Mixing spoken dialogue and sung numbers, The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s “play with music”, has always hovered uneasily between musical theatre and opera. It’s had a chequered history. Intended as an antidote to the traditional Broadway musical, its plot charts trade-union attempts to break the stranglehold of corruption and nepotism in an anonymous “Steeltown, USA”, while satirising the intolerance and hypocrisy of the American middle class.
Conservative elements in Congress were quick to brand Cradle as an attempt to foster industrial unrest, and a few days before the planned premiere in 1937, funding for the show through the Federal Theatre Project was withdrawn. In the event the first night did go ahead, directed by Orson Welles, but without costumes, scenery or an orchestra; Blitzstein accompanied the performance on a piano.
The breezy polyglot musical style is unquestionably indebted to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, just as Blitzstein’s subversive score left an indelible impression on Leonard Bernstein, who conducted a semi-staging of the orchestral version in 1947. There have been occasional revivals since, and in 1999, Tim Robbins released a feature film about the circumstances surrounding the extraordinary premiere. But it wasn’t until last year that it was staged in full, with its original scoring, at Opera Saratoga. It was conducted by John Mauceri, who in 1991, while music director of Scottish Opera, had brought Blitzstein’s Regina to the UK.
The Saratoga performance fizzes with the excitement of discovering what seems like a brand new work, 80 years after it was written, one that’s as fiercely relevant now, in Trump’s America, as it was then. With 25 named roles in a work lasting under two hours, this is very much a company show, and Mauceri ensures that the tangy orchestration makes a mark, too. For anyone who only knows Blitzstein’s work from mentions in histories of US music, it will be a revelation.
This week’s other picks
For something completely different, there’s Anton Rubinstein’s Moses, in a recording from Warsaw conducted by Michail Jurowski. It is possibly the first time the “sacred opera” had been heard since the 19th century, for though as a pianist, composer and conductor Rubinstein was a dominating figure in late 19th-century Russian music, few of his works are heard today. Only one of his 20 operas, The Demon, is anywhere near being a repertory piece; this performance, with Stanisław Kuflyuk in the title role, may be decent enough, but Moses, with its echoes of Gounod and Mendelssohn and an overlong, stodgy German libretto, isn’t likely to join it soon.
