Howard Pollack's "Marc Blitzstein," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Marc Blitzstein by Howard Pollack.

The entry begins:

The life of the American composer-librettist Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) had its fair share of drama, from his early years as a piano prodigy and enfant terrible to his turbulent marriage to the brilliant writer Eva Goldbeck, their travels together through Europe (including deportation from Belgium for alleged subversive activities), Eva’s tragically young death from anorexia, the legendary 1937 Broadway premiere of The Cradle Will Rock (for which Blitzstein wrote the words and music), his involvement with Orson Welles, John Houseman, and the Mercury Theatre, his leftist and pro-Soviet activities, his years of service during World War II (including coaching the U.S. Army Negro Chorus and traveling the French countryside collecting Resistance songs in the service of William Wyler’s documentary The True Glory), his homosexual adventures and affairs, his landmark adaptation of Brecht-Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (which helped make “Mack the Knife” one of the great hits of the century), his confrontation with the House on Un-American Activities Committee, and his own tragic death at the hands of three seamen in Martinique in 1964.

The premiere of The Cradle alone has inspired not only the play It’s All True (1999) by Jason Sherman, but two unfilmed screenplays --- Rocking the Cradle (early 1980s) by Ring Lardner Jr. (one of the Hollywood Ten) and The Cradle Will Rock (1984) by Orson Welles (his final screenplay, and dedicated to Blitzstein’s memory) –- along with one script that made it to the screen, namely, Cradle Will Rock (1999), written and directed by Tim Robbins. Whereas Welles contemplated casting the witty, urbane, and irreverent Canadian comedian David Steinberg as Blitzstein, Tim Robbins chose...[read on]

Learn more about Marc Blitzstein by Howard Pollack at the Oxford University Press website.

Pollack is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Music at the University of Houston and author of, among other books, John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer; Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man; and George Gershwin: His Life and Work. His latest book is Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World.

My Book, The Movie: Marc Blitzstein.

--Marshal Zeringue