Less Than Ideal: Politics, Personal Agendas and Economics in the Making of Street Scene

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Notes

¹ Lizt to Rice, February 11, 1947. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. Original in Playwrights’ Producing Company Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

² Rice to Lizt, February 27, 1947. Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. Original in Playwrights’ Producing Company Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

³ It is not my purpose to analyze the specific merits and shortcomings of the show as theater. That has been done well by others. For a musicological discussion of Street Scene, see Larry Stempel, “Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera,” in Kurt Weill, a New Orpheus, ed. Kim Kowalke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). See also Kim Kowalke, “Kurt Weill, Modernism, and Popular Culture,” Offentlichkeit als Stil, Modernism, Modernity, 2, no. 1(1995), 27–69. Theater scholar Forest Hirsch's book Kurt Weill on Stage, From Berlin to Broadway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), also contains a chapter devoted to Street Scene. Two unpublished dissertations discuss Street Scene in detail: William Thornhill, “Kurt Weill's Street Scene,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina (1990), and David Michael Kilroy, “Kurt Weill on Broadway: the Postwar Years (1945–1950),” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (1992).

⁴ Kurt Weill, “Score for a Play,” The New York Times, January 5, 1947.

⁵ Elmer Rice, Minority Report (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 237.

⁶ Elmer Rice, Street Scene, a Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1929).

⁷ Kurt Weill, “Shifts in Musical Composition.” Berliner Tageblatt, October, 1927. Translated by Stephen Hinton in Source Readings in Music History, ed., Robert P Morgan (Boston: W.W. Norton, 1998), 123–5.

⁸ Kurt Weill, “Die Oper, Wohin?” Berliner Tageblatt, October 31, 1929. Translated by Kim Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), 506–9. Rice, Minority Report, 237.

⁹ Hirsch, Kurt Weill: Berlin to Broadway, 257. Hirsch quotes this letter, dated June 28, 1945, but does not name its source location.

¹⁰ Weill had been pressured by Brecht to accept only 25% of the royalties due on their greatest collaboration, Threepenny Opera. Ibid., 88.

¹¹ Playwrights’ Producing Company lawyer, John Wharton, said of Rice “Elmer always asserted he was a socialist (not a Communist), but he had quite definite capitalistic ideas about what large royalties should be paid where one of his prize properties was involved.” John F. Wharton, Life Among the Playwrights (New York: Quadrangle, 1974), 151.

¹² Rice had formed the company in 1938 with fellow authors Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, S.W. Berman, and Sidney Howard with the intention of avoiding the commercial producing establishment. The company had produced a string of hits, among them Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois and There Shall Be No Night, and Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo and Knickerbocker Holiday, which was also Weill's first major American hit. Weill was invited to join the Playwrights’ Producing Company in 1946, after his Broadway successes, Lady in the Dark, in 1941, and One Touch of Venus, in 1943.

¹³ Weill's own copy of the playtext of Street Scene was marked up with these notations in the summer of 1945, but the dates are not known. A fifteen-page draft outline of the show exists in the Langston Hughes Papers at Yale, in which the same annotations are present (see note 19). Weill's hand is obvious, because of the language of the musical descriptions, and it is clearly very early, because of the cuts suggested, some of which were restored. Margin comments, in pencil, by Hughes, briefly describe each song/set of lyrics. These notes appear to have been made at different times, some quite early in the collaboration, based on the information Hughes gives to himself. For example, he notes in the opening scene that Shirley Kaplan, Sam's sister and the daughter of the old radical, “does not sing,” which he needed to know early in the process. For the purpose of this analysis, I assume that the numbers described in the treatment reflect Weill's narrative conception of the musical drama. Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (Subsequent cites refer to this archive as LHP).

¹⁴ Kurt Weill, “Outline for a Musical Version of Street Scene.” [No date]. LHP.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ According to Kilroy, the early Weill/Anderson libretto draft outline exists in the Elmer Rice Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I have not seen this outline, but it may be the same as the draft outline in LHP.

¹⁷ Both Weill and Rice claimed to have suggested Hughes. Rice, 410. Hirsch, 257.

¹⁸ Rice to Hughes, August 23, 1945. Weill-Lenya Research Center, Original in LHP.

¹⁹ Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93.

²⁰ Ibid. 95.

²¹ Ibid. 90.

²² Langston Hughes’ papers at Yale are encyclopedic. Hughes appears to have collected and saved everything he worked on, in every form, from scratch paper to drafts to final versions. He was already submitting materials to Yale's James Weldon Johnson Collection for some years when he began work on Street Scene.

²³ Rice sent “a synopsis of the projected First Act” to Hughes on September 6, once they accepted Hughes’ audition lyrics. Rice to Hughes, September 6, 1945.Weill-Lenya Research Center. Original in Playwrights Producing Company Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

²⁴ Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II, I Dream a World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 123.

