And the Music Was With Him: Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

Other, More Important, Things

I recalled, very early one morning, Father's last words to me, now over twenty years ago: "I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important, things.” 

I wasn’t surprised the day in 2001 that a New Berlin police officer called to tell me that “we found your dad several days ago. He had been … um … deceased for a couple of days and … there was no indication of next of kin. So, um … we had to track you down … over the Internet. Nice website, by the way.” Father’s decomposing body had lain for several days before being discovered by a cop face down in his own dried vomit on the floor of the den in our Big Cedar House. The immediate cause was “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” but, when I called the coroner for an explanation, he explained, without emotion, “Well, he was clearly an untreated diabetic, and the liver was cirrhotic, so there’s that.”

He had been failing for some time. I imagine that, since he was only slowing down, Father didn't see the point in paying a doctor to tell him to change his life. Father’s emotions were volcanic. His thirst for expressions of love was impossible to slake. No gesture was enough, so his feelings were always hurt. During our conversation, immediately after Mother’s death, he tried to explain himself to me by quoting the toast from Citizen Kane: “A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows—his own.”

My brothers had promised their mother to keep trying to communicate with him, but it was naïve of her to expect them to just let go of the damage that a father can do to his son. Shortly after her death, each had an encounter with him that forced them to decide whether to carry on, or to make a new start, with him by telling him that he was forgiven—not that he particularly desired forgiveness, or felt that he deserved it, or understood the suffering and shame he’d inflicted on them with his actions, judgments, and words. The “unveiled secrets of their father,” neither ever spoke to him again.

Partly because I rarely fought him, he never attacked me the way that he did them, so I remained—to a consciously calibrated degree—sensitive to the wounded love that motivated his anger. I never felt the need for an apology from him, or to offer him forgiveness. I accepted that he loved me, had done the best that he could, and that he was sick. To the end, being right remained more important to him than being happy. He taught me how to work; but is wife taught me how to love working.  In the end, I kept in touch with him because I promised her that I would, and because not doing so would have made me feel guilty, and I didn’t have what it took to accept that burden. We spoke on the phone. To avoid emotional manipulation, I’d hang up when he turned ugly. Conversations could be short.

It was with a weird sort of relief that my brother and I flew to Milwaukee to perform together the mundane tasks sons do for their dead fathers—burying him, gathering up whatever was worth saving in the house and readying it for sale. In the garage sat the last in a long line of used cars and a lot of familiar, rusting gardening equipment. When we managed to get into the house, it was like a visit with Dickens’ Miss Havisham. Enormous, ropy, decade-old webs hung from the soaring ceiling of the front room, in which buckets sat everywhere on sheets of plastic to catch the rain which had been working its way through the roof for years and in which cheap, remaindered furniture added after Mother's death cluttered the once elegant space. The kitchen whose floor we had scrubbed in our pajamas in the small hours as boys hadn't been used for anything except boiling noodles for what seemed a very long time. The pantry was empty. He had obviously been bathing in the sink. Between the kitchen and the library was an enormous, half-filled garbage can, which looked as though it had been placed there for our use in cleaning up after his demise. The third floor was deserted, the master bedroom with the huge bed at the foot of which Mother died was half-made, the sheet half-pulled off. It looked (and felt) like a crime scene. Once she had banished him, sometime in my early teens, he had never again slept there; he slept on a couch in the den, where he had clearly been living for years….

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Father had converted what had been my bedroom into a sort of storage room for teddy bears of various shapes and sizes, which he at some point had taken to giving out to strangers and acquaintances alike. There were dozens of them. The den, where he collapsed and died, was like the lair of some wounded animal. Stinking slightly of sweat, it was filled with broken electronic equipment, an empty Cutty Sark bottle on its side, and a single box filled with insurance papers. On a table sat a box containing what little he had elected to save of his and our family's history—letters, newspaper clippings, birth certificates, and a handful of faded photographs. He returned all my letters to me, tucked carefully back into the envelopes in which they had been sent. Like my other brother a few years before, who emptied his Springfield hotel room before taking a taxi to the hospital one last time, Father was determined to leave no Rosebuds sitting around for others to pick over. Nevertheless, it took us several days to cart away the garbage and the alarming number of broken vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens he had somehow accumulated, to knock the place into the barest shape before handing it over to a realtor who would then sell it after our departure “as is.”

