance the number’s infantile quality with sparkling, tinkling sounds. The duet rocks in a gentle 6/8 time, and the two nursemaids alternate fluid melodies, ultimately uniting their vocal lines in harmonious descending parallel thirds. In the performance I attended, this duet elicited a combination of amusement, nervous laughter, and disbelief from the audience at the disconnect between the beautiful music and grisly lyrics. Weill wrote in a letter to Langston Hughes what he envisioned the text of the number should be: “As you remember, it should be a sort of waltz-song about the newspaper reports and pictures, using the whole Daily News terminology which is typical of fifty million women in America who are more interested in murder stories than anything else.”70
Stacy Wolf makes an argument about paired female voices in musicals from the 1950s in which she argues that the female vocal duet serves to undermine the ultimate goal of
70 Letter from Kurt Weill to Langston Hughes, 20 September 1946. Photocopy, Series 40, Weill- Lenya Research Center, New York. Original in Beinecke Library, Yale University.
28 heterosexual union between the leading man and woman, because it offers the female characters
an alternative expressive outlet, if only for a moment: “The homosociality or homoeroticism of a female duet forces a wedge into the 1950s musicals’ resilient heterosexual project.”71 She
observes this in the duet between Sarah and Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. In another discussion of
female duets, Heather Hadlock points out how the treatment of women’s voices changed from
the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in which the female voice was no longer read as heroic
and female duets no longer signified love or support. Instead, nineteenth century audiences were
much more likely to see women competing for the affections of a male character or at some other
cross-purpose.72 A late example of this comes from Weill’s own oeuvre in the “Jealousy Duet”
from The Threepenny Opera, which Wolf cites as exemplary of opera’s “dueling sopranos”
convention.73
The musical mode written for the female duet and trio in Street Scene does something different. Weill’s music perverts female rhetorical modes. He sets gossip to music: a lowly form of communication most closely associated with women is legitimized through a musical setting.
Conversely he writes a lullaby, a recognizable genre of song most closely associated with women, but his music is subverted by incongruously gruesome lyrics. When women sing together in Street Scene, it is a sign of nothing good. The women on the stoop are all married and
two of them are mothers. Mrs. Fiorentino has tried to have a family, but her husband later reveals
she cannot. The nursemaids may be working women, but their employment consists of childcare.
For models of women that prioritize marriage, family, and child rearing, all of these characters
71 Wolf, Changed for Good, 27. 72 Heather Hadlock, “Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1810–1835,” in Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds, edited by Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 286. 73 Wolf, Changed for Good, 35.
29 fill their expected roles conventionally. But the way Weill set their voices to music creates an unflattering portrayal. These women are guilty of no crime, save their meddling and gossiping, but the music Weill wrote for a confirmed adulteress generates an antithetical portrayal for the audience, as will soon be discussed.
As indicated by the contrast between the easy musical style of the Janitor and Mr.
Buchanan as compared with the insistent style of the trio of gossipers, women and men express themselves in different ways in this opera. Weill was drawn to Street Scene in part because the eclectic array of characters Rice had created offered the opportunity to explore various musical styles.
As soon as I began to think about the music for “Street Scene” I discovered that the play lent itself to a great variety of music, just as the streets of New York themselves embrace the music of many lands and many people. I had an opportunity to use different forms of musical expression, from popular songs to operatic ensembles, music of mood and dramatic music, music of young love, music of passion and death--and, overall, the music of a hot summer evening in New York.74
Stephen Hinton recognizes Weill’s talent for finding the specific expressive mode for a particular character: “Throughout his career, Weill was a master of [established rhetorical conventions]. He had a keen sense not only when it was appropriate for characters to sing but also of how they should sing.”75 How the characters sang in Street Scene had much to do with Hughes’s contribution as lyricist, as Weill and Rice felt Hughes was well suited to creating the lyrics for “a show in which the music had to grow out of the characters” and “decided that the lyrics should attempt to lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry.”76 The lyrics Hughes wrote for some of the major musical solo numbers demonstrate another contrast
74 Weill, “Score for a Play.” 75 Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater, 382 (original emphasis). 76 Weill, “Score for a Play.”
30 between the expressive modes of male and female characters. These disparate phraseologies are assigned along gendered lines. Stacy Wolf observes that “Gender inflects and shapes every aspect of the musical. As soon as an actor steps foot onto the stage, the audience sees the actor’s gender and interprets that character accordingly,”77 and for Street Scene this extends to associations with gender coded expressive modes.
The men of Street Scene are emphatic and direct when they sing. Their language is declarative and demonstrates a strong sense of possession and ownership, whether of material possessions, a sense of self, or their place in the world. The first solo song we hear illustrates this clearly. Henry, the building janitor, sings the blues number “I Got a Marble and a Star.”
I got a marble and a star And the star is in my pocket, too. Got a marble and a star. The star is in my pocket, too. If you’ll be real good I’ll show that star to you.
I got a halo and a hat But my halo I don’t wear. Got a halo and a hat. My halo I don’t wear. I’m gonna save that halo Until I get up there.
Henry is one of the show’s minor characters, and he does not participate in any central plot lines.
Yet the language in his solo indicates a clear sense of self. The lyrics may be metaphors, but
Henry’s musical expression enumerates everything he “got” and what he intends to do with it.78
77 Wolf, Changed for Good, 6. 78 The confidence of Henry’s worldview can be seen again in the lyrics for “Great Big Sky,” a number that was cut from the final version of the show. Originally intended to be the closing number to Act I, it showcases the same sort of masculine declamation with lyrics such as “And a man ain’t much / But yet a man is all / That stands up tall / Between earth and God” and “I know the night will pass! / I know the dark will go! / I know the dawn will come alright! / I know!” Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes, Unsung Weill: 22 Songs Cut From Broadway Shows and
31 The most extreme example of a declarative masculine expression is Frank Maurrant’s
aria “Let Things Be Like They Always Was,” the most significant portrayal of Frank’s character
in the show. In the dialogue preceding the aria, Frank Maurrant gets into an altercation with
Sam’s father, Abraham Kaplan, an elderly Russian Jew who reads the newspaper from his first-
story window and laments “de exploitation of the verkers by the kepitalist klesses.”79 Kaplan
argues the American social and economic system based on greed is rotten. Maurrant becomes
incensed at hearing such “radical hooey” and asserts his own perspective: “I been a working man
all my life an’ I got no kick against the system.”80 As the disagreement escalates to the brink of a
physical fight, Maurrant is restrained by his neighbors and then sings his aria.
The aria is marked “Moderato (dark, menacing),” and the orchestra’s music evokes this
mood by the pervasive pattern of four even quarter notes per bar that underscores much of the
aria. Like Maurrant’s oppressively mean spirit that cannot be mollified, the orchestra plays the
quarter notes relentlessly (example 2). Two places in the vocal line are marked to be sung
“wildly,” and the orchestra has instructions to play “martellato,” “marcato,” and “stringendo
molto” in various sections. Norman Cordon’s operatic bass voice was supported by the lower
instruments in the orchestra, including bass clarinet, bassoon, violas, and cellos, and on his line
“My kids are gonna be brought up right,” a timpani enters and beats out the quarter notes for
most of the remainder of the number. All these elements create an aria that has an aggressive
drive and ominous mood, as Maurrant proclaims his worldview.
Hollywood Films, edited by Elmar Juchem (New York: European American Music Corporation, 2002), 9–12. 79 Street Scene, vocal score, 91. 80 Street Scene, vocal score, 91.
32
Example 2. Let Things Be Like They Always Was, mm. 1–14
33 Let things be like they always was. That’s good enough for me. Let things again be safe and sound The way they used to be! What’s going on? Why is it so bad? If you ask me, The world is going mad!
Look at all these new-fangled ideas going round, Free love, divorce, and birth control. Young girls smoking cigarettes, Their dresses up around their necks, And men coming in, breaking up decent peoples homes. But it ain’t gonna be that way around here, You hear? You hear? If anyone in my house wants that kind of stuff, Oh no! Oh no! My kids are gonna be brought up right! Not running the streets as if they’re wild all night In the old days they didn’t carry on that way, And I’m telling you they ain’t gonna do it today! With me that stuff will never go! In my house I run the show! Let things be like they always was. That’s good enough for me. That’s good enough for me.
Threatened by a world changing around him and his suspicions that his wife’s infidelity is rupturing the security of his life at home, Frank Maurrant expresses himself through demands and emphatic statements. His language demonstrates his conviction in his own power and control, that his force of will is powerful enough to halt the march of time in his own home.
Frank Maurrant’s confident language contrasts considerably with that of his wife. In both of Mrs. Maurrant’s arias she expresses a belief in a brighter future but no ability to manifest it.
Her language relies on wishful thinking and imagination; it is not based in action. Her first and
34 most significant aria describes how her life did not end up as she intended, and it begins with a
hopeful yet impotent rhetoric marked “with great feeling and warmth”:81
Somehow I never could believe that life was meant to be all dull and gray. Somehow I always will believe There’ll be a brighter day.
The aria has several climactic moments, and one of these consists of three sequential fermatas, one of the highest notes in the aria, and a fortissimo dynamic marking (example 3).
Example 3. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 108–111
The music is as emphatic as any section of Mr. Maurrant’s aria, and yet the lyrics set are
“There’s got to be a little happiness somewhere.” Mrs. Maurrant expresses a vision of the world
the way it should be, as Frank does as well, albeit with a strikingly different perspective. But
Anna Maurrant can only hope the future will be better, where Frank demands that life will not
change. Both arias reflect visions of the future, but the music and lyrics through which these
visions are revealed demonstrate the disparate expressive modes of language for men and women
in this show.
81 Street Scene, vocal score, 49.
35 Mrs. Maurrant’s language is similarly based on belief in her song to her son, Willie, “A
Boy Like You,” which begins “Somebody’s going to be so handsome, / Somebody’s going to
make me proud.”82 A recurring theme in Street Scene is the importance of motherhood, a subject
upon which characters such as Mrs. Jones, Fiorentino, and Olsen comment and pass judgment.
Mrs. Maurrant’s second solo number is shorter and lacks the dramatic intensity of her first aria,
but her language is consistent. She dreams of Willie’s growing into a respectable man who will
show her the kindness and affection she has never received from Frank. The closest she comes in
this aria to a sense of possession is when she sings,
Yes, that is the grandest feeling That any woman ever knew To know I have somebody wonderful, To know I have a boy like you.
But any listener can tell her confidence is misplaced. Willie’s behavior throughout the show
gives no indication that he will grow into the gentle-mannered man his mother envisions. Here
again Mrs. Maurrant sings with a language of faith in a better future, in the man Willie could grow up to be, but she is powerless to effect it, as even her own son slips outside her sphere of influence.
Rose’s solo number “What Good Would the Moon Be?” employs this same feminine
style of expression. Rose also imagines a different future for herself, but hers is even more
conditional than her mother’s. Where Mrs. Maurrant places her faith in Willie, Rose’s vision
depends on an imagined companion who will bring meaning to her life, someone with whom to
share walks and moonlight kisses. She ends her solo with a wistful “what if”:
No, it won’t be a primrose path for me, No, it won’t be diamonds or gold, But maybe there will be
82 Street Scene, vocal score, 207.
36 Someone who’ll love me, Someone who’ll love just me To have and to hold.
“Someone who’ll love me,” “Somebody’s going to make me proud,” “Somehow I always will
believe.” The women of Street Scene want more than they have, but they have no ability to turn their dreams into reality. In characterizing Rose’s solo, Weill described it as “Rose’s decision to live her own kind of life” in response to “Mr. Easter, who is trying to lure her into a different sort of life”83 in the song immediately prior, “Wouldn’t You Like to Be on Broadway?” If this is
Rose “deciding” what kind of life she wants, it is not very decisive, because it is not grounded in action.
Ultimately, action trumps belief, and Frank Maurrant dashes any possibility of the brighter day Mrs. Maurrant and Rose hoped would come. He makes good on his word that things
“ain’t gonna be that way around here” when he shoots his wife in their apartment. Finally at the show’s end, Rose overcomes the passiveness that has characterized her phraseology and takes action by refusing Sam’s proposal to elope. The contrast between the wishful thinking of Rose’s lyrics and her ability to leave Sam at the show’s end reveals how significant this moment of action by a woman is to the rest of the show. Rose herself recognizes the importance of possession just before she leaves, singing, “Look at my father, my poor mother, / If she had belonged to herself, / If he had belonged to himself, / It never would have happened.”84 Her own solo is evidence of how little Rose belongs to herself in this show, making her decision to reject
Sam all the more surprising.