²⁵ Langston Hughes, “Papa remembers, Mama remembers” (Draft lyrics for Street Scene tryout). LHP. Hughes notes: “Possible inserted duet for ROSE and SAM of second generation Americans in contrast to their parents’ memories of the old country. Page 167 of text.”

²⁶ Rice, Street Scene.

²⁷ Langston Hughes, “Oi, de skendals!,” (Draft lyrics for Street Scene tryout). LHP.

²⁸ In the July 4, 1946 meeting in which this song was finalized, a significant substitution was made of “kepitalist” for “American” in the refrain. Langston Hughes, “Oi, de scendals!,” (Draft lyrics) Notes from July 4, 1946. LHP. This made the lyric more strongly political, but at the same time, removing “American” from the lyric, probably sanitized it some to diffuse potential criticism. Hughes’ notes from this meeting suggest that Rice made this change.

²⁹ Langston Hughes, “Bread That Makes You Choke.” (Draft lyrics for Street Scene tryout). LHP. Later versions add “It's kepitalist,” first in pencil notes, then typed. (No date.)

³⁰ Rice to Hughes, September 6, 1945. LHP.

³¹ Hughes to Rice, October 23, 1945. LHP. Hughes to Max Lieber, October 23, 1945. LHP.

³² Weill to Hughes, January 23, 1946. Weill-Lenya Research Center. Original at LHP. The two typewritten drafts of this letter, one an expanded version of the other, provide corroboration of Weill's concerns.

³³ Hughes to Amy Spingarn, March 8, 1947. LHP.

³⁴ During the intensive revisions of Street Scene, Hughes wrote a series of six articles about the Soviet Union for the Chicago Defender. These, too, highly praised the Soviet Union, again because of its racial policies. He ignored the problems in the U.S.S.R. until the second to last article, finally addressing the lack of freedom of speech, actual inequities in income, and massive shortages. But his focus in the articles is on how much better life was for people of color because they were treated like everyone else, which he reinforced in the final article. His sympathies certainly must have informed his writing on Street Scene, yet the softened direction of the show frustrated any impulses he might have had to retain its original social criticism.

³⁵ Weill to Hughes, September 20, 1945. Weill-Lenya Research Center. Original in LHP.

³⁶ Notes on drafts of “Wrapped with a Ribbon and Tied with a Bow.” November, 1946. LHP.

³⁷ Weill to Hughes. Ibid.

³⁸ Elmer Rice, “Lullaby,” in Kurt Weill, Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, Street Scene, an American Opera (New York: Chappell Music Company, 1948), 244–247. This is the final lyric as it appears in the vocal score, attributed entirely to Rice. See the discussion, above, which traces the attribution.

³⁹ Weill to Hughes, August 23, 1946. LHP.

⁴⁰ Undocumented newspaper reviews from the New York opening of Street Scene, January 1947. Weill-Lenya Research Center. Street Scene clippings file.

⁴¹ Amy Spingarn to Hughes, January 12, 1947. LHP.

⁴² Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, 269.

⁴³ Kilroy and Thornhill both discuss the lyric credit dispute in their dissertations, but their discussions are not informed by an analysis of the texts or the early correspondence and do not draw conclusions concerning the treatment of Hughes effort.

⁴⁴ Lieber to Hughes, August 28, 1947. LHP.

⁴⁵ Rice to Hughes, July 26, 1946. LHP.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Arnold Rampersad, 114.

⁴⁸ Langston Hughes, Drafts for “Lullaby,” November 1946. LHP.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Hughes to Lieber, September 7, 1947. LHP.

⁵¹ Kurt Weill to Caspar Neher, February 16, 1947. KWF. The final quote Weill uses is from the Brecht text of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. A childhood friend of Brecht's, Neher had designed all Weill's German theater works, and was still working with Brecht in the late 1940s, after staying in Germany throughout the war.

⁵² Brooks Atkinson, “New York to Music: Mr. Rice's Street Scene, Mr. Weill's score.” New York Times, January 16, 1947.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Olin Downes, “Opera on Broadway: Kurt Weill Takes Forward Step in Setting Idiomatic American to Music,” New York Times, January 26, 1947.

⁵⁵ There was little promotion of Street Scene in the radical press. The single review I found, in New Masses, deals with the failure of Weill's operatic realization to adequately convey its social message, contrasting it unfavorably with Soviet operas. Reviewer Isador Schneider felt that no American opera was successful in this effort and that for such “prosy matters as neighborhood gossip, family quarrels…and so on, the musical declamation and recitative were in the way.” Isador Schneider, “Street Scene,” New Masses, February 4, 1947.