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Kurt Weill's The River Is Blue: “Film-Opera” and Politics in 1930s Hollywood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2017
Abstract
In early 1937, Kurt Weill and playwright Clifford Odets collaborated on a Spanish Civil War film that they hoped would lead to a new kind of political–musical picture. Originally titled The River Is Blue, the film was eventually released in 1938 as Blockade without the involvement of either Odets or Weill, but recently uncovered archival material of the abandoned project reveals new facets of Weill's musico-dramatic thought. The discovery of Odets's first draft of the screenplay shows an extraordinarily close collaboration between composer and screenwriter as the shot numbers in the script align exactly with numbers in Weill's score. Read together, these two documents show Weill attempting to combine different paradigms of film scoring that were popular in the 1930s. There are moments of typical Golden Age–style scoring with mickey-mousing and leitmotifs, but there is also evidence of older practices such as the use of popular songs. Weill's score also displays the influence of the Popular Front, elements of Eisensteinian montage, and anti-Wagnerianism. These show Weill working toward what he termed “film-opera,” not a filmed version of an opera but an entirely new genre that combined elements of musical theatre and movies.
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- Copyright © The Society for American Music 2017
References
References
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Zimmers, Tighe E.
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Ann Ronell Papers. Music Division. New York Public Library. New York.Google Scholar
United States Copyright Collection. Music Division. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
William Dieterle, Blockade (United Artists, 1938). Correspondence, 3 February 1937–22 December 1941. History of Cinema, Series 1, Hollywood and Production Code Administration. Margaret Herrick Library. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Beverly Hills, CA. Available online at http://go.galegroup.com/gdsc/i.do?&id=GALE%7CSC5106194797&v=2.1&u=acd_gdsc&it=r&p=GDSC&sw=w&viewtype=Manuscript. (PCA/Blockade).Google Scholar
Walter F. Wanger Papers, Mss. 136AN (WWP). Wisconsin Historical Society. Madison.Google Scholar
Weill–Lenya Archive, MSS 30, The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Yale University. New Haven, CT. (WLA).Google Scholar
Weill–Lenya Research Center. New York, NY. (WLRC).Google Scholar
Anonymous. “National Music, Opera, and the Movies: An Interview with Kurt Weill.” Pacific Coast Musician, 3 July 1937, 12–13. Available online at http://kwf.org/kurt-weill/for-further-reading/33-foundation/kwp/352-national-music.Google Scholar
Barrios, Richard. A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film. 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Matthew. Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Bick, Sally. “
Of Mice and Men: Copland, Hollywood, and American Musical Modernism.” American Music
23, no. 4 (2005): 426–72.Google Scholar
Bick, Sally. “Eisler's Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935–42.” Current Musicology
86 (2008): 7–39.Google Scholar
Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906–1940. 1981. Reprint, New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2002.Google Scholar
Burrows, Marian. “The Asphalt Musician: The Elusive Character of Kurt Weill Speaks Through His Work in Writing Theater Scores.” New Masses, 12 January 1937.Google Scholar
Carter, Tim, ed. Johnny Johnson: A Play With Music in Three Acts, libretto by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill. Kurt Weill Edition, Series I, Volume 13. New York: Kurt Weill Foundation for Music/European American Music Corporation, 2012.Google Scholar
Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties. 1945. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1983.Google Scholar
Crawford, Dorothy Lamb. A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Daverio, John. “
Tristan und Isolde: Essence and Appearance
.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Grey, Thomas S., 115–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Deathridge, John. Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar
Doherty, Thomas. Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Downes, Olin. “Some Considerations Concerning Experiments in a New Art-Form.” New York Times, 8 March 1931.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Sergei M.