Because Street Scene is not a traditional opera, incorporating elements of music theater as well, the audience comes to know the central characters through two quite different vocal modes
83 Weill, Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording. 84 Street Scene, vocal score, 268.
37 of expression: spoken dialogue and musical numbers. Certainly an audience would have different
expectations of the show’s songs than of its dialogue, much of which was pulled unchanged from
Rice’s original play. For the characters onstage, who cannot hear the music the way an audience
does, the two expressive modes nonetheless elicit different kinds of responses. In several
instances where Mrs. Maurrant begins to discuss something meaningful to her, she is promptly
interrupted. When, immediately following the Gossip Trio, she descends from her apartment to
join the stoop women and “be sociable,” they all engage in small talk (in spoken dialogue) about
the weather and their respective children. After a brief appearance from Sam Kaplan on his way
to the library, Mrs. Maurrant begins to speak with more substance, discussing something that is
significant to her view of the world. “Oh, I think it’s wonderful to have something like that, to
put your heart and soul into [a response to Mrs. Jones’s criticism that Sam reads too much]. Rose
says he’s just about the brightest boy she ever met and that she’s sure some day he’ll . . . .”85 In
the middle of her dialogue she is interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Buchanan, who comes
onstage carrying a bag of groceries. All the women greet him, and the conversation immediately
turns to the subject of his very pregnant wife. Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Fiorentino, and Mrs. Olsen would
much rather give their advice about tending to a woman during pregnancy than return to Mrs.
Maurrant’s notions of something meaningful to nourish the heart and soul. In this first
interchange the audience can clearly recognize that although Mrs. Maurrant’s neighbors invited
her down from her apartment, they do not value what she thinks or says; to them she provides a
gossip topic. The only occurrence of an ellipsis, this moment of interruption is even visually
striking on the page of the libretto, a clear representation of her unfinished thought.
85 Street Scene, vocal score, 36. This section of dialogue is not in the original play. Sam does not appear until later, and Mr. Buchanan enters after Mrs. Jones’s comment that foreigners do not know how to raise children well. Mrs. Maurrant’s comment on her admiration for Sam’s passion for reading appears only in the musical version.
38 Mrs. Maurrant is cut off again in a reflective moment soon after this first interruption. At
the end of Mr. Buchanan’s solo number “When a Woman Has a Baby” Mrs. Jones expresses her
relief at not having to go through another pregnancy, and Mrs. Maurrant begins to disagree: “Oh,
I don’t know. Sometimes when I look back, I think that was the happiest time of my life. It’s a
wonderful thing to be young like that and . . . .” This time she is cut off by the first appearance of
her husband. The music underscores his entrance with the same dark orchestral colors that will
later support his aria. The bass clarinet plays a twisting chromatic melody, as the violas, cellos,
and double basses punctuate with quick sforzando notes; the timpani rumbles paired with a soft stick roll on the cymbal, and the bass drum plays four even beats per measure for five measures.
This musical interruption serves two purposes. The music that accompanies Frank’s entrance acts as the first introduction to his character, and it is fittingly cheerless and threatening. The music’s narrative voice also offers commentary on Mrs. Maurrant’s reflection. We know from this ominous music that Mrs. Maurrant must be correct when she says her happiest times are in the past, because the music confirms that her present life with Frank is not a positive one. The music also alludes to just how bad her situation is, because it is so different in character from the happy memory of her youth that she begins to describe. The significance of this moment reaches a level beyond the interpersonal relationship of Mrs. Maurrant and her neighbors in how little they value her speech. Here the music represents a more omniscient external force commenting on her situation. Weill’s music recognizes her plight and conveys that sentiment to the audience, thus adopting a narrative role with the same authoritative perspective as a narrator in a novel.
The same way the focus shifts from Mrs. Maurrant to Mr. Buchanan, the characters onstage all turn to Mr. Maurrant once he appears, and no one asks Mrs. Maurrant to finish what she was saying. For now we are left to wonder what she might have said, and if she would have hinted at
39 what has happened to change her situation so drastically. This question will soon be answered in
her aria.
“Somehow I Never Could Believe” provides one of Street Scene’s most powerful moments in an operatic style. Weill himself felt the number was special. According to Lotte
Lenya, the impresario Billy Rose approached Weill after one of the show’s performances during the Philadelphia preview and criticized the aria’s length, telling Weill the number did not work and he should cut it down. “Kurt, it’s impossible. You have to shorten it. Nobody will listen.”
Weill responded, “If that aria doesn’t work, then I haven’t written the opera I wanted to write. I will not change a note.”86 Weill was right to defend the music he wrote, because the number was warmly received in New York. Rice described it as a turning point for his own confidence as he watched the show opening night, still nervous about the poor showing in Philadelphia: “I entered the theatre feeling as though I were on my way to the scaffold. Betty and I sat far back in the balcony, expecting the worst. However, the overture was warmly received, and when the curtain rose the attention of the audience was engaged.”87 Rice went on to mention only one number
specifically. “Ten minutes later Polyna Stoska’s beautiful rendition of her long tragic aria evoked
an ovation that literally stopped the show. From that moment on, success was unquestionable.”88
The aria has been a central topic of discussion for scholars who have written on Street Scene.
Larry Stempel compares the aria to Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy” in Carousel, concluding that the
conventions of European-style opera provide the aria with its continuity and “determine the
stylistic as well as structural underpinnings of the ‘American Opera’ . . . that Weill wanted to
86 Joseph Horowitz, “Lotte Lenya Recalls Weill’s ‘Street Scene’,” New York Times, 26 October 1979. 87 Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography, 412. 88 Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography, 412.
40 write.”89 Foster Hirsch praises the cohesion of Weill’s music and Hughes’s lyrics, “Like Weill,
Hughes, in Anna’s aria as throughout, is unafraid of banality; his lyrics for Anna’s lament
contain many plainspoken phrases that border on cliché but are truthful to the character.”90
Stephen Hinton scrutinizes the aria more closely, expanding upon and complicating the arguments of Stempel and Hirsch. He finds “a richly allusive web of motivic reference to other parts of the opera”91 in the aria, and he recognizes the juxtaposition of the aria with other numbers from the show. “The emotional depth of Anna’s aria, in part a function of its formal complexity and motivic richness, certainly provides a striking contrast with the numbers performed by subsidiary characters.”92
Mrs. Maurrant’s aria follows Frank’s exit into the apartment building after he finishes singing his own aria, and her singing emerges out of the ensuing conversation with Mrs. Jones about how to approach difficult relationships.
MRS. JONES: Men are all alike. They’re easy to get along with, so long as everythin’s goin’ the way they want it to. But once it don’t – good night!
MRS. MAURRANT: I guess it’s just the same with women.
MRS. JONES: Well, the way I see it, you get married for better or worse, an’ if it turns to be worse, why all you can do is make the best of it.
89 Larry Stempel, “Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera,” in A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill, ed. by Kim H. Kowalke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 327–28. 90 Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, 271. 91 Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, 374. 92 Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, 374. Central to Hinton’s discussion of Street Scene is his emphasis on Weill’s use of contrast and juxtaposition and the way these manifest in musical counterpoint. Hinton argues “dramaturgically motivated counterpoint informs Weill’s conception of musical theater throughout his career” (387). He uses this perspective as one method in resolving the questions of unity that scholars such as Larry Stempel and Elise K. Kirk have accused Street Scene of lacking. For those interested in issues of musical unity and generic integration, fuller discussions can be found in Hinton’s Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (364–87), Larry Stempel’s “Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera” in A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill (321–42), and Elise K. Kirk’s American Opera (261–63).
41 MRS. MAURRANT: I think the trouble is people don’t make allowances. After all, we’re all human, and we can’t just go along by ourselves all the time.93
This interchange is based somewhat faithfully on the dialogue from Rice’s play, but the moment
Mrs. Maurrant begins to sing, the connection to Rice’s source material stops. In the play, Mrs.
Maurrant continues to respond to Mrs. Jones using impersonal, broad statements. “I often think it’s a shame that people don’t get along better, together. People ought to be able to live together in peace and quiet, without making each other miserable.”94 She does not reveal anything more about her personal life or how she and Frank came to be such an unhappy couple. The text of the aria, in which we learn how Mrs. Maurrant’s youthful dreams of finding love and happiness had to be put away when she married Frank, is all Hughes’s creation.95
The aria begins in F minor, and the opening vocal line is marked “with great feeling and warmth,”96 as Mrs. Maurrant begins to describe the optimism that has stayed with her throughout her life. The hopeful opening lines set in a minor key create a bittersweet opening to her aria.
Somehow I never could believe That life was meant to be all dull and gray, Somehow I always will believe There’ll be a brighter day. Folks should try to find a way to get along together, A way to make the world a singing happy place, Full of laughter and kind words,
93 Street Scene, vocal score, 48. 94 Elmer Rice, Street Scene in Twentieth-Century Plays, British, American, Continental; Eleven Representative Selections, ed. by Richard A. Cordell (New York: Ronald Press Co, 1947), 158. 95 Although it is often impossible with Street Scene to determine which of the creators is responsible for a specific choice, Hughes’s sole authorship of the lyrics to Mrs. Maurrant’s aria can be confirmed with a degree of certainty because Rice never made a claim to them. How much co-credit Rice would or would not get for the lyrics in Street Scene was a subject of some disagreement between Rice and Maxim Lieber, Hughes’s agent. Rice lists all the numbers for which he felt he should receive credit in a letter to Weill. He does not include Mrs. Maurrant’s aria on that list. Letter from Elmer Rice to Kurt Weill, 16 October 1947. MSS 30, Box 49, Folder 62, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 96 Street Scene, vocal score, 49.
42 And friendliness on ev’rybody’s face.
But somehow in the world that I grew up in The streets were dark with mis’ry and distress. The endless daily grind was too much for them. It took away all hope of happiness.
When I was a girl, I remember, I used to dream about a party dress to wear. But I never had a party dress and I guess My dreams got lost somewhere - - nobody seemed to care.
But when I grew up I said, “I’ll make it!” For I believed there’d be a lucky star above me. In the fairy tales I read, the maiden always said: “I know I’ll find a fairy prince to love me.”
So I went wand’ring down the pavements of New York And through the subway’s roaring tunnel’s underground, Hoping I’d discover some wonderful lover.
Frank was the one that I found.
Oh, on the day that we were married I took a flower from my bouquet And I pressed it in a book And put the book away. Sometimes now I go and take a look, The flower’s dry, the perfume’s gone, The petals all turned grey.
Oh dream of love! Should love turn out that way? Should love turn out that way?
But then the babies came. Their little arms made a ring-a-round-a-rosy about me, Yet as they grew older, They, too, seemed to grow away. Until even Willie, My little boy Willie Seems he can get along without me.
I don’t know – it looks like something awful happens In the kitchens where women wash their dishes. Days turn to months – months turn to years,
43 The greasy soap-suds drown our wishes.
There’s got to be a little happiness somewhere – Some hand to touch that’s warm and kind! And there must be two smiling eyes somewhere That will smile back into mine.
I never could believe That life was meant to be all dull and grey. I always will believe There’ll be a brighter day!
The text of the aria explores issues that are not only much more personal than what is revealed in the original play, but Mrs. Maurrant’s words expose the disappointments she has experienced in living out the limited life prescribed to her as a married woman. She does not simply wonder why people do not get along better together, as Rice had written, instead she describes stanza by stanza how the things that purportedly make a woman’s life fulfilling – party dresses, love, marriage, children – all failed to bring her happiness.
As her story unfolds, the music embodies her emotional state, as she relives significant moments. We hear a shift from diatonic to chromatic harmonies when Mrs. Maurrant reveals that she dreamt of a party dress to wear but never had one. Then she reprises the same diatonic party dress melody in finding her youthful optimism again on “But when I grew up I said, ‘I’ll make it!’” As she goes on to state her belief that she will find a fairy prince to love her, the orchestra rises through energetic sixteenth notes to a climactic forte chord, and the cymbal shimmers with a hard stick roll. Then the music transitions to evoke the sounds of New York, with busy, accelerating lines punctuated by a prominent brass motive. The vocal line drops out as the brass motive rises by sequence to a frenzied height and climaxes at an F-sharp half-diminished seventh chord. The full orchestra immediately drops out, leaving only a horn playing an E-natural, above
44 which Mrs. Maurrant’s voice re-enters: “Frank was the one that I found” (example 4). The effect created by the music in this “anti-climax” is chilling.
Example 4. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 56–65
45 The lyrics clearly reveal that the party dress and accompanying lost dreams were the first
disappointment she faced, but we understand the magnitude of the second disappointment (her
fairy prince) more from Weill’s music than from her ambiguous line: “Frank was the one that I
found.” The text does not offer any description of the relationship, but the music’s retreat after a
climactic build-up indicates just how much Frank was never her fairy prince.
Mrs. Maurrant’s sweet demeanor emerges again as she sings the party-dress melody a
third time, her vocal line marked “warmly” and the strings that support her directed to play con
sordino. She sings about taking a flower from her wedding bouquet and saving it as a keepsake
in a book, but after she describes how the flower lost all its color and fragrance, the mutes come
off, and the orchestra plays a highly chromatic ascending line molto crescendo to the height of the phrase, where she sings, “Oh dream of love! Should love turn out that way?” (example 5).
Example 5. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 77–81
46 The party dress she never had; the prince she never found; the flowers that faded along with her
hopes of marital bliss – the music turns in each case to mirror her feelings of disappointment and
despondency. Although the music stays fairly consistent in character, Mrs. Maurrant’s next line
of text follows the same pattern of optimism followed by disappointment as she describes how
even her young son “can get along without [her].”