Except for the books that he and Mother had acquired together in college, Father had thrown out or given away all his books and papers. How sad those books that remained looked, propped at crazy angles, cigarette-smoke-stained, moldy, some lolling open over the lip of the shelf like tongues. I fished a copy of Leaves of Grass from the shelf and paged through it. Their marginalia, the handwriting so personal, so recognizable, was a testament to the seriousness with which they pursued their dialogue with favorite poets. It was possible to read their hearts and minds flowering for the first time. He wrote in the margin on one side of a page of Keats’ On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, “Man cannot possess perpetual happiness; only momentary glimpses in intimation of beauty.” On the other side of the page, she answered, “Note how he makes nouns of adjectives & vice versa.” Further down the page, he wrote, “Every poet is contributing to a great poem; each poet is holding ground in his way—,” to which she replied, with two brisk down-strokes of her pen beside Keats’ lines, “Of course, this is the function of a poet’s role.” Really, it’s a love duet they’re singing, with Keats’ observations about Homer as the subtext. Beautiful. Keats had always been Father’s solace, and John Milton; Mother loved Browning, and Baudelaire. A volume of Baudelaire, with Mother’s corrections to the French translation interlaced with the published text, had a bookplate that read, “This book is the property of Gwen Johnson.” They continued to sing together after marrying: Father picked up an anthology of British and American poetry during the 60s the bookplate of which read, “Ex Libris Gwen and Earl Hagen—darling I knew you had to have this—Earl.” A copy of Dylan Thomas’ collected poems was inscribed by me, aged 13 in blue ballpoint pen, “For Mama—a gift from your children, Christmas, 1974.” I took all the volumes that remained. They now rest safely between their siblings on the shelves in the Big Victorian House, where they will snuggle safely for the rest of my life, thereafter to be handed on to my sons for safekeeping, my parents’ marginalia and those added by me read by them as though they were eavesdropping on our ghostly songs.

Mother's recipe box I rescued from the top shelf in the kitchen pantry and gave to my brother, who handed it down to his son. Finally, I caught the kitten; my brother's wife adopted it. We dealt with the realtor, the funeral home, and the local newspaper. Writing the obituary, I couldn’t remember the names of his siblings, or any facts about his life…. We had the remains cremated. There was the melancholy triage of Executorship. I arranged a memorial, to which neither of us went. Sometime later, a well-meaning relative sent a videotape of the service on which numerous familiar-looking people I have never met shared sad, kindly reminiscences of a man I never knew. When I told Father that “all we ever wanted was for you to be happy with us,” his last words to me, in January 2001, a few weeks before he died, were, “I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important, things.” 

This essay appeared in its original form in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.

Six Beats for Blitzstein

Marc Blitzstein, American composer (1905-1964)

Marc Blitzstein’s music is not exactly an obsession of mine, but I do find the musical DNA of which it is composed indispensable. Strands of that DNA — strict adherence to economy of means, a passion for combining words and music, the belief that music can promote social justice, an abhorrence of pretension — are woven contrapuntally, inextricably, into the music that I compose, and have been, nearly from the start. Here are six Blitzstein beats.

One

Bltzstein’s music is powered by the ironic marriage of opposites. A fierce advocate of the poor and disenfranchised, he was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to affluent parents. Determined to write music popular with Regular Joes, he studied composition and piano at the Curtis Institute. Then he went on to Berlin to study with Arnold Schoenberg and to Paris where he worked with Nadia Boulanger. He began as a modernist, but he turned populist in the 1930s, shortly before he (an openly gay communist) married novelist Eva Goldbeck. Three Portuguese sailors in Martinique beat him to death in 1964 after a sexual encounter. In 1937, he entered Broadway history when the Works Progress Administration shut down The Cradle Will Rock — an opera presented as a musical. As the story goes, director Orson Welles and producer John Houseman walked the musicians, cast and audience from the Maxine Elliott Theater to the nearby Venice Theater, where — in order to evade union restrictions — they performed the piece from the audience, with Blitzstein (not a union member) accompanying from an upright piano onstage.