The Film Sense. Edited and translated by Leyda, Jay. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1947.Google Scholar
Eisler, Hanns, and Adorno, Theodor. Composing for the Films. 1947. Reprint London: Continuum, 2007.Google Scholar
Farneth, David, with Juchem, Elmar, and Stein, Dave. Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents. New York: Overlook, 2000.Google Scholar
Franklin, Peter. Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Heinsheimer, Hans. “Film Opera—Stage vs. Screen,” Modern Music
8, no. 3 (March–April 1931): 10–15.Google Scholar
Hess, Carol A. “Competing Utopias? Musical Ideologies in the 1930s and Two Spanish Civil War Films.” Journal of the Society for American Music
2 (2008): 319–54.Google Scholar
Hinton, Stephen. “Weill Contra Wagner: Aspects of Ambivalence.” In “. . .das alles auch hätte anders kommen können”: Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Schall-Gotthardt, Susanne, Schader, Luitgard, and Winkler, Heinz-Jürgen, 155–74. Frankfurt am Main: Schott, 2009.Google Scholar
Hinton, Stephen. Weill's Musical Theatre: Stages of Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Kalinak, Kathryn. How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinderman, William. “Dramatic Recapitulation and Tonal Pairing in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal
.” In The Second Practice of Nineteenth Century Tonality, edited by Kinderman, William, 178–214. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.Google Scholar
London, Kurt. Film Music. Translated by Bensinger, Eric S.. London: Faber and Faber, 1936.Google Scholar
Meyer, Stephen C. “‘Leitmotif’: On the Application of a Word to Film Music.” Journal of Film Music
5 (2012): 101–8.Google Scholar
Moore, Douglas. “The Motion Picture Music.” National Board of Review Magazine (November 1935): 4–9.Google Scholar
Paulin, Scott D. “Richard Wagner and the Fantasy of Cinematic Unity: The Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the History of Theory and Film.” In Music and Cinema, edited by Buhler, James, Flinn, Caryl, and Neumeyer, David, 58–84. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Platte, Nathan. “Before Kong Was King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore.” Journal of the Society for American Music
8 (2014): 311–37.Google Scholar
Younger, Prakash. “Film as Art.” In The Routledge Companion to Film History, edited by Guynn, William, 27–38. London: Routledge, 2011.Google Scholar
Robé, Christopher. “Taking Hollywood Back: The Historical Costume Drama, the Biopic, and Popular Front in U.S. Film Criticism.” Cinema Journal
48 (2009): 70–87.Google Scholar
Robé, Christopher. “The Good Fight: The Spanish Civil War and U.S. Left Film Criticism.” Framework
51 (2010): 79–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, Thomas J.
Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Schroeder, David. Cinema's Allusions, Opera's Allure: The Operatic Impulse in Film. New York: Continuum, 2002.Google Scholar
Slowik, Michael. “Diegetic Withdrawal and Other Worlds: Film Music Strategies before King Kong
.” Cinema Journal
53, no. 1 (2013): 1–25.Google Scholar
Smith, Greg M. “Blocking Blockade: Partisan Protest, Popular Debate, and Encapsulated Texts.” Cinema Journal
36 (1996): 18–38.Google Scholar
Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. New York: Vintage, 1990.Google Scholar
Spring, Katherine. Saying it With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Thorau, Christian. “Guides for Wagnerites: Leitmotifs and Wagnerian Listening.” In Richard Wagner and His World, edited by Grey, Thomas S., 133–50. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Weill, Kurt. “The Future of Opera in America.” Translated by Lifflander, Joel. Modern Music
14, no. 4 (1937): 183–88. Available online at http://kwf.org/grants-a-prizes/33-foundation/kwp/331-the-future-of-opera-in-america.Google Scholar
Weill, Kurt. “Music in the Movies.” Harper's Bazaar
80, no. 9 (September 1946. Available online at http://kwf.org/foundation/staff-directory44/33-foundation/kwp/333-music-in-the-movies.Google Scholar
Weill, Kurt and Lenya, Lotte. Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Edited and Translated by Kowalke, Kim and Symonette, Lys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Weill, Kurt. Musik und Musikalisches Theater: Gesammelte Schriften. Mit einer Auswahl von Gesprächen und Interviews. Expanded and Revised edition. Edited by Hinton, Stephen and Schebera, Jürgen. Mainz: Schott, 2000.Google Scholar
Whitfield, Sarah. “Kurt Weill: The ‘Composer as Dramatist’ in American Musical Theatre Production.” Ph.D. diss., Queen Mary College, University of London, 2010.Google Scholar
Wittern-Keller, Laura. Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915–1981. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.Google Scholar
Zimmers, Tighe E.
Tin Pan Alley Girl: A Biography of Ann Ronell. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.Google Scholar