As if realizing how each of her efforts to make the best of it, as Mrs. Jones would say,
have ended in greater unhappiness, Mrs. Maurrant stops chronicling her past and tries with
uncertainty to make sense of how she got to this place: “I don’t know – it looks like something
awful happens / In the kitchens where women wash their dishes. / Days turn to months – months
turn to years, / The greasy soap-suds drown our wishes.” The music presents material unlike
what has been heard thus far. The cellos and double-basses begin to play a lamento bass, an
ostinato bass line of a descending minor tetrachord that has long been associated with sadness
and mourning,97 and above this the upper strings play a tremolo back and forth between two
major thirds (D♭4 – F4 and C4 – E4) (example 6). Weill has set this section of the aria in musical
stasis. The violins and violas alternate between the two thirds, progressing no further, and the
ground bass that underpins them makes it feel as though this moment could continue indefinitely.
The literal quivering in the string articulation perfectly represents the uncertainty in Mrs.
Maurrant’s voice as she sings “I don’t know,” her vocal line marked pianissimo and “Lento, quasi misterioso.” It is a heartbreaking moment, in which we realize just how trapped she has become. This moment in the aria resonates strikingly with some of Simone de Beauvoir’s
97 Douglass Seaton, Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 188.
47
Example 6. Somehow I Never Could Believe, mm. 99–105
observations about the effect of domestic living on women in her landmark book The Second
Sex, which would not be published until two years after Street Scene closed:
Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again. The housewife wears herself out running on
48 the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins again every day . . . Suddenly in the kitchen, where her mother is washing dishes, the little girl realizes that over the years, every afternoon at the same time, these hands have plunged into greasy water and wiped the china with a rough dish towel. And until death they will be subjected to these rites. Eat, sleep, clean . . . the years no longer reach toward the sky, they spread out identical and gray as a horizontal tablecloth; every day looks like the previous one; the present is eternal, useless, and hopeless.98
The toil of housekeeping forms only a part of Mrs. Maurrant’s experience as described in her aria, but to focus a spotlight on the condition of women’s daily lives in all its mundanity during one of the most important numbers in the show is an indication of how universal Mrs. Maurrant’s experience must have been for real women, such as those women in the audience hearing Polyna Stoska sing. The strength of the music also empowers her language, which is otherwise characterized by feminine inaction.
Mrs. Maurrant goes on to sing the remainder of the aria with tremendous force, emphatically declaring, “There’s got to be a little happiness somewhere.” Some have read the aria’s ultimate resolution in F major instead of F minor as symbolic of her indefatigable optimism, but this resolution comes so late in the aria there is barely sufficient time to establish a clear F-major tonality. Mrs. Maurrant sings her final note on A5 while the orchestra plays a B♭ minor chord followed by a G half-diminished seventh chord, and it is not until the last two measures of the aria that her note settles as the third of an F-major chord. The last two pages of the aria have too much desperation to be read as simple optimism.
The audience must be all the more sympathetic to Mrs. Maurrant’s plight because Weill has couched it in such beautiful music sung by a performer ideally as talented as Polyna Stoska.
We feel connected to Mrs. Maurrant because of her singing voice, while conversely the
98 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany- Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 474–75.
49 characters onstage hear her (speaking) voice and only demonstrate how little they value it. The
audience establishes its relationship with Rose in the same way. Everyone onstage criticizes her,
her father because of how late she has stayed out and even her employment, and Mrs. Jones for
Rose’s many admirers, but the more important characterization of Rose is her solo “What Good
Would the Moon Be?” The number is more popular in style than the operatic quality of her
parent’s arias, but it is still a serious treatment and clearly establishes Rose as the romantic lead.
It has a beautiful, tuneful melody that perfectly fits the plaintive lyrics. The seductive and bluesy
clarinets and brass from Mr. Easter’s lascivious song have disappeared when Rose’s number
begins; violins, flute, and harp outline a harmonic backdrop as other strings punctuate the texture
with pizzicato articulation. By comparison to Easter’s number, the music seems so much more
sincere and honest, an association Rose helps establish when she responds to Easter’s coaxing to
be her paramour by asking, “And what about your wife?”99 Mr. Easter tries to argue his wife
need not be informed, but Rose counters, saying, “I don’t think it’s the way I’d want things to
be,”100 at which point her music begins. For Rose material wealth cannot be enjoyed without a
loving companion with which to share it.
What good would the moon be Unless the right one shared its beams? What good would dreams-come-true be If love wasn’t in those dreams? And a primrose path What would be the fun Of walking down a path like that right one?
She concludes,
No, it won’t be a primrose path for me, No, it won’t be diamonds or gold, But maybe there will be
99 Street Scene, vocal score, 127. 100 Street Scene, vocal score, 127.
50 Someone who’ll love me, Someone who’ll love just me To have and to hold!
Some of the music also draws on blues elements, such as a snaking, chromatic melody line that begins the main theme as well as muted horns throughout, but where Easter sang of fame and fortune, Rose sings about a love she dearly hopes will soon enter her life. For Rose the muted horns and languid triplet figures in the cellos take on the romantic qualities of a young woman in the raptures of a fantasy.
But although Weill wrote beautiful music for his characters to sing, lending importance to the words they are singing, the other characters onstage do not respond to the lyrical content. In
“Wouldn’t You Like to Be on Broadway?” Mr. Easter has just offered Rose the chance to pursue a career in entertainment if she will also agree to be his mistress, and Rose has responded with a different idea of what her life should look like. But once the number ends, instead of commenting on the vision she has just proposed, Mr. Easter responds to the cries of Mrs.
Buchanan upstairs in the throes of childbirth.
Similarly, Mrs. Maurrant’s aria emerges out of a conversation with Mrs. Jones, but neither she nor any of the other neighbors onstage responds in any verbal way to what Mrs.
Maurrant has just said. Instead, they all turn to Mr. Sankey when he walks by on his way to the drug store. Her neighbors may have interrupted her speech when it was represented through spoken dialogue, but they allow her aria to go undisturbed from beginning to end. Yet not a single character acknowledges anything she has uttered in its duration. This raises the questions of who exactly hears her and for whom this aria is intended.
51 As previously mentioned, the aria is unusually long – Foster Hirsch goes so far as to call
it “dangerously long”101 – and Polyna Stoska’s rendition lasts almost six and a half minutes on the original cast recording, longer than any other number in the show.102 For over six minutes
Mrs. Maurrant shares her story, and no one interjects. From what the audience has heard from
Mrs. Jones thus far, her uncharacteristic silence is baffling. She has given her opinion freely and often up to this moment, and in Mr. Buchanan’s arietta earlier in the act her commentary is even set to music along with the voices of Mrs. Olsen, Mrs. Fiorentino, and Mrs. Maurrant. It makes sense from a musical perspective that Weill would not include anything of this comedic variety in Mrs. Maurrant’s poignant aria, but for Mrs. Jones to hold her tongue while the neighbor she scorns describes a perspective on relationships and motherhood is difficult to credit. Equally curious is that Mrs. Maurrant says any of this out loud at all. To reveal so much about her personal life, and to express her dissatisfaction with domestic womanhood so openly, is remarkable. It certainly runs counter to the rhetoric represented by the article “Occupation:
Housewife” that extolled the activities of wives and mothers in their homes just a few years earlier in Life Magazine.
These observations raise the issue of the ambiguity of this aria as an external and/or internal form of expression. There is no possibility for this aria to be sung while Mrs. Maurrant is alone onstage, because it proceeds immediately from her conversation with Mrs. Jones. Directors of Street Scene must decide how to advise the actress playing Mrs. Jones to behave during the
101 Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, 271. 102 Kurt Weill, Street Scene (Excerpts), original cast, conducted by Maurice Abravanel. Columbia Masterworks set M-MM-683, released 1947, 78 rpm.
52 aria. In the filmed 1979 production by New York City Opera,103 Mrs. Maurrant (Eileen Schauler) sings the first half of the aria downstage of her neighbors, her face turned directly out to the audience, but Mrs. Jones (Diane Curry), Mrs. Fiorentino (Martha Thigpen), and Mr. Jones
(Robert Paul) all follow her movements with their eyes. Mr. Jones can been seen smirking when
Mrs. Maurrant mentions the party dress, and Mrs. Fiorentino’s smile visibly fades when Mrs.
Maurrant sings, “Frank was the man that I found” (a modification of the original lyric). When
Mrs. Maurrant comes to the point about the pressed flowers, she crosses upstage to Mrs. Jones, who is seated on a garbage can, and sings to her directly. Mrs. Jones responds by looking back over her shoulder at either her husband or Mrs. Fiorentino and rolling her eyes. All three characters listen and respond with subtle physical gestures to what Mrs. Maurrant expresses.
The production by Florida State University employed a more direct connection between
Mrs. Maurrant (Alicia Jayourba) and Mrs. Jones (Jessica Kasinski).104 At the beginning of the aria Mrs. Jones stands with her back to the audience, arms folded, as Mrs. Maurrant sings directly to her. After a few lines, Mrs. Jones walks away, shaking her head, but she turns back and listens through the end of the line “there’ll be a brighter day” before crossing fully to stage left and turning her back to Mrs. Maurrant. There she assumes a neutral pose, pressing a handkerchief against her neck to dab away sweat in the hot weather. For a period of time she does not move, but the scene behind Mrs. Maurrant is not fully frozen. Mrs. Fiorentino (Kathryn
Bowden) and Shirley Kaplan (Marie Smithwick) can be seen moving around in their first floor apartments, but neither woman appears to be aware of Mrs. Maurrant outside her window at all.
103 “Street Scene NYCO 1979 complete,” YouTube video, 2:55:45, from a Live From Lincoln Center performance televised by PBS on 27 October 1979, posted by “tenore23,” 26 January 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlFDe6mZjDM. 104 Kurt Weill, Street Scene, Florida State Opera. Conducted by Douglas Fisher with Alicia Jayourba, André Dewan Peele, Kyaunnee Richardson, Andy Acosta, et al. Recorded 27 March 2014, DVD.
53 Mr. Jones (Michael K. Lindsay, II) spends the entirety of the aria sitting on a wooden crate,
apparently in a drunken doze; he does not once move or acknowledge Mrs. Maurrant’s voice in
any way. For a while, it seems that no one listens to Mrs. Maurrant, who sings out to the
audience, until she describes searching for a fairy prince to love her, at which point Mrs. Jones
looks toward her again, and then crosses right to look at her own husband. Throughout the aria
there are moments when Mrs. Jones physically responds to what Mrs. Maurrant says, but in other
moments Mrs. Maurrant speaks to no one in particular. Once Mr. Sankey appears, it becomes
clear that time has operated differently in her aria. The moment he is visible, everyone moves.
Mr. Jones stands up, and Mrs. Jones turns to face Sankey. Both Shirley and Mrs. Fiorentino rise
from their seated positions and lean out their windows. Even Mr. Buchanan up in his second
story window peers out over the ledge with interest. The spotlight that had lit Mrs. Maurrant
during her aria disappears as a broader and more neutral lighting comes up. The staging in this
production exemplifies the distinction that Stacy Wolf makes between songs and dialogue in
Broadway musicals: “The occasion of a song opens space in the play and gives the audience a
chance to engage in a different experiential mode.”105 Listening to Mrs. Maurrant from the other side of the fourth wall, we would be willing to suspend our disbelief and understand that what she sings cannot be heard by the other characters, because these are actually her inner feelings set to music. But physical reactions in both productions from Mrs. Jones prohibit this reading.
In both staged productions to some degree Mrs. Maurrant’s aria is an external expression.
The physicality of her neighbors indicates they hear her, and yet her aria elicits no verbal response from them. Rose’s solo has more limited options for staging, as the only character onstage with her is Mr. Easter. In both the New York City Opera and Florida State Opera
105 Wolf, Changed for Good, 17.
54 productions, Rose sings part of her solo to Mr. Easter directly and part of it out to the audience as
Mr. Easter looks at her, listening. The number’s shorter length makes Easter’s silence less unnatural, but like Mrs. Maurrant’s neighbors, Easter also does not acknowledge what Rose has just sung. If Street Scene creates a space for women’s voices to be expressed, then it is also significant whether or not that space is one in which women are heard.
Much of Mrs. Maurrant’s aria feels like an internal expression. She reflects on her past and criticizes her current life. We can imagine her having these thoughts within the confines of her apartment as she goes about her day. But she sings her aria out on the street. She is not alone when she sings it, and yet the aria’s length and the lack of any response indicates that what she sings during the aria is somehow different from what she says in her dialogue. None of her neighbors interrupts her aria, but perhaps they do not really hear it. Thus the aria occupies a liminal space of interiority and exteriority in which her expression is legitimized through its musical setting, but that legitimacy is undercut by the lack of a response from her onstage audience. If Mrs. Maurrant’s aria and Rose’s solo evoke no response from the other characters because they are fundamentally soliloquies, then Street Scene does not recognize the importance of these women’s voices but rather their thoughts and feelings.
But of course Mrs. Maurrant has two audiences, and the second audience not only listens to everything she sings but applauds her aria once she has finished. The practical issues of physical space complicate the questions of interiority and exteriority for her vocal expression.