To some, Blitzstein’s signature gambit of destabilizing tonality by throwing a suspended fourth in the bass was crude. But, like a beat cop’s billy club to the ribs, it got things moving. Minus Blitzstein’s example and inspiration, Leonard Bernstein might have been a very different, possibly lesser, composer.

Two

One rainy November 1980 day Karlos Moser, then head of the opera program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I was an undergraduate music major, and I were working through some songs that I had contributed to a revue he was concocting. My introduction to Marc’s music had come when Karlos cast my older brother Kevin as Ben Hubbard in his production of Blitzstein’s Regina during the late 70s. Karlos mentioned in passing that the State Historical Society possessed the Blitzstein papers. Thrilled, I had sprinted across the street to the archives, filled out a request to see them, and was astonished to be granted immediate access. Within thirty minutes, I held in my hands a Photostat of the manuscript of Blitzstein’s fair copy of the first page of Cradle. I was 17.

Odd it was, only a year later, to find myself a student of Ned Rorem’s at the Curtis Institute, composing and practicing on the same pianos Marc once did, passing his graduation portrait (along with everyone else’s — Leonard Bernstein, Ralph Berkowitz, Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss, and on and on) on my way each week to my piano lesson. Odder yet to have landed there in part because of a letter from his friend Bernstein to my mother, telling her I was “the real thing,” and encouraging her to send me to Juilliard (that’s another story) to study with another of Marc’s close friends, David Diamond.

John Houseman tells the story of opening night of The Cradle Will Rock.

Three

John Houseman’s production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock at the Fairbanks opened on 30 July 1983. I was there, seated in the first row. I still weighed about 160, sported a Blitzstein-esque moustache, and was still a student at Curtis. Before the performance, Houseman took the stage to tell the story of the night the show opened — Blitzstein at the piano, Orson Welles dashing around the theater, playing multiple characters, everyone afire with the moment. Ordinarily too abashed to importune, I threw myself at Houseman afterwards. “You captured lightning in a bottle, didn’t you?” I enthused. “Yes, my boy,” he drawled in his Professor Kingsfield voice, “I’m acutely aware of that.” I laughed. He was disarmed. “You look like Blitzstein,” he remarked. I flushed with pleasure. He frowned. “He ended badly.” I waited. Beat. “Yes, I know,” I said, “I’m a composer.” He thrust his chin upwards theatrically as though searching for answers among the klieg lights: “Dear God,” he said, exploding the G, extending the O into a melisma, and plucking the final D like a pizzicato. “What does one do with a composer?” I laughed again, shook his hand vigorously, and thanked him for his time. “Not at all,” he said. “Good luck.” He stared at me, hard, for three long beats. “You’ll need it.”

Four

Summer 1985. Saranac, Serge Koussevitzky’s home overlooking the Berkshires across the highway from the Tanglewood grounds. Late one evening, after hearing me improvise at the piano in Marc’s style and a discussion about Blitzstein’s music, Bernstein asked me to have a go at completing Sacco and Vanzetti, the unfinished opera for the Met found in the trunk of Marc’s car after he died. I told him I’d love to have a try, but couldn’t afford to do it for no fee. A few days later, at Bernstein’s behest, Jacob Druckman approached me on the back patio and put a little money on the table for the project on behalf of the New York Philharmonic, for whom he was then serving as composer in residence.

My instinct was that, as I did when offered by Ellis Freedman and Sylvia Goldstein a job as Aaron Copland’s final amanuensis, I should refuse it. I told Druckman that I felt that if I wanted to establish myself as a composer, then I needed to be known for my own music, not for what I had done for others’. He said that I had a point, and was impressed enough by the professionalism with which I handled the situation to speak to his wife Muriel about a ballet commission.

