Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2015 If She Had Belonged to Herself: Female Vocality in Kurt Weill's Street Scene McKenna Tessa Milici Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] 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