When the applause following Polyna Stoska’s performance stopped the show opening night, the men and women in the audience acknowledged everything she had just sung. Certainly they may have responded primarily to the beauty of her voice and the feat of singing she had just accomplished, but they heard Hughes’s lyrics as well. As they listened, the members of the
55 audience heard a representation of a contemporary woman describing her life as a wife and mother as a series of disappointments. Although the applause cannot be viewed as an endorsement of the content of the lyrics (Norman Cordon certainly would have received applause at the end of his menacing aria as well), it is an acknowledgment of Mrs. Maurrant’s expression that is entirely absent from Rice’s play.
By taking what we might imagine are Mrs. Maurrant’s internal thoughts and turning them into an outward expression set to music, the creators of Street Scene gave center stage to an average woman to tell her story for two captive audiences. The picture Mrs. Maurrant paints of her life challenges the glorifying perspective of domestic womanhood that was generated for women in 1947. Jill Dolan writes that theatrical productions are made with an “ideal spectator carved in the likeness of the dominant culture” in mind, and “historically, in North American culture, this spectator has been assumed to be white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male.”106 If female theater attendees looked to see how members of their own gender were represented onstage, they would typically have found themselves depicted adjacent to a central masculine narrative. “She sees women as mothers, relegated to supporting roles that enable the more important action of the male protagonist. She sees attractive women performers made-up and dressed to seduce or be seduced by the male lead. While the men are generally active and involved, the women seem marginal and curiously irrelevant, except as a tacit support system or as decoration that enhances and directs the pleasure of the male spectator’s gaze.”107
Street Scene negotiates this in several ways. Although Rose and Mrs. Maurrant both sing beautiful solos uninterrupted, enjoying a space in which they can openly describe their views of the world, their language is marked by a passivity and insecurity that does not plague the
106 Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, 1. 107 Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, 2.
56 phraseology of Street Scene’s male characters. But these women could never be called
“marginal” nor “curiously irrelevant,” because Weill’s musical settings make their vocal expressions too important and captivating. Yet what they sing about is not acknowledged in their world onstage; rather the recognition they receive comes from the audience listening to them in the theater. Polyna Stoska may have stopped the show with her performance, but the audience listened to her because she occupied a privileged space in which to showcase her vocal talents, not because her character’s story deserved to be heard. Stoska’s performance was successful because she, a famous opera singer, believably conveyed the role of a voiceless woman. The aria
Weill wrote opened a space for us to hear what we imagine a real Mrs. Maurrant, and countless women like her, would never have expressed out loud; the strength of Stoska’s voice allowed the audience to hear the weakness of Mrs. Maurrant’s. In the Broadway opera version of Street
Scene, we connect with Mrs. Maurrant and Rose most strongly when they sing to us. It does not trouble us that their solos fall on unsympathetic ears among the other characters, because ultimately we do not need Mrs. Jones and Mr. Easter to hear them. We hold no expectation that
Mrs. Jones will be persuaded by Mrs. Maurrant’s story and treat her with any more kindness, nor will Rose be able to convince Mr. Easter of the benefits of a relationship filled with genuine loving care. We want Rose and Mrs. Maurrant to sing to us, because although the other characters onstage are not privy to the expressive power of their voices, it is what we value most about them.
57 CHAPTER 3
VOCAL HIERARCHIES
In a collection of papers pertaining to the casting of Street Scene, one sheet enumerates the cast requirements.108 The list calls for a cast of 52 people, 21 of whom are listed as “Principals.” Of these 21 principals, only three are non-singing roles: Marshall James Henry, Officer Harry
Murphy, and Steve Sankey. Sankey’s minimal physical time on stage might lead one to dismiss
Sankey’s songlessness as inconsequential, but the significance of the character’s lack of access to the sung world of Street Scene marks him as an outsider. Because of his association with Mrs.
Maurrant, his lack of a musical voice poses a threat to her own in how their voices are recognized.
The music Weill wrote for Street Scene features the majority of its cast as singers. The
Joneses, Fiorentinos, and Olsens sing frequently in ensembles throughout. Mr. Buchanan,
Abraham Kaplan, and the janitor each have a solo number, and Jennie Hildebrand sings the first half of “Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow,” before the chorus joins her. “Moon Faced,
Starry Eyed” presents the ne’er-do-well couple of Mae Jones and Dick McGann, and “Lullaby” showcases the voices of two gossiping nursemaids; these four characters do not appear in the show beyond their respective featured numbers. They enter to sing, dance, and deliver a bit of dialogue, and then they leave. The ensemble numbers also contain ample solo opportunities for members of the chorus, from Mary and Charlie Hildebrand in “Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow,” to Willie Maurrant and a young girl named Joan in the children’s game “Catch Me If
You Can.” Other numbers include solos for characters who do not even receive the designation
108 “Street Scene – Casting.” T-MSS 1963-001 Box 1 Folder 23 of the Lina Abarbanell Papers, The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
58 of a first name. “Ain’t it Awful, the Heat?” has a short solo marked for the character of “Negro
Woman,” and later in the same number a separate line is written for “2 Salvation Army Girls”
above the rest of the chorus. Motives sung by offstage voices occur throughout the show, such as
multiple instances where “A girl’s voice off stage” sings “Come in, come in wherever you are!”
and the same line is echoed by “A Boy’s voice.” In the underscored scene preceding Mrs.
Maurrant’s murder, “A distant Voice” sings “Strawberries! Strawberries!” emulating the call of a
fruit vendor. The “Choral Scene and Lament” following the murder is peppered with solos for no
particular designated characters. The score indicates that the solos should be drawn from “People
in the crowd whispering to each other,” but just who should sing the individual lines is left to the
director or chorus master.
The effect is that the world of Street Scenes comes alive through the variety and richness of its many voices. In a publication for Musical Digest Weill described whom he envisioned populated this world: “the people in the play are the people we know – with whom we rub shoulders every day of our lives.”109 For that very reason, the fact that the characters in Rice’s place were so real, Weill felt he could not tell the story in music alone: “I am not calling my work an opera. I would rather term it a dramatic musical. There are certain things one usually expects from opera which cannot be done in a Broadway production . . . In order to preserve the realism I cannot tell my whole story in music but must weave the spoken word with song for a blending of these effects.”110 Weill appears to have made good on this promise, for the show does contain a fair amount of dialogue, but Weill featured so many of the voices at his disposal as to make the singing voice a universally significant expressive device. It is not as if Weill
109 Kurt Weill, “Broadway Opera: Our Composers’ Hope for the Future,” Musical Digest 29, no. 4 (December 1946): 16, 42. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/broadway-opera-our-composers-hope-for-the-future. 110 Weill, “Broadway Opera: Our Composers’ Hope for the Future.”
59 saved the most featured vocal parts for his major characters, hiding the rest of Street Scene’s
voices in the anonymity of the chorus. Even the singing voices of unnamed characters have the
opportunity to make an impression on the audience.
This preponderance of featured singing voices makes the absence of Mr. Sankey’s voice
all the more noticeable. Although Sankey is a minor character, he cannot be excused as
insignificant to the plot because of his crucial role in the central narrative concerning Mrs.
Maurrant’s adultery; his presence in her apartment at the moment of Mr. Maurrant’s unexpected
early return leads to the tragic murder that serves as the climax of the show. It is Mrs. Maurrant’s
relationship with Sankey that causes her neighbors to gossip about her so maliciously, and even
Rose is visibly affected by Sankey’s presence in her mother’s life, as she tentatively asks Sam,
“Sam, do you think it’s true – what they’re saying about my mother?”111 to which his silence is
the only affirmation she needs. Then later, after the argument between her mother and father in
the trio “There’ll Be Trouble,” Rose even comes close to discussing the affair openly, suggesting
to her mother, “Well, what I was thinking was, if he didn’t come around here so much, maybe.
Do you see what I mean, Ma?”112 Although she does not name him, she clearly refers to Sankey.
Each time Sankey’s character appears, his entrance causes a significant reaction from the rest of
the characters onstage. Yet he delivers all his lines in spoken dialogue and never once sings, even
in the chorus numbers. It is curious that a character so structurally significant to the plot would
be kept songless, when so many of Street Scene’s characters do sing.
Weill made conscious decisions about the importance of integrating dialogue with his
music, even remarking about where he felt Porgy and Bess fell short of achieving the new
American idiom he envisioned:
111 Street Scene, vocal score, 153. 112 Street Scene, vocal score, 204.
60 Being a theatrical composer, I have to present my music in a manner which would be accepted by a realistic public. I found only one fault with Porgy and Bess, that being its tendency to tell everything in music. I will have music for seventy-five percent of my story, but twenty-five percent will be dialogue. Sometimes this dialogue will be underscored by the orchestra as a dramatic moment is about to unfold. At other times, no music will be played at all.113
Unfortunately he did not clarify his reasons for omitting any singing lines for Sankey. It seems clear, however, that Weill never intended any musical material for Sankey. In addition to the vast number of singing parts he wrote for both major and minor characters, a large amount of music was considered for Street Scene that was either cut before or after the Philadelphia tryout, was only ever notated in Weill’s sketches, or never made it beyond drafts of Hughes’s lyrics.114 None of this material indicates a part for Sankey (table 1)
Table 1
Song Title Intended Characters Notes Great Big Sky115 Henry This song was replaced by “I Got a Marble and a Star” That’s where our Mrs. Fiorentino, Mrs. Horoscopes Lie116 Olsen, Buchanan, Kaplan, and Olsen The Streetlight is My Dick and Mae This jitterbug was replaced by Moonlight117 “Moonfaced, Starry Eyed”
113 Weill, “Broadway Opera: Our Composers’ Hope for the Future,” Musical Digest. 114 For more detailed information regarding when these various pieces were eliminated from the show, see William Thornhill, “Kurt Weill’s Street Scene,” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1990). Materials in David Drew’s entry on Street Scene as well as his appendices in his Kurt Weill: A Handbook (London: Faber, 1987) are also helpful in this matter. 115 Weill and Hughes, Unsung Weill, 9–12. 116 “Street Scene. Vocal Score. Holograph. Act II.” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 436, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 117 Weill and Hughes, Unsung Weill, 13–15.
61 Table 1 — continued Song Title Intended Characters Notes She’s a Gemini Girl118 Not specified – likely These three ensembles were replaced by Mr. Buchanan and dialogue on vocal score pages 192–193. possibly others “She’s a Gemini Girl” was likely replaced by the exchange between Buchanan and The Iceman Cometh119 Lippo and Mike Mrs. Fiorentino, where he reveals that his Italy in Technicolor120 Rose and Lippo wife gave birth to a baby girl. Mr. Sankey is not present during this scene. Anything Can Happen In a The Cop, Quartette, Day121 Mrs. Jones, Women, Nursemaids A Nation of Nations122 Not specified “A Nation of Nations” was also referred to The Kids in School123 Not specified as “Erickson and Columbus.” These It’s the Irish124 Not specified numbers all address the topic of ethnic diversity; they were likely various options for the “Melting Pot” number Weill envisioned. Rose’s Good-bye to Rose, Mr. Easter, Easter125 Henry, Shirley
Lauren Gilbert created the role of Mr. Sankey in the original production. A file of clippings on the actor’s career at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts reveals some information about his other work. In 1941 he appeared as Duke Orsino in a production of
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the St. James Theatre, but his biography in the playbill does not
118 Thornhill, “Kurt Weill’s Street Scene,” 33. 119 “Street Scene. Vocal Score (cont’d) Act II (copy)” MSS 30 Box 32 Folder 438, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 120 “Street Scene. Vocal Score. Holograph. Act II.” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 436, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 121 “Street Scene. Anything Can Happen. Text.” MSS 30 Box 30 Folder 425, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 122 “Street Scene (sketches) (cont’d)” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 123 “Street Scene (sketches) (cont’d)” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 124 “Street Scene (sketches) (cont’d)” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 125 “Street Scene. Vocal Score. Holograph. Act II.” MSS 30 Box 31 Folder 436, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
62 mention any appearances in musical productions.126 Even if Gilbert had no singing experience, it seems almost impossible this could have been a determining factor in Sankey’s songlessness. On the contrary, Weill had negotiated an actor’s vocal shortcomings to great success just a few years earlier in Knickerbocker Holiday, as observed by Marc A. Roth: “‘September Song,’ written for
actor Walter Huston, who took the role of [Peter] Stuyvesant, illustrates the way in which Weill
could take advantage of an actor’s limitations as a singer. Delivered in a nasal monotone,
Huston’s rendering of ‘September Song’ made the piece one of Weill’s greatest hits.”127 Alan
Jay Lerner even credits Weill with endorsing Rex Harrison for the role of Henry Higgins in My
Fair Lady; when asked by Lerner “Does he sing?” Weill responded, “Enough.”128 According to
Lerner, Weill considered producing a new English version of The Threepenny Opera with
Harrison, so Weill must not have been troubled by an actor’s limited vocal talents.
