Cafeterias and Tootsie Pops: the music of Weill's Street Scene

I have two food-centric analogies to help me convey the essence of Kurt Weill's approach to the music of Street Scene:

It's a cafeteria. It's a Tootsie Roll Pop.

Any questions? ...Yeah, you probably need a little more detail. Gotcha.

HOW IS IT A CAFETERIA?
When you eat at a cafeteria, you are presented with an array of entrees: meat loaf, baked chicken, ham, lasagna, fish. The entrees are selected to represent the most popular dishes possible.

The musical numbers in Street Scene reflect the composer's experience of observing and absorbing the state of American popular music during the twelve years from his arrival in America in 1935 and his opera's premiere in 1947. As noted in my previous post, this was a golden period during which such giants as Rodgers, Loewe, Berlin, Porter, Bernstein and Gershwin were doing brilliant work, as were the great bandleaders of the Big Band era.

In my view, Weill deliberately evoked the styles of several of these masters; virtually every number in Street Scene is an homage to a particular composer.. He had a two-fold reason for this scheme:

1. The diversity of styles and genres seemed an appropriate match for the notable diversity of characters making up the cast: African-American, German, Irish, Swedish, Italian, and so forth.
2. I believe Kurt Weill was, in effect, sending a message to his American colleagues. The message? "We composers need to find a distinctly American musical language for opera, or we'll end up writing niche works for a niche opera. American music is rich and fertile and full of potential. There is no reason that any or all of these diverse styles can't be employed in the service of opera. Don't be afraid to write a serious opera with popular styles - after all, that's what Rossini did, isn't it?"

Okay, I'm taking a few liberties at putting these words in his mouth, but I think I'm on the right track.

In this regard, let's take a look at some examples of Weill deliberately appropriating another composer's style:

• "Ain't it awful, the heat". The opera opens with three neighbors kvetching about the sultry weather in New York; a heat wave that, surely, is a metaphor for the oppression suffered by the residents of the tenement house, in which poverty and ethnic tensions make life a trial to be endured. The musical style is laid-back jazz, notably evoking Gershwin.
• "I got a marble and a star" Here we have a blues number sung by an African-American character whose music reveals a likeable, easy-going nature and a contentment not dependent on material possessions. We are expected to recognize an homage to "I got plenty o' nothing" from Porgy and Bess.
• "Wrapped in a ribbon and tied in a bow": Young Jennie Hildebrand's joyous celebration of her graduation day is charming, sweet, and a tiny bit corny. The music is pure Rodgers and Hammerstein. This number is in R&H's ingenue vein, calling to mind "I am sixteen going on seventeen", "I'm as corny as Kansas in August" and "When I marry Mr. Snow".
• Wouldn't you like to be on Broadway?: This number for Harry Easter, Rose's smarmy boss, has something of the Tin Pan Alley milieu of Irving Berlin
• What good would the moon be? Rose's reply to Harry is a no-brainer: this song is pure Cole Porter. Further, it seems to suggest a particular Porter song: "Night and Day" from his 1934 musical The Gay Divorcee. Rose is no ingenue like Jennie; this is music for a sophisticated urban woman. Rose's ascending chromatic vocal lines correspond nicely to the descending lines in the Porter song.
• Moon faced and starry eyed. When Mae Jones and Dick McGann (two otherwise minor characters) feel Dick's gin hitting their systems, they sing a song that is followed by a raucous swing dance that sounds as if the DNA of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller were somehow combined to create worthy new voice of Big Band. It's interesting that Weill out-sourced the orchestration of this number to a Broadway arranger rather than attempt it himself.

I could go on, but you get the idea, and there's a Tootsie Roll Pop question on the table.

HOW IS IT A TOOTSIE POP?
You've had Tootsie Pops, right? It's two candies in one! The outside is a light, crunchy, sugary fruit-flavored shell. But in the center is a DARK AND CHEWY CORE.

All the numbers listed above are pop styles of one kind or another. The pop genres, with one important exception, belong to the supporting characters: the residents of the tenement house, or the visitors like Harry Easter and Dick McGann. This is the light, fruity shell.

The DARK AND CHEWY CORE? This is the world of the four characters making up the serious tragic verismo-style plot. They are Frank and Anna Maurrant, their daughter Rose, and the bookish young Sam Kaplan. Whenever the focus turns to the Maurrant's loveless marriage and the star-crossed love of Sam and Rose, there is an abrupt shift in musical language. The vocal styles feature traditional operatic writing, calling for big dramatic instruments and extended range. The orchestral writing becomes symphonic, as opposed to the lighter, more traditionally Broadway sound of the pop numbers. Some illustrative highlights and notions about them:

Frank Maurrant's entrance. The dialogue as Frank joins his neighbors upon arriving home from work is underscored by ominous orchestral underscoring. It's easy to focus on the spoken lines rather than pay attention to the orchestra, but then one can miss an important motif introduced immediately in the strings: 

Opera-savvy listeners who note this short musical idea will immediately understand how the drama will end: Frank is going to kill his wife. They will know this because they can connect it with a similar motif (long note followed by four quicker ones) in Bizet's Carmen: the so-called "Fate Theme":

Anna's aria "Somehow I never could believe". This composition was a sticking-point in the collaboration between playwright/librettist Elmer Rice and Weill. The aria is redolent of Puccini-like devices in both vocal writing and orchestral gestures. At seven and a half minutes long, Rice was sure the number would kill the show dead in its tracks. Weill, who had firm and specific goals for this "Broadway Opera", refused to cut so much as a note. He had his way, and he was right: we need to hear Anna express her state of affection-starved misery at some length in order to feel empathy for her. Without empathy, she's merely an unfaithful wife, in which case her death is less tragic. 

Sam's solo "Lonely House". This, perhaps the best-known excerpt in Street Scene is vocally grateful for the tenor voice. More importantly, it is the most successful fusion of vocal writing that demands classical technique with a jazz-based accompaniment. It also seems the most "Weill-ian" in that I hear no particular synthesis of another composer's style. \

By the way, Langston Hughes's lyrics for "Lonely House" contain a bit of imagery uncomfortably close to one used by another poet some years earlier. At one point Sam sings:

“Unhook the stars and take them down”.

Nine years prior to Street Scene, W. H. Auden crafted the following lines in his 1938 poem "Funeral Blues": 

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

It's reasonable to assume that Hughes would have been familiar with Auden's work. Was this a conscious or unconscious bit of borrowing?

Sam and Rose's duet "We'll go away together"

Of equal importance to the plot line of Frank and Anna's doomed marriage is the bittersweet aborted romance of Sam and Rose. They are given no fewer than three substantial duets, ranging from perfumed operetta style to Sam's final heartbreak. "We'll go away together" occurs in Act 2; Sam summons up the nerve to propose an escape for the two of them to a happier life. Rose, in misery with her father's cruelty and her mother's scandalous affair, is tempted to take him up on it. The music is lyrical and buoyant; it could almost be Viennese operetta a la Franz Lehar. 

However, Weill inserts a telling harmonic touch that, for those with ears to hear it, foreshadows their eventual breakup. Here is the initial phrase of the main theme:

The final two bars feature a moment of bitonality: E flat major in the accompaniment and F major in the melodic line. Let's assume the former stands for Sam and the latter for Rose. The two harmonies don't match; they create a dissonance. Sam and Rose are not in agreement; they're in different keys. Lehar would have put both lines in E flat. Weill's bitonality is code; it's telling us that, for the foreseeable future, Sam is the square peg in the round hole of Rose's life.

We'll wrap up Street Scene next week with a few more insights on the music.