Street Scene and the Weill-Puccini connection

Kurt Weill: Puccini-minded?

Summer is OVER and I'm pale, exhausted and not-quite-ready.

Okay, enough carping. Time to commence a series of posts preparing you nice people for Virginia Opera's 2018-2019 season. First up: Kurt Weill's 1947 "American Opera" Street Scene.

Raise your hand if you knew Weill's score won the 1947 Tony Award for Best Original Score, beating out classics like Brigadoon and Finian's Rainbow. (This nicely enhances the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Elmer Rice in 1929 for his Broadway play, the source for the opera.) The score is notable for being crammed with references, near quotations and homages to a wide array of composers, poets and musical genres. A future post will offer commentary on these.

Today, however, I want to shed light on the "homage" that, for me, is most striking: Puccini's gritty one-act opera Il Tabarro (The Cloak), one-third of the trilogy Il Trittico.

The arc of the major plot lines of the two works are remarkably similar. In both cases, an attractive woman is stuck in a dreary, loveless marriage to her hard-boiled working-class husband. The woman expresses disappointment with the way her life turned out; her youthful dreams of romance and happiness have turned to ashes. Desperate for affection, she takes on a lover. When the husband finds out, his rage leads to violence and tragedy.

The resemblance becomes undeniable when comparing the arias given to Giorgetta (in Il Tabarro) and Anna Maurrant. Here's Giorgetta giving voice to her restlessness and discontent:

Oh! My dream is quite different! 
I was born in the suburbs, and the air 
Of my Paris is life and joy to me! 
Oh! If some day we could give up forever 
Our vagarious and stupid, bleak, existence! 
It’s no life for a woman in that dark, dingy cabin; 

Here's Weill's Anna early in Act 1, with pertinent lyrics excerpted:

Somehow I never could believe that 
Life was meant to be all dull and gray.
...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.
...Days turn to months - months turn to years,
The greasy soap suds drown our wishes.

Each woman is unfaithful in her marriage: Giorgetta has the ardent dock worker Luigi; Anna has the smarmy milk collector Steve Sankey. Yet Puccini and Weill compel the listener to empathize with them in spite of their "transgressions". The main difference is that whereas Frank Maurrant dispatches both Sankey and Anna via gun shots, Giorgetta's husband Michele is (for the moment, at least) satisfied with strangling Luigi so that he may horrify his wife with the spectacle of the murdered corpse.

It's also useful to excamine the interaction between the two pairs of doomed spouses. Here's a bit of dialogue between Michele and Giorgetta:

MICHELE
Have I ever caused a scene?

GIORGETTA
You certainly have not; you don't beat me.

MICHELE
What? You want me to?

GIORGETTA
To your occasional silences, yes.
I would prefer to be beaten til I am bruised.

Now sample an exchange between Frank and, not Anna, but their daughter Rose:

ROSE
Pop, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about.

FRANK
Well, what is it?

ROSE
It's about Ma

FRANK
What about her?

ROSE
It's only that if you were a little nicer to her,
maybe everything would be different.

FRANK
Yeah? Where's she got any kick coming?
Ain't I always been a good husband?
Ain't I always looked after her?

ROSE
It's not that, Pop. It's somebody to be sort of nice to her that she wants -
sort of nice and gentle, the way she is to you. That's all it is.

Frank follows that by completely mis-construing "somebody to be sort of nice to her", interpreting Rose's plea as an oblique admission that her mother has a lover. It's simultaneously maddening AND completely understandable. It's maddening in that Rose wasn't talking about Sankey; she means that Frank should be "nice and gentle"; but it's understandable in that Frank, who wasn't born yesterday, is entirely correct in his suspicions about Anna. He sees what, for him, is the big picture.

Two colorful dramas of verismo: eschewing stories of the upper classes; the privileged; the powerful; turning instead to the passions and foibles of the working class.

The question for us now is: are these similarities deliberate? Were Elmer Rice and Kurt Weill familiar with Il Tabarro? Did they intend to create a version set in New York City?

It's a question as interesting to speculate about as it is tricky to arrive at an answer. As for Elmer Rice, he could have known the Puccini opera. Il Tabarro predates the Broadway version of Street Scene by eleven years. I have found no mention of opera in Rice's highly readable autobiography Minority Report, but that's not the same as concluding Puccini was unknown to him.

As for Weill, he was naturally not responsible for the plot line of a play written independently of him a generation before he set to work on his operatic version. Yet there's no doubt that in most cases, the creation of a libretto is a joint collaborative effort between librettist (Rice) and composer (and, in this case, Langston Hughes, the lyricist).

IF Weill was well acquainted with Il Tabarro (and why wouldn't he be?), he may have had a hand in the formation of Anna's aria "Somehow I never could believe" with the aim of making it correspond to Giorgetta's monologue.

Or - it may have been a coincidental case of a familiar verismo trope occurring in two dramas. Complete happenstance.

What do you think?