Whatever Weill’s reason, he clearly separated Sankey from the rest of the cast by not composing any music for him. This decision sets Sankey apart from the other characters, and it causes his presence onstage to often have an unsettling effect. Scholars have addressed the issue of non-singing characters in a variety of ways, but almost always by addressing the negative connotation that songlessness has for a character. Geoffrey Block argues that a non-singing
126 His biography reads: “Lauren Gilbert (Orsino) has appeared in two other productions with Maurice Evans, namely ‘Richard II’ and ‘Hamlet,’ and was in The Theatre Guild production, ‘Dame Nature,’ so that he comes into this company somewhat naturally. He made his first professional appearance at the Grove Theatre in Chicago during the 1934 World’s Fair. He had left his home in Fairbury, Nebraska, to study medicine at the University of Chicago, but a meeting with Jessie Bonstelle, whose stock company in Detroit is famous for fostering theatrical talent, changed the course of his carrear [sic]. Other productions in which he has appeared are ‘Mother,’ with Nazimova, and ‘Cue for Passion,’ in which he portrayed a Hollywood screen writer.” “Gilbert, Lauren,” Clippings folder in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 127 Marc A. Roth, “Kurt Weill and Broadway Opera,” in Musical Theatre in America: Papers and Proceedings of the Conference on the Musical Theatre in America ed. by Glenn Meredith Loney (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1984), 268. 128 Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live (New York: Norton, 1978), 49.
63 character runs the risk of appearing one-dimensional in comparison to the more fully-formed
singing characters, and thus the character “proceeds at his or her own peril.”129 Stacy Wolf also labels the songless character an outsider, when she writes, “ . . . how a character sings delivers important information to an audience: a character who sings badly, such as Ado Annie in ‘I
Cain’t Say No’ in Oklahoma!, or not at all, such as Baroness Schraeder in the film version of The
Sound of Music, signals one who is out of step – literally out of tune – with society and perhaps
not to be believed or trusted.”130 The strongest perspective comes from Andrea Most’s discussion
of racial politics in South Pacific, and how Rodgers and Hammerstein condemned the character
of Liat to silence, “a sentence in the musical theatre akin to death.”131
The characterization of Sankey most closely fits with Wolf’s description, because he is
outside the community in a physical way, as well. Mrs. Maurrant clarifies on more than one
occasion that Sankey is the collector for the milk company, and he lives “down the block
somewhere,”132 and although he always appears to be passing by the apartment en route to
somewhere else, he engages with the neighborhood in a way that disrupts its natural flow. The
audience’s first introduction to Sankey comes from the trio of gossiping women, who condemn
him for even exchanging pleasantries with Mrs. Jones, who sings:
I seen that man me-self last week. He had the gall to stop and speak! He was comin’ out as I came in. Good morning, says he, putting on a grin. Good morning, says I, looking him in the eye,
129 Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings; the Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50. 130 Wolf, Changed for Good, 17–18. 131 Andrea Most, “‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’: The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘South Pacific’,” Theatre Journal 52(3) (Oct 2000): 315. 132 Street Scene, vocal score, 113.
64 As me and my dog passed him right on by. [All three women:] Ain’t he got a nerve!133
Sankey’s first appearance occurs immediately following Mrs. Maurrant’s aria, and as discussed in chapter 2 this entrance pulls the focus of all characters onstage, removing any possibility that her neighbors will comment on what she has just sung in her aria. The music that underscores his conversation with Mrs. Maurrant and her neighbors features motives from her aria. As Sankey
Example 7. Sankey’s entrance following Mrs. Maurrant’s aria
enters, muted strings play the melody from “Oh dream of love! Should love turn out that way?” and “There’s got to be a little happiness somewhere,” (example 7 – motive 1) music that correlates to two of the most desperate moments from the aria. Then the flute plays another melody from her aria, the melody that first appeared when she described searching for “some wonderful lover” (example 7 – motive 2). This same melody was transformed, rising by sequence, until an ultimate anti-climax when she sang “Frank was the one that I found” (example
4). The melody reappeared before the line “then the babies came,” and it could be heard a final time in the aria’s postlude, just after she sang “I always will believe there’ll be a brighter day!”
Its association has always been with Mrs. Maurrant’s optimism, and now, as the flute and
133 Street Scene, vocal score, 31–32.
65 clarinet play this melody while she converses with Sankey, the flicker of her happiness in his
company has a musical resonance with her aria’s happier recollections. But as this melody plays,
a stage direction indicates, “Maurrant appears at window.”134 In the next measure a horn finishes the melody that corresponds to “Should love turn out that way?” (example 7 – motive 3). Music that was previously employed to evoke Mrs. Maurrant’s despondency thus alternates with a theme of optimism, mirroring the contrast between her husband in the window above her and her lover before her on the street. But more than highlighting the differences between these two men, the alternation between differing musical moods creates a sense of foreboding. This feeling that something is not right now that Sankey has appeared is compounded by his conversation, which mentions not only is he married, which we already knew, but also that he has two young daughters. In the most immediate sense, the anxious feeling prepares for the following reprise of the malicious “Gossip Trio,” now a quartet, after Mrs. Maurrant invents an unconvincing excuse to run down the street after Sankey. On a broader level the uneasiness that accompanies each appearance of Sankey foreshadows his ultimate role in Mrs. Maurrant’s death.
His second appearance causes an even greater feeling of unease, because his entrance not only interrupts a scene of merriment and dancing but also halts the music with an abrupt silence.
In one of the larger ensemble numbers, the chorus has just finished singing “Wrapped in a
Ribbon and Tied in a Bow.” In the spirit of cheerfulness and celebration, Lippo asks Mrs.
Maurrant to dance, and she initially expresses some reticence, but as the orchestra crescendos and the music modulates joyfully up from the key of B-major to C-major, she and Lippo begin to
134 Street Scene, vocal score, 60. The same stage direction occurs in a synopsis of set, props, and business for the original production of Street Scene dated 14 November 1946: “Sankey enters right. Maurrant appears at window of his flat and stands looking out.” T-MSS 1993-002 Series IV – Productions Box 53 Folder 13 of the Joe Mielziner Papers, The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
66 dance. Lippo compliments her skills, to which she responds, “Oh, go on! But I always loved to
dance.”135 This phrasing in the past tense, indicating that she is no longer used to dancing, only slightly tempers the exhilaration of her exclamation. They whirl through the street, until the pair almost bumps into Mr. Sankey, who has just entered, saying, “I see you’re having a little dance.”136 As he finishes speaking, the music diminuendos and halts on a dissonant chord that evades the expected resolution on tonic (example 8). All the energy from the preceding chorus vanishes in Sankey’s silence. He only remains for a few more lines of dialogue before exiting, but the effect of his presence is permanent. The overriding mood damped, the following page of dialogue sees Mr. Maurrant chastise first his wife for dancing and then his son for fighting, and the neighbors on the stoop resume their gossiping until Sam cannot bear their disparaging remarks anymore. His outburst begging them to stop their cruel conversation ushers the
Example 8. Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow, mm. 140–148.
135 Street Scene, vocal score, 113. 136 Street Scene, vocal score, 113.
67 remaining characters offstage, leaving him to sing the arioso, “Lonely House.” Sankey is thus a terribly disruptive force, and the music’s narrative persona acknowledges this when his speaking voice silences the orchestra. His lack of access to the musical world in which so many other characters participate marks him as a clear outsider.
Sankey makes one final appearance, walking past the apartment and catching the attention of Mrs. Maurrant who beckons him up to her room. After Frank Maurrant returns unexpectedly, he discovers them together and shoots them both, killing Sankey and mortally wounding his wife. He then flees down the street, pushing through the gathering crowd of onlookers with his gun extended in front of him. Rose emerges in the commotion, and Sam futilely attempts to hold her back from the scene. The crowd then begins to sing the number labeled “Chorale Scene and Lament”:
Solo voices: Who’s she? Her daughter. Poor thing. Her mother’s dead. Who killed her? Her husband! About another man! He killed them both.
Tutti: The man from down the street and the woman who lived up there!137
With this line the crowd functions like a Greek chorus, commenting on the scene with a homogenous voice. They reduce Sankey to the nameless “man from down the street” and Mrs.
Maurrant to the equally nameless “woman who lived up there.” To the characters who comprise the crowd, many of whom do not live in the building, this description is perfectly accurate; Mrs.
Maurrant means no more to them than Mr. Sankey does. But for us in the audience, the most
137 Street Scene, vocal score, 226.
68 significant character has been conflated in anonymity with the character that we know and care about the least. The relationships we have formed with these respective characters over the course of the show lend this moment dramatic irony; if only these people in the crowd knew Mrs.
Maurrant as we do, if only they had heard her sing as we did, they would never identify the two in equivalent terms, nor reduce the leading female to such an impersonal description as “the woman who lived up there.” The chorus has pushed Mrs. Maurrant into the unvoiced category
Sankey occupies, denying the significance of her voice by associating her with a character who does not have one. Street Scene may have created a space for Mrs. Maurrant to express herself vocally through her aria and song, but the chorus fails to acknowledge the vocal hierarchy between her and Sankey. If there is any expectation that the audience will empathize with the response of the chorus in this scene, this failure of recognition threatens to undermine the way in which her aria envoiced Mrs. Maurrant earlier.
Perhaps if Sankey had been included in the musical world of the other characters, we would have found reason to trust him more, or at least feel as if we knew him. Although none of
Weill’s correspondence mentions his conception of Sankey’s character, one note in the composer’s personal copy of Rice’s play raises an intriguing notion. Most of Weill’s notes in the margins of the script indicate places where Weill imagined inserting a musical number, writing notes such as “aria” or “quintett” [sic] next to certain lines of dialogue. One of Weill’s longer notes is almost impossible to read due to how heavily Weill crossed it out, but it appears that he wrote: “Change character of Sankey (more romantic?)”138 Whatever the reason, Weill considered enhancing the character of Sankey, only to then decide against it. Perhaps he even considered writing a song for the character at some point, which could easily have increased Sankey’s
138 Weill’s annotated copy of Rice’s play, page 23. Series 20, S6, 196-. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
69 romantic characterization. But by the time drafting the music had begun, Sankey’s silence was fixed.
Weill’s choice to keep Sankey songless creates a strong dichotomy of vocal magnitude between him and Mrs. Maurrant. When the chorus conflates the two characters, it seems like a denial of Mrs. Maurrant’s voice that surpasses the interruptions of her dialogue or the lack of acknowledgement of her aria by her neighbors on the stoop. The chorus associates her with the character whose lack of a musical voice has rendered him an outsider, and the association threatens to strip her of her voice as well. But then Sam begins to sing about “love and death
[linking] their arms together,” and the melody he sings is the main theme from “Somehow I
Never Could Believe.” Although Weill alters the theme slightly, it is unmistakably a strong sonic marker of Mrs. Maurrant. In one of the most cathartic moments in the show, when Mrs.
Maurrant’s voice is so painfully absent, we hear her through the melody Sam sings to express his grief. Larry Stempel called the transformation of this theme “the musical coup of the opera.”139
The choice to reprise Mrs. Maurrant’s music counters the chorus’s failure to acknowledge her voice. Where in Rice’s play Mrs. Maurrant is carried off in a stretcher never to return, Weill let her be heard once more. Her voice rises by surrogate above the chorus that would associate her with Sankey’s songlessness, transfigured by Weill from a personal lament to a threnody not only for Mrs. Maurrant’s impending death, but for the greater hope of earthly fulfillment for which she so longed: “The summer’s bright in warm and golden weather / and all the children in the streets laugh as they run. / But love and death have gone away together / To find their morning in the sun.”140
139 Stempel, “Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera,” 327n23. 140 Street Scene, vocal score, 236–239.
70 CHAPTER 4
TO WHOM DO WE LISTEN
For Rose Maurrant the act of simply walking down the street invites a snide comment or unwelcome suggestion. She tolerates quite a bit of harassment through the course of the show. In her first appearance Mr. Easter will not allow her to leave and go up to her apartment. Later that same evening Vincent Jones also physically blocks her path from entering the house, putting his arm around her and pressuring her to join him for a drive. While her admirers prevent her entering the house, her father expresses his displeasure that she remains outside of it. After spending much of the first act inquiring why she has stayed out so late, as well as criticizing her for doing so, the last words Frank utters in the first act are from his apartment window, telling his adult daughter she had better come inside and not make him call her again. Frank’s characteristic marcato quarter notes return briefly in the contrabass and timpani to underscore this line.
While the male characters preoccupy themselves with telling Rose what to do, the female characters are startlingly frank in their comments to her. The first words the inebriated Mae says to Rose upon seeing her is, “Hello Rose. How’s de milkman?”141 The question is obviously rhetorical and meant to upset Rose. Even sympathetic Shirley Kaplan, Sam’s sister, criticizes
Rose for being the pretty face that distracts her brother from his studies. Most disconcertingly, even though Rose tried to communicate her disinterest to both Mr. Easter and Vincent Jones,
Mrs. Jones (Vincent’s mother) observes Rose arousing their attention and says, “You seem to have plenty of admirers, Miss Maurrant. But I guess you come by it natural.”142 The constant
141 Street Scene, vocal score, 152. 142 Street Scene, vocal score, 152.
71 barrage of disparaging comments and subtle coercions is exhausting to listen to. More criticism
comes from her father:
MAURRANT: Who was that guy you were talkin’ to?