Having my hands on Blitzstein’s sketches was just too inviting an invitation to refuse. After spending a few days with them, I concluded that the most responsible thing to do was to leave the thing alone-they were just too fragmentary, too raw. The finished score would require the creation of too much original material to make it coherent. That May, Eric Gordon helped me to find the manuscript of Marc’s Piano Sonata, which hadn’t been performed publicly since the 20s so that I could program it on the concert series I was putting on in Philadelphia and New York.

Five

During spring 1990, I was fortunate enough to work on my first major opera Shining Brow with Bernstein. As Bernstein once did for Blitzstein with Trouble in Tahiti,I did for Lenny: I would play and sing the scene from Brow that I was working on. He’d amble over to the bench, push me to the side, and start playing off of my manuscript, squinting, sort of wheeze-singing as he briskly double-checked parts he wanted to speak to.

“Okay, baby,” he’d begin. “Try this.” He would “put over” a few bars of what I had written and veer off in a new direction, improvising an entirely different line reading. Then he’d stop, suck on his plastic cigarette holder, quickly page to a different part of the sketch, find something, and say, “Or you could have used this from before, like this.” He’d play a few bars.

“No, that wouldn’t work,” he’d think out loud. I’d improvise a different line reading. “No, no, you can’t do that!” he would laugh, “Marc did that in No for an Answer! Do you know that one?” He’d noodle a few bars. “No, that was Tender Land. Ugh. God.” (Laughter.)

During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the “New York, New York” rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia,” “Nice lift,” he said, “very Straussian. But you follow it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, but you should come up with something else there.”

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s 'Maria'. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. “But he stole it from Aaron!” (Generous, warm laughter.)

It still felt, a few years later, at the family’s Dakota apartment (the day Brow received its workshop run-through after Bernstein’s death), as though he slouched in the low chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Daron and David Diamond in the music room at Yaddo a few days before Diamond's death in June 2005. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

Six

“Before I forget, I want to tell you that Marc used to like to sit over there,” said David Diamond, squeezing my hand and pointing at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We were sitting on one of the pews in the Yaddo Music Room. Life-sized full body portraits of the Trask children loomed over us like gravestones. The June 2005 air was lively. Late afternoon light streamed through the leaded windows.

Elaina Richardson had asked me to curate a recital of music by composers who had worked at Yaddo. Michael Boriskin and his Music from Copland House players performed. I wanted to honor David, with whom I had studied, so I programmed his early Flute Quartet. I also suggested that he be invited and, to everyone’s astonishment, he agreed to come. He told me that he had wanted to visit Yaddo once more. I looked at David: his impeccably tailored gray serge sit hung loosely over his diminished frame. His blue shirt’s collar was crisp. There was a large New Zealand-shaped liver spot on his scalp over his right eye. What remained of his hair was colorless. His skin was papery and luminous. His rheumy eyes brimmed with tears. A few days later, on 13 June, he died.

That day, however, David’s observation was piercingly clear: “Marc cared,” he whispered urgently. “When he composed Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny’s Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?” (When David reminisced, the facts could sometimes be sketchy, but the point was always clear.)

In May 2007, I sat before the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Tower studio, the one at which Marc had written Regina, writing with trepidation the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch of my breakthrough opera about flight and rebirth. A bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, “You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will be fine. The door is open. Fly through it.” As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door to safety in the surrounding forest.

It was the spirit of Yaddo, yes; but it was also the spirit of Blitzstein.

Coda

Here is an aria from my Filmopera Orson Rehearsed in which Orson Welles recalls the night that Blitzstein performed The Cradle Will Rock from the piano at the Fairbanks Theater. The role of Welles is sung by Robert Frankenberry. Roger Zahab conducts the Fifth House Ensemble in a production I directed at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in 2019 and released in March 2021 on the Naxos label. Discover more here.

 This essay was originally published in the Huffington Post under the title "Obsessed: Marc Blitzstein" on 14 May 2012. Click here to read it there.