Partner William Hewitt
Queer Places:
134 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012
4 East 12th Street, New York
Chelten Hills Cemetery, 1701 E Washington Ln, Philadelphia, PA 19138, Stati Uniti
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein (March 2, 1905 – January 22, 1964), was an
American composer, lyricist, and librettist.[1]
He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union
musical
The Cradle Will Rock, directed by
Orson Welles, was shut down by the
Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock
and for his
Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of
The Threepenny Opera by
Bertolt Brecht and
Kurt
Weill. The composer and lyricist Marc
Blitzstein once said to Ned Rorem, ‘sooner
or later all queers meet each other’.
Blitzstein's works also include the opera
Regina, an adaptation of
Lillian Hellman's play
The Little Foxes; the
Broadway
musical
Juno, based on
Seán
O'Casey's play
Juno and the Paycock; and
No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and
Weill's musical play
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play
Mother Courage and Her Children with music by
Paul
Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and
Seaweed (1931) and
The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original
1960 production of Hellman's play
Toys in the Attic.
Addressing the post-WWI period in his enormous overview of
twentieth-century music, but without the ulterior agenda of the anti-gay
conspiracy theorists, Alex Ross writes: Homosexual men, who make up
approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general population, have played a
disproportionately large role in composition of the last hundred years.
Somewhere around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century
seem to have been homosexual or bisexual:
Aaron Copland,
Virgil Thomson,
Leonard Bernstein,
Samuel Barber,
Marc Blitzstein,
John Cage,
Harry Partch,
Henry Cowell,
Lou Harrison,
Gian Carlo Menotti,
David Diamond, and
Ned Rorem, among many others.
A number of composers who were both Jewish and gay had something else in
common. In their youth, they had been to Paris to study composition under
Nadia Boulanger: Aaron
Copland in the early 1920s, Virgil
Thomson in the mid-1920s (while there he met his lover, the painter
Maurice Grosser),
Marc Blitzstein in the late 1920s (his
Russian-born lover, the conductor
Alexander Smallens
accompanied him to Europe in 1924), David
Diamond in 1936 (his Psalm, an orchestral piece of that year, was inspired
by a visit to Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père
Lachaise and dedicated to André Gide).
Blitzstein was
openly gay.[7]
He wrote to his sister in 1929, regarding prior attempts to suppress or hide
his orientation, "it is absurd to assume there are no sins; there are
definitely Cardinal sins -- sins against oneself, against one's law. My sin
is, has been... the willingness to corrupt my nature."[8]
His first lover was the conductor
Alexander Smallens, with whom he traveled to Europe in 1924.[9][5]
Blitzstein nevertheless married novelist
Eva Goldbeck on March 2, 1933. They had no children. His mother-in-law was
Berlin-born
musical star and opera singer
Lina Abarbanell. He dedicated a number of works, including Romantic
Piece for Orchestra (1930), String Quartet, 'The Italian' (1930), the
ballet Cain (1930), and the Serenade for String Quartet (1932)
to his wife-to-be. She died of
anorexia in 1936, and his grief prompted him to throw himself into the
work of creating The Cradle Will Rock.[10]
For a time in the late 1940s Blitzstein openly introduced his lover,
William Hewitt,
an American Technical Sergeant and a Ninth Air Force radio gunner on a Marauder,
whom Blitzstein had met in London during the World War Second. They lived
together for about two years. They spent the summer of 1945 at the home Jo and Ed Davis had
purchased the previous year in Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley at Chadds
Ford, residing below the main house in a stone spring cottage that they
painted pink and black. In the fall of 1946, they took an apartment at 134
West 4th Street, New York, and spent part of that winter at the estate of
Motty and Bess Eitingon in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Blitzstein completed
the Airborne Symphony. In 1946, the two moved into a modest studio
apartment at 4 East 12th Street, New York, that would serve Blitzstein as home
for the rest of his life, and that was equipped with a galley kitchen, bath,
terrace, and large multipurpose room where the composer kept his bed, piano,
and work-table. He and Hewitt summered in 1946 at the guest cottage of
Mina Curtiss in Ashfield,
Massachusetts, and in 1947 at the country house of writer Donald Ogden Stewart
and his wife Ella Winter Stewart in Upper Jay in New York's Adirondack
Moantains, near the home of artist and writer Rockwell Kent—asocial circle
bound by communist sympathies.
Blitzstein and Hewitt presumably maintained some romantic involvement
throughout this time, although they were never monogamous: Blitzstein
continued to cruise trysting places, while Hewitt maintained his relationship
with Luellen Bowles, whom he will marry in 1949. In the fall of 1946, Hewitt
took a job as a cutter in Motty Eitingon's fur business, but that did not
last. When Hewitt returned with Blitzstein to New York in the fall of 1947, he
moved out on his own. For a short while, Hewitt roomed with Blitzstein's
nephew Christopher Davis. David
Diamond observed Hewitt's
flirtatiousness with Leonard Bernstein
and himself.
Blitzstein died in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he was wintering, in
1964, a few hours after being robbed and beaten by three sailors.
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