ROSE: That’s Mr. Easter. The manager of the office.
MAURRANT: You been out wit’ him?
ROSE: Well, you see, Pop, the office is closed tomorrow, on account of Mr. Gordon’s funeral. So I had to stay late to get out some letters and after that we went to dinner.
MAURRANT: This is a hell of a time to be getting’ home from dinner.
ROSE: Well, we danced afterwards.
MAURRANT: Oh you danced, huh? With a little neckin’ on the side, is that it?
ROSE: No it isn’t! And even if it were . . .
MAURRANT: It’s your business, is that it? Well, I’ll make it my business, see? Is this bird married? I t’ought so! They’re all alike, them guys! All after the one thing!143
He ends the conversation by declaring, “Well, just get this straight. No married man
ain’t gonna come nosin’ around my family, get me?”144 making clear the real source of his anxiety, his wife.
Everything Rose does elicits denunciations from her father, and her concern and sympathy for her mother cause her to be caught between her two parents, a position most clearly represented by the trio “There’ll Be Trouble.” The not yet fully articulated tension between Mr. and Mrs. Maurrant bubbles up at the beginning of the number, in which Mrs. Maurrant defends her night’s absence aiding in the delivery of the Buchanan baby, and Frank tells her she should be looking after her own home. Mrs. Maurrant and
143 Street Scene, vocal score, 132–34. 144 Street Scene, vocal score, 135.
72 Frank both sing in styles strongly reminiscent of their respective arias; she sings longer
lyrical lines, and he spits his out with sharp articulation. For several pages of music
Frank’s quasi-recitative line stands out against Mrs. Maurrant’s and Rose’s more
melodic lines. His words are blunt and demanding, and at this point our sympathies are
clearly aligned with the women he lambasts. But then Mrs. Maurrant lies. Just before a
key change marked Più mosso, where all three characters finally sing together, Frank
asks his wife (in spoken dialogue) why she is so keen to know when he will return from
his trip out of town, “In case somebody came calling, huh?” to which Mrs. Maurrant
sings in response, “No! It isn’t! It’s nothing of the kind!”145 She may not mean to deceive him intentionally, but the audience knows that something “of the kind” is certainly within the realm of possibility, and eventually does occur.
This moment captures the problems Mrs. Maurrant’s behavior creates for the audience’s sympathies toward her. Catherine Clément observes that an opera heroine is often a kind of foreigner:
You will see: their foreignness is not always geographical; it appears in a detail, a profession, an age no longer said to be womanly. But always, by some means or other, they cross over a rigorous invisible line that makes them unbearable; so they will have to be punished. They struggle for a long time, for several hours of music, an infinitely long time, although it is already late, to the supreme outcome where everyone knew they would have to end up.146
Rose may have done nothing to deserve the criticism directed at her, but her mother is not above
reproach. Mrs. Maurrant broke a moral covenant by venturing outside her marriage, and audience
members listening to her story in 1947 would have condemned her for it. But Street Scene has
made it clear over and over that we are meant to sympathize with Mrs. Maurrant, and part of this
145 Street Scene, vocal score, 200. 146 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, translated by Betsy Wing, with a foreword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 59.
73 stems from our negative feelings toward Frank. For most of the show both the text and music
offer a portrayal of Frank that is fairly limited in its dimensions. Most of his lines, both sung and
spoken, express displeasure and contempt for his family, his neighbors, and the country at large.
His sour mood never changes, and we learn little else about him besides that he works in a
theater.
In the souvenir program for the original 1947 production of Street Scene a photograph of
Kurt Weill fills the third page. Weill gazes pensively off to his left, posed with his pencil gently resting on a page from an autograph score lying on the desk in front of him.147 The score in the photo is the first page of Frank Maurrant’s aria, and although the photo was staged (Weill holds a pencil and the score was written in ink), it seems a fitting portrait, because the archival materials for Street Scene indicate that Weill struggled to portray Frank’s character. Compared to the pencil sketches of Mrs. Maurrant’s aria, the sketch of Frank’s aria reveals more trial and error.
Whole pages are crossed out, and Weill sketched some sections multiple times. Several lyrics are different from the final version. Lines such as “My family will do what I say” and “Stop your woman from being neglectful. Make your kids act more respectful” did not make it into the final copy of the aria, and Weill sketched several different settings for the line “I’m the one who wears the pants,” which ultimately was also cut.148 Other lyrics that were eventually changed echo the sentiments Frank expresses in his argument with Abraham Kaplan: “No yellow pacifism fillin’ my boy’s head with rot. I’m for using a length o’ rope on any hyphenated dope that don’t respect
147 Street Scene Souvenir Program, Weill-Lenya Research Center, Program collection. The score in the photo is from the holograph vocal score, Act I. MSS 30, Box 31, Folder 435, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 148 Street Scene (Sketches). MSS 30, Box 31, Folder 433–434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
74 the laws America’s got.”149 It appears that Weill even considered ending the aria with Frank declaring that some members of the population should “go back where they came from.”150 The lyrics about Frank’s sense of control and insecurity concerning his family are consistent with the lyrics in the published aria, but the nationalist lines emphasize his more xenophobic side. It is not difficult to imagine why Weill struggled with the musical characterization of a man whose emotional limitations make him the narrative’s antagonist but who also reckons with the understandably toxic situation of discovering his wife’s infidelity. The nuances of Frank’s struggle did not, however, emerge in the final version of his aria.
In Weill’s copy of Rice’s play he penciled in a note, “Song about the theater?” next to a line of dialogue where Frank says, “I’ll say I’ve been workin’. Dress-rehearsin’ since twelve o’clock, with lights – in this weather. An’ tomorra I gotta go to Stamford, for the try-out.”151 One wonders what a song by Frank Maurrant on the topic of the theater would have sounded like.
Would it have further entrenched his discontented characterization through an indictment of the theater world? Would the song have been a mouthpiece for Weill’s own laudatory thoughts on the theater? In any case, to hear Frank sing about his theater employment would have added a dimension to his character that never materialized in the final version of the show. Following the dialogue that Weill incorporated in the trio “There’ll Be Trouble,” Mrs. Maurrant has left, and
Rose asks her father if he might consider moving out of the apartment and getting a little house in Queens. Rose even offers to help finance such a place, but her father brushes her off, saying,
“This place suits me all right.” Weill wrote the words “duett [sic]” and “song??” next to this
149 Street Scene (Sketches). MSS 30, Box 31, Folder 433–434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 150 Street Scene (Sketches). MSS 30, Box 31, Folder 433–434, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 151 Weill’s annotated copy of Rice’s play, page 17. Series 20, S6, 196-. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
75 conversation, indicating that he considered writing a duet for Rose and her father.152 Weill considered many musical possibilities for Frank’s character, and each one would have affected how the audience felt about him, and by extension how the audience felt about the wife he drove to infidelity. In Jill Dolan’s impressions of the relationship between performance and audience, she observes,
Since it directs its address to a gender-specific spectator, most performance employs culturally determined gender codes that reinforce cultural conditioning. Performance usually addresses the male spectator as an active subject, and encourages him to identify with the male hero in the narrative. The same representations tend to objectify women performers and female spectators as passive, invisible, unspoken subjects.153
Although Frank is never presented as a “male hero,” any possibility of identifying with him is
obstructed by the lack of complexity in his characterization.
The expressive devices in Street Scene clearly direct our sympathies toward Mrs.
Maurrant, as evidenced by the centrality and magnitude of her aria. Even a simple description of her family in one of her very first lines, “My husband don’t care for music. But Rose is more like me – just crazy about it,”154 confirms where the sympathies of a music-loving audience should
lie. And yet audiences certainly would have appreciated Frank’s position, as well, because he has
fulfilled the basic expectations of the head of household by providing for his family. He argues
this in his own defense, when Rose asks him to be kinder to his wife: “Where’s she got any kick
coming’? Ain’t I always been a good husband? Ain’t I always looked after her?”155 Even though we are meant to sympathize with Mrs. Maurrant, we still recognize her role as the adulterer.
152 Weill’s annotated copy of Rice’s play, page 147. 153 Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, 2. 154 Street Scene, vocal score, 36. 155 Street Scene, vocal score, 193.
76 To an audience of Street Scene in the twenty-first century, Frank’s final remorse over killing his wife sounds much like the hollow apologies of perpetrators of domestic violence, always regretful in hindsight, always too little, too late. In “I Loved Her Too,” labeled as the beginning of the Finale, Frank rationalizes the killing of his wife. He “couldn’t stand to see nobody takin’ her away from [him], For [he] loved her,” and he “oughtn’t have done it.” He explains that he had been drinking and he “must have been crazy, [he] just went clean out of [his] head.” All the while he proclaims, “I loved her, too.”156 What are we to make of this side of
Frank we have never seen before? His first expression of any affection for his wife comes after her death, and yet the chorus echoes his words quickly and emphatically. He only sings the line
“I loved her, too” once before the chorus repeats it and then later adds, “He really loved her.”157
By contrast, Rose asserts a description of her mother, singing, “She was so gentle, always so good and sweet,”158 but the chorus never echoes this. After such a consistently limited portrayal of Frank throughout the show, this newly emotional character opens the possibility for us to reevaluate our opinion of him in his last moment onstage.
In his final words before he exits permanently, Frank says to Rose, “You’re a good girl!
You always was a good girl.”159 These words contradict everything he has previously said to his daughter about her behavior and his opinion of her. Prior to the murder Frank is constantly at odds with Rose, whether because of how he perceives her personally or because of her support of her mother. The trio “There’ll Be Trouble” demonstrates the degree of failure in their communication. In the only musical moment where the three principal Maurrant characters sing together, their polyphonic melodies with three different lines of text render the lyrics almost
156 Street Scene, vocal score, 253–61. 157 Street Scene, vocal score, 254. 158 Street Scene, vocal score, 253. 159 Street Scene, vocal score, 261.
77 indistinguishable (example 9). The music perfectly captures how the Maurrant family has failed to come together and will eventually rupture.
Following the end of this section Frank leaves, but after his exit his words resonate through Rose who is caught between her two parents and desperate for peace. She confronts her mother, saying (in spoken dialogue), “Well, what I was thinking was, if he [Mr. Sankey] didn’t
Example 9. There’ll Be Trouble, mm. 52–57.
78
Example 9 – continued
come around here so much, maybe. Do you see what I mean, Ma?”160 Rose has tried, to no avail, to persuade her father to be kinder, so now she attempts to resolve the problem by asking her mother to change her behavior instead. Upon hearing Rose take up the same criticism she has faced from her husband and neighbors, Mrs. Maurrant wonders if she would be better off dead.
Rose tries to console her mother but finds herself powerless. The scene ends with Rose singing a
161 line that rises to a pianissimo G5, “If there was only something I could do!”
To end such an emotionally turbulent scene with a statement of uncertainty from Rose illustrates the struggle between a feeling of indecision and a compulsion toward action that Rose negotiates throughout the show. We observe Rose’s agency undermined and questioned by external forces in characters such as Vincent, Mr. Easter, and Mrs. Jones, but Rose faces inner conflict in this regard, as well. Her line ending “There’ll Be Trouble” exemplifies her desire to take action but inability to do so. She demonstrates a flicker of the same internal conflict in
160 Street Scene, vocal score, 205. 161 Street Scene, vocal score, 206.
79 between the first instance of “What Good Would the Moon Be?” and her reprise of it after
arguing with her father. The first time she sings the number, she offers it as an alternative to the
lifestyle Mr. Easter has proposed to her. Once her father has chastised her for fraternizing with a
married man, she says in soliloquy, “You just wait and see, someday I will run off with someone.
Oh, what’s the use. Maybe I should say yes to Mr. Easter, and get out of this. Still, I don’t
know . . .”162, and then she reprises her solo. This second time it takes on a quality of defiance in
asserting her desire to escape her father’s control by finding someone to love her, but her doubt is
indicated by the line “I don’t know . . .” Even after joining Sam in pronouncing that they will go
away together in their Act II love duet, once the duet ends she immediately retracts the confident
language with which she has just sung. Sam begs her to promise they will go and soon, but Rose
backpedals in her response: “I just want to be sure that we’d be doing the right thing. Just give
me a little time to think, Sam.”163
Yet a few moments after she says this, something changes, and Rose asserts her agency.
Mr. Easter enters and he begins to leave with Rose for the funeral.
EASTER: We’ll pick up a cab at the corner.
ROSE: Why, I thought I’d walk. It’s not far.
EASTER: Much more comfortable taking a cab.
ROSE: I’d rather walk.
Easter acquiesces, and they do walk. Rose has resisted the advances of Easter and Vincent before, but never with such simple determination. This demonstration of agency anticipates
Rose’s ultimate action as an autonomous woman when she leaves Sam at the end of the show and walks away from his offer to take her from the apartment and spend his life with her. This
162 Street Scene, vocal score, 135. 163 Street Scene, vocal score, 219.
80 action puzzled the woman who best knew the character of Rose, Anne Jeffreys, who commented
on it in an interview:
PEGGY SHERRY (INTERVIEWER): It’s a beautiful role. She’s so independent, to be able to go away at the end.
ANNE JEFFREYS: I never could quite figure that one out. I wouldn’t have left him.
PEGGY SHERRY: Yeah, I would think that she would need him after all that had happened. She’d want to stay with him. But somehow she says, If my mother had possessed herself, if my father had been himself, this would never have happened, and I’ve gotta be myself. Does that seem sort of artificial to you?
ANNE JEFFREYS: It did strike a chord of “I wouldn’t have done that.” But that was my own personal feeling. Obviously Elmer Rice didn’t feel that way about that. You know, he wanted her to go away and leave . . . I felt so sorry leaving Sam. And leaving him in the tenement. But he should have gone away.164
Audiences surely shared Jeffreys’s surprise to see Rose walk out at the end of the show, because any other performance they would have attended on Broadway pursued the union of its romantic leads as the ultimate goal of its narrative, as Stacy Wolf has discussed. Christian Mendenhall has observed this same model so frequently that he argues that integrated musicals from 1943 to
1964 performed the ritual enactment of societal myths that both celebrated and helped to solidify the “American Dream” as a kind of secular dogma. Celebrations of societal myths by musicals
“healed post-war deviations from this truth and became a part of the seemingly monolithic integration of American society as it attempted to live out this truth.”165 Central to that truth is the mythology of “the Woman as Homemaker and the Man as Pioneer.”166
164 Anne Jeffreys, An Oral History Interview with Peggy Sherry for the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Weill-Lenya Research Center, Series 60, 21. 165 Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” 57. 166 Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” 57.
81 Rose’s exit in Street Scene avoids this model entirely, but her action is unexpected not only because it is so atypical of the genre but also because much of what has preceded the exit has led toward a conventional romantic union. “What Good Would the Moon Be?” fits a model heard in other contemporary musicals in which the ingénue imagines her hypothetical true love, a device that foreshadows the romance soon to materialize. Fiona exemplifies this in Alan Jay
Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Brigadoon (1947) when she sings “Waitin’ for My Dearie,” as does Sarah Brown in Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950) in her song “I’ll Know (When My
Love Comes Along).” In the last verse of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from Lerner and Loewe’s
My Fair Lady (1956), Eliza Doolittle includes a tender companion to care for her to her list of hypothetical “loverly” things, and Marian Paroo imagines her white knight in Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man. When Rose sings about someone to love her, this creates an assumption that she will find that someone before the show ends.
Street Scene leaves no ambiguity on this point; Sam is obviously Rose’s someone. The music consistently endorses their pairing, as when the orchestra plays one of the more recognizable motives from Sam and Rose’s Act I love duet to underscore their first kiss. Whereas
Mr. Easter forces a kiss on Rose, Sam asks her to kiss him, a gesture that would satisfy even the current expectations of consent in courtship as practiced by third-wave feminists. Not only is
Sam kinder and more compassionate than Easter, but he also clearly cares about Rose’s wishes.
Sam and Rose are thus established as the couple striving for a second-act union, which Street
Scene ultimately rejects. In their final duet, just before Rose reveals why she cannot stay with
Sam, she sings, “Oh Sam, it’s love that I want more than anything in the world,”167 a sentiment
consistent with the expectations that the genre of integrated musicals dictates for the romantic
167 Street Scene, vocal score, 267.
82 leading female. But for Street Scene’s ingénue this desire is not enough, and she tells Sam with
no hints of uncertainty,
But loving and belonging . . . they’re not the same. Look at my father, my poor mother, If she had belonged to herself, If he had belonged to himself, It never would have happened. And that’s why, even though my heart breaks, I can’t belong to you, Or have you belong to me.168
When she leaves, Rose demonstrates that there exists an alternative not only to the romantic
union that other musicals prescribe, but also that she intends to make her way in the world
independently without relying on Sam or Easter or anyone else to take her away from the
apartment.169 Beyond that, her future is uncertain. Mendenhall writes, “If the female lead fails to
enter into [the proper social role of homemaker,] either by will or circumstance, she is punished.
Virtually every hit musical from the post-war era uses this story of the working woman who
leaves her job to support the man with whom she has fallen in love.”170 We do not know if Rose
will be punished or not. All we know is she has ventured out on her own. As the show ends, Mrs.
Jones has the last judgmental word, predicting Rose will turn out “the same way as her
mother.”171
168 Street Scene, vocal score, 268. 169 Rose’s rejection of the expected romantic union is not the only subversion of gender norms in Street Scene. Aspects of Sam’s characterization feminize him, as when he tries to defend Rose against Vincent and lacks the physical strength. The audience’s final image of Sam derives from a description by Abraham Kaplan after Sam has run into the apartment: “Shoiley, what’s the matter with Sam again? He’s crying on the bed.” Street Scene, vocal score, 272. 170 Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” 59. 171 Street Scene, vocal score, 272.
83 As Stacy Wolf writes, “Whatever the subject, the Broadway musical venerates female performers and provides substantial roles for women.”172 This is especially true of Street Scene, because the show’s narrative derives first from its female protagonists rather than its male characters. For concerned spectators like Jill Dolan, lamenting the continuing trend of “too many plays, performances, and films that take white straight male experience and desire as their focus, barely nodding to women’s existence,”173 Street Scene should lie outside that canon.
Whatever Street Scene attempts in portraying its female characters as central characters deserving of our attention and subsequent reflection, that does not determine what each audience member hears and internalizes. Rose’s ultimately independent exit might constitute a triumph over the obstacles to her confidence and agency that have plagued her over the course of the show, but some reviewers saw Rose more through Mr. Easter’s eyes. The collection at the Weill-
Lenya Research Center includes a clipping in the folder of reviews on Street Scene, written by the prominent theater critic Douglas Watt, who was credited with helping promote the revival of
Porgy and Bess. The article is not a review of Street Scene but rather a description of a lunch interview he conducted with Anne Jeffreys. The article is titled “Girl in ‘Street Scene’ Has Scene of Own, An Audience of Men.” It opens with this sentence: “The men in the restaurant yesterday weren’t eating. Their eyes were playing tag. Anne Jeffreys was ‘it.’ Every inch of her.” After a breezy summary of Jeffreys’s describing her experience in the cast of Street Scene, Watt ends his article, “Out on the street, the early afternoon sun was as flattering to her as the lights inside had been. The revolving door did a big business as the men spun through. She walked on up the
172 Wolf, Changed for Good, 12. 173 Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, xxv.
84 street. They watched her walk. Baby, baby.”174 This is the most extreme example, but other critics were also quick to point out that Jeffreys’s portrayal of Rose was lovely or appealing, often before any mention of her singing or acting. Roger Bagar’s review argued that Jeffrey’s appearance was the most successful part of her performance: “Anne Jeffreys is agreeable to the eye, although not always to the ear.”175 Street Scene may offer a different ending for Rose’s
character from what audiences would have expected from Broadway musicals, but that does not
mean audiences necessarily found this the most compelling part of the performance. Some
obviously missed the significance of Rose’s strength in focusing on Jeffreys’s beauty, and
therefore although Rose’s character is not decorative or marginal, as Jill Dolan observes about
typical female characters, the effect of Street Scene’s divergent narrative may not have been so very different from other shows in the eyes of many viewers. The best Street Scene can offer is an opportunity to observe the leading ingénue on an alternative path to the models employed by most Broadway musicals.
174 Douglas Watt, “Girl in ‘Street Scene’ Has Scene of Own, An Audience of Men.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. 175 Robert Bagar, “‘Street Scene’ Real American Opera,” New York World-Telegram, 15 January 1947.
85 CHAPTER 5
VOICES HEARD
At a time when many people were concerned about a “woman problem,” Street Scene offered a performance that centered its narrative on women who did not fit the conventional model of womanhood. Weill belittled ostensibly upstanding female community members when he wrote the Gossip Trio for the stoop women and a macabre lullaby for the nursemaids. Conversely, for
Mrs. Maurrant he contextualized and expanded her story for his audience through significant and sympathetic musical expressions. The audience also had the opportunity to understand why she sought affection from Sankey, because her husband’s musical expressions depicted him as an angry man whose short temper and irascibility threatened to extinguish her gentle and optimistic spirit. Yet Street Scene also understands the rash actions of a cuckolded man, and Frank’s final musical appearance opens the possibility for the audience to sympathize with him as well as with the wife he has just slain. There are no easy answers to be found here – no uncomplicated heroes or villains. When Mrs. Maurrant invites Mr. Sankey into her apartment before the show’s violent climax, all she says to him is, “I got to talk to you.”176 In keeping with Rice’s play, the content of their conversation remains ambiguous. The audience must speculate whether she intended to end the affair, as Rose had urged, or continue the liaison that afternoon. If women at this time were expected to be, as Christian Mendenhall (referencing Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher
Stowe) has suggested, “the family member charged with the responsibility of the moral formation of the entire family, including the husband,”177 Mrs. Maurrant failed in this and
176 Street Scene, vocal score, 221. 177 Mendenhall, “American Musical Comedy as a Liminal Ritual of Woman as Homemaker,” 58.
86 therefore should not be regarded as the story’s heroine. And yet Street Scene allows her to be just
that.
Weill did not discuss at length how he viewed his female characters. The closest he came
to describing his treatment of the women in Street Scene comes from a radio interview he gave in
1949 with Boris Goldovsky: “ . . . looking back on many of my compositions, I find that I seem to have a very strong reaction in the awareness of the suffering of underprivileged people – of the oppressed, the persecuted.”178 Kim Kowalke suggests this quality is one of a few consistent
aspects of Weill’s career on two continents.179 Weill’s collaboration with Rice and Hughes led to the musical portrayal of two American women with a weight of suffering to share. The characters of Rose and Anna Maurrant thus had their voices elevated to a heightened form of expression, allowing them to be heard more acutely and with greater significance than just the spoken word could afford. Although the content of their lyrics may indicate uncertainty about their futures or their senses of self, the music empowers their voices in song.
But setting female voices to music does not guarantee a progressive portrayal of female vocality. The feminist reader elated to hear the female condition communicated so significantly in Street Scene must also recognize the ways in which the show denies its female voices and
removes its characters’ agency as much as it offers them a vocal space not available elsewhere.
The characters of Mrs. Maurrant’s neighbors consistently grant no value to her voice, whether
they interrupt her speech, ignore the content of her song, or associate her with a voiceless
character. Mrs. Maurrant’s voice may transcend her pitiable circumstances, but the character
178 Boris Goldovsky and Kurt Weill, et al., “Opera News on the Air (1949),” moderated by Boris Goldovsky, intermission feature during broadcast of Metropolitan Opera performance of Manon Lescaut, 10 December 1949. 179 Kim H. Kowalke, “‘I’m an American!’ Whitman, Weill, and Cultural Identity,” in Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood, ed. by Lawrence Kramer. (New York: Garland, 2000),125.
87 herself remains trapped. Sankey clearly represents an impermanent solution, and although we
hear Mrs. Maurrant’s music in the choral lament, the line has been transferred to Sam to sing one
of the show’s most cathartic moments. More conspicuously, she does not survive the show.
Catherine Clément laments the ambivalent position of women in opera. She acknowledges the
necessity of prima donnas in opera but explores what she believes is a fatal dilemma: opera needs
women, but women frequently do not survive operas. She reviews the stories of many tragic
operatic heroines, observing, “Opera is not forbidden to women. That is true. Women are its
jewels, you say, the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima donna, no opera. But the
role of a jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women
perpetually sing their eternal undoing.”180 She calls opera a “spectacle thought up to adore, and
also kill, the feminine character.”181 Using this description, Clément could have added Mrs.
Maurrant to the ranks of other doomed heroines: Violetta, Isolde, Mélisande, Mimì, Lucia,
Carmen, Lakmé, Norma, Desdemona, Cio-Cio-San; the list goes on. Clément’s distressing
conclusion is that music mediates the space between an audience and a violent death, allowing us
to view women singing their own demise and still leave the theater invigorated:
Women again. In opera, the forgetting of words, the forgetting of women, have the same deep roots. Rereading the texts, more than in listening at the mercy of an adored voice, I found to my fear and horror, words that killed, words that told every time of women’s undoing. It is perfectly obvious, you are vaguely listening to the story of a very unfortunate woman. But, so, they are love stories, and then, is that not women’s fate? Oh voices, sublime voices, high, clear voices, how you make one forget the words you sing! How beautiful is suffering’s melody, how good it feels to suffer an agreeable little sorrow, scratching the surface of the soul to give it depth, without really hurting it! I am not forgetting that is a prima donna who sings, and that she is playing a role, but I am too well-acquainted with the powers of spectacle not to watch fiercely with all my eyes and listen with all my
180 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 181 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 6.
88 ears to the stories repeated a thousand times by men who pursue women and reduce them to nothing.182
For the tragic works on which Clément focuses, her concerns are valid enough, and the argument could be made that what Street Scene accomplishes in exalting its women’s voices serves them poorly if they do not survive it.183 But to emphasize this concern further would be to overlook what Street Scene does accomplish in creating such significant roles for the female voice.
Carolyn Abbate offers another perspective. Drawing from Paul Robinson, she argues,
“Clément chooses to neglect the locus of women’s operatic triumph, even though it is exemplified in the very work she discusses, in the overwhelming sound of female operatic voices and the musical gestures that enfold those voices into a whole. This is a realm beyond narrative plot, in which women exist as sonority and sheer physical volume, asserting themselves outside spectacle and escaping murderous fates.”184 Street Scene epitomizes this triumph. Mrs. Maurrant does die, but she also sings the longest aria of any character; in each production I have seen, the actress portraying her takes the last bow; and when there was a possibility of taking Street Scene
182 Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 22. 183 Interestingly, in a radio interview moderated by Boris Goldovsky with Kurt Weill and mezzo- soprano Irene Jordan, Jordan and Goldovsky comment on how Puccini gave his tragic heroines such great music: “JORDAN: You know, Puccini seems to have had an especially deep understanding of his heroines. Most of the stories he chose revolve about a woman as the central character. And he certainly gave some of his loveliest music to the soprano! GOLDOVSKY: Yes, if you think of the musical highlights of the Butterfly score, you almost invariably settle on the passages that are associated with the heroine . . . And speaking of Butterfly's beautiful music, we must not forget her death scene in the last act. JORDAN: For all her unhappiness, the lady does get the best of it musically!” Weill does not comment on this topic but rather moves the conversation on to a discussion of Puccini’s modern compositional techniques and innovations. Boris Goldovsky and Kurt Weill, et al. “Opera News on the Air (1947),” moderated by Boris Goldovsky, transcription of intermission feature during broadcast of Metropolitan Opera performance of Madame Butterfly, 8 February 1947. The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. 184 Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; Or, the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 254.
89 on a road tour, the proposed budget listed a $500 salary for the actress singing Mrs. Maurrant, which is $150 more than the next highest valued role, including the fee set aside for the conductor.185 Put simply, despite the ensemble nature of the show, Street Scene is Mrs.
Maurrant’s story.
I view Street Scene situated in a historical time on the verge of change in the way women were conceptualized and discussed. The conflicting arguments surrounding the “woman problem” would soon be confronted directly by second-wave feminists, ushered in by authors such as Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir. The issues I have addressed in Street Scene are the same issues to which Friedan and Beauvoir responded. Street Scene reflects a social need that feminist literature would soon begin to meet. I have focused on the ways that Street Scene explores through musical manifestations “the problem that has no name,” famously exposed by
Friedan, such as Mrs. Maurrant’s discontent as wife and homemaker in her aria.186 I find resonances throughout Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Street Scene, as well. I hear Mrs.
Maurrant reflecting on a domestic life that did not meet her expectations, when Beauvoir writes,
But to find a home in oneself, one must first have realized oneself in works or acts. Man has only a middling interest in his domestic interior because he has access to the entire universe and because he can affirm himself in his projects. Woman, instead, is locked into the conjugal community: she has to change this prison into a kingdom.187
Beauvoir also warns against dissatisfied women pinning all their hopes on their children:
Even in cases where the child is a treasure within a happy or at least balanced life, he cannot be the full extent of his mother’s horizons . . . she can do no more than create a situation that solely the child’s freedom can transcend; when she
185 “‘Street Scene’ road salary budget,” 22 July 1947. T-MSS 1963-001 Box 1 Folder 23 of the Lina Abarbanell Papers, The Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 186 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 15. 187 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 470.
90 invests in his future, it is again by proxy that she transcends herself through the universe and time; that is, once again she dooms herself to dependency.188
Yet Beauvoir understands why women so often do this, because they want to feel needed, just as
Mrs. Maurrant does when she sings “A Boy Like You.” Finally, Rose’s realization that Sam’s conception of loving and belonging could destroy them both can be drawn right from Beauvoir’s pages:
But there are few crimes that bring worse punishment than this generous mistake: to put one’s self entirely in another’s hands. Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world. . . . But in most cases the woman knows herself only as other: her for- others merges with her very being; love is not for her an intermediary between self and self, because she does not find herself in her subjective existence; she remains engulfed in this loving woman that man has not only revealed but also created; her salvation depends on this despotic freedom that formed her and can destroy her in an instant. She spends her life trembling in fear of the one who holds her destiny in his hands without completely realizing it and without completely wanting it; she is in danger in an other, an anguished and powerless witness of her own destiny.189
Before either Friedan’s or Beauvoir’s seminal feminist text was published, Street Scene brought women’s issues before an audience on Broadway, an audience that could just have easily decided to attend Oklahoma! a mere ten blocks away at the St. James Theatre and heard a very different portrayal of womanhood.
Kurt Weill believed composers should be able to reach all audiences with their music and that opera should have the same accessibility as any other form of theater.190 The ambiguity of
188 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 568. 189 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 706–07. 190 “I never could see any reason why the ‘educated’ (not to say ‘serious’) composer should not be able to reach all available markets with his music, and I have always believed that opera should be a part of the living theatre of our time.” Kurt Weill, “Broadway and the Musical Theatre,” The Composer’s News-Record, no. 2 (May 1947): 1. A transcription is available on the
91 Street Scene’s genre, which has preoccupied Weill scholars for so long, resulted in the show’s drawing a different audience than would have attended a traditional opera. Theater critic Harold
Clurman commented on how Street Scene’s accessibility affected the audience it attracted:
Perhaps the most important aspect of Street Scene is that while it is very nearly an opera – in order not to scare the customers the producers called it a dramatic musical – it succeeds in functioning for its audience as a good show. This is important because we have as yet no tradition in our theatre which makes it easy for our audiences to accept a combination of serious drama and song. . . . What interested me most about Street Scene was the nature of the audience it attracts. It is not the large hotel and nightclub audience that frequents the hit musical comedies, but a lower middle class of small businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers – the “white collar” clientele. 191
For this audience Street Scene offered a depiction of women that contemporary musicals did not,
thereby redressing the way women were musically represented in this time period and
foreshadowing the next period of social history. Although the mostly impoverished characters in
Street Scene occupy a lower social class than the audience members hearing their stories, a line
by one of the infelicitous nursemaids alludes to the universality of the female condition. After
being mocked by the policeman monitoring the apartment-turned-crime-scene, the nursemaid
retorts, “Clarice darling would throw a duck-fit, if she knew I brought her precious Dumplings to
a neighborhood like this.”192 In the Lullaby immediately prior, the two nursemaids sang about
the parents of the children in their care, describing a home of horrific physical, verbal, and
emotional violence occupied by a drunk father and a cheating mother.193 This brief moment
Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/broadway-and-the-musical- theatre. 191 Harold Clurman, The Collected Works of Harold Clurman: Six Decades of Commentary on Theatre, Dance, Music, Film, Arts, and Letters (New York: Applause Books, 1994), 102–103. 192 Street Scene, vocal score, 247. 193 “Hush, baby, hush. / Your daddy is a lush. / Shut your eyelids tight. / He’s plastered ev’ry night. / No, darling, no. Your mummy has a beau. / Snooze, little man! She cheats whenev’r she can. / Your parents are a loving pair. / He smacks her face. / She pulls his hair. / Their shrieks and curses fill the air. / She smashes plates, and he tears her clothes; / She lands a left right on his
92 clearly recognizes that Mrs. Maurrant’s misfortunes transcend class and can happen to any
woman, regardless of the neighborhood in which she lives.
The alternative Street Scene offers to the Maurrant family fate is the same as what
Beauvoir hopes for future women. Rose reflects on her parents’ relationship, singing, “Look at my father, my poor mother. / If she had belonged to herself, / If he had belonged to himself, / It never would have happened.”194 Beauvoir expresses a similar sentiment looking toward the
future when she writes, “The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in strength and
not in her weakness, not to escape from herself but to find herself, not out of resignation but to
affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger.”195
A crucial necessity for women belonging to themselves is to feel strength in their voices, from
feeling comfortable enough to publicly express their thoughts, to expecting that those who hear
them will acknowledge their expression. The first chapter of Friedan’s book ends with the
following statement: “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want
something more than my husband and my children and my home.’”196
This thesis has focused on the ways Street Scene makes ignoring the female voice
impossible. Street Scene gave its women a voice through music and its audiences a chance to
hear them better and, hopefully, to understand them. As Langston Hughes wrote, commenting on
how Weill’s music reflected the way he understood all human beings, “Good songs are but the
dreams, the hopes, and the inner cries deep in the souls of all peoples of the world.”197 Street
nose, / Until there’s blood all over his mug! / Sleep, lady bug; / Sleep, sweet and snug; / Sleep, my lady bug-bug.” Street Scene, vocal score, 246–47. 194 Street Scene, vocal score, 268. 195 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 708. 196 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 32. 197 Hughes, “My Collaborator: Kurt Weill,” 7.
93 Scene demonstrates what strength the inner cry of women takes on through dramatized music and that we would do well to listen to it.
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Street Scene: A Sourcebook. New York: Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, 1996.
“Street Scene NYCO 1979 complete.” From a Live From Lincoln Center performance televised by PBS on 27 October 1979. YouTube video, 2:55:45. Posted by “tenore23,” 26 January 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlFDe6mZjDM.
100 Taylor, Ronald. Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
“This is ‘Street Scene’ – 1947.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Thornhill, William. “Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1990.
Watt, Douglas. “Girl in ‘Street Scene’ Has Scene of Own, An Audience of Men.” Photocopy of clipping from unknown newspaper, Series 50, Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Weill Correspondence. Series 40. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Weill, Kurt. “Broadway and the Musical Theatre.” The Composer’s News-Record, no. 2 (May 1947): 1. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/broadway-and-the-musical-theatre.
Weill, Kurt. “Broadway Opera: Our Composers’ Hope for the Future.” Musical Digest 29, no. 4 (December 1946): 16, 42. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/broadway-opera-our-composers-hope-for-the-future.
Weill, Kurt. “The Future of Opera in America,” Modern Music 14, no. 4 (May–June 1937): 183– 88. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/grants-a-prizes/33-foundation/kwp/331-the-future-of-opera-in- america.
Weill, Kurt. “I’m an American! Interview with Kurt Weill.” Radio program broadcast 9 March 1941 on NBC Blue Network. A transcription is available on the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music website: http://www.kwf.org/kurt-weill/for-further-reading/33- foundation/kwp/354-im-an-american.
Weill, Kurt. “Kurt Weill on behalf of his ‘American opera’.” Kurt Weill Newsletter 13, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 10–11.
Weill, Kurt. Letter to Street Scene cast. 9 January 1947. MSS 30, Box 47, Folder 14, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
Weill, Kurt. Liner notes for Street Scene, original cast recording, Columbia Masterworks set M- MM-683 (released 1947).
Weill, Kurt. “Notes on Street Scene.” 21 December 1946. MSS 30, Box 68, Folder 8, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University.
Weill, Kurt. “Score for a Play.” New York Times, 5 January 1947: X3.
101 Weill, Kurt. Street Scene (Excerpts). Original cast, conducted by Maurice Abravanel. Columbia Masterworks set M-MM-683, released 1947, 78 rpm. Reproduced as a compact disc, CBS MK 44668. Also available from streaming services Spotify and Naxos Music Library.
Weill, Kurt. Street Scene, Florida State Opera. Conducted by Douglas Fisher with Alicia Jayourba, André Dewan Peele, Kyaunnee Richardson, Andy Acosta, et al. Recorded 27 March 2014, DVD.
Weill, Kurt, Elmer Rice, and Langston Hughes. Street Scene: An American Opera Based on Elmer Rice’s Play. Piano-vocal score ed. by William Tarrasch. New York: Chappell, 1948.
Weill, Kurt and Langston Hughes. Unsung Weill: 22 Songs Cut From Broadway Shows and Hollywood Films, ed. by Elmar Juchem, 9–12. New York: European American Music Corporation, 2002.
Weill, Kurt and Lotte Lenya. Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Trans. and ed. by Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Weill Papers. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Weill Writings and Interviews. Series 31. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Weill’s Works – Performing Materials. Series 16. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York.
Wolf, Stacy Ellen. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
102 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
McKenna Milici is a graduate student in historical musicology at Florida State University. She received a Curtis Mayes Research Fellowship in 2014 to conduct the research for this thesis, and she is also the recipient of an Orpheus Fund Scholarship, a Tallahassee Music Guild Scholarship, and a graduate assistantship in musicology. In 2015 she was elected to the National Music Honor
Society Pi Kappa Lambda and the National Honor Society Phi Kappa Phi. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century opera and music theater, musical hermeneutics, reception histories, and feminist criticism of music. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of
Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, where she graduated first in her class with a Bachelor of
Arts in Music with Honors, summa cum laude.
Ms. Milici is also pursuing a master’s degree in vocal performance at FSU under the tutelage of Shirley Close. An experienced performer, Ms. Milici has sung the roles of Mistress
Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Amalia in She Loves Me, Anne Egerman in A Little Night
Music, and Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! She has appeared as the soprano soloist in performances of Fauré’s Requiem, Bach’s Magnificat, and Vaughan-Williams’s Benedicite. She has also sung in concert performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas as Belinda and Carissimi’s Jephte as Filia.
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