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Celebrating the Nation: Kurt Weill, Paul Green, and the Federal Theatre Project (1937)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2011

TIM CARTER
TIM CARTER*
Affiliation:
[email protected]
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Abstract

In summer 1937, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) commissioned from playwright Paul Green and composer Kurt Weill a work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Green had provided the text for Weill's first American musical play, Johnny Johnson (1936), which the FTP took up with some enthusiasm, and he had scored some success with his outdoor historical drama The Lost Colony (1937). He was also interested in music on the stage following his encounters with Russian director Alexei Granowski in Berlin in 1928–29. Weill, in turn, was involved in various spectacle-driven projects in 1937, not least with fellow émigré Max Reinhardt. Green's first scenario for the new drama focused on the constitutional implications of recent labor disputes in the U.S. South. However, the controversy of summer 1937 surrounding the overt agit-prop of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock—sponsored but then dropped by the FTP—put an end to such political aspirations. Green rewrote his outline in favor of a more conventional treatment of the American Revolutionary War, to be called The Common Glory. Although he produced a rough script, and Weill started composing the score, the project collapsed, in part because of their incompatible visions for the play and its music. Nevertheless, newly uncovered sources reveal them attempting to grapple with the potentials of nationalistic subject matter in the theater, and with the search for U.S. cultural identities in changing times.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 297 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2011

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References

References

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Billy Rose Theatre Collection. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center [NYPL], New York.Google Scholar
Federal Theatre Project Collection. Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. [LOC/FTP].Google Scholar
Federal Theatre Project Collection. Record Group 69, National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, Md.) [NARA/FTP].Google Scholar
Hallie Flanagan Papers. NYPL.Google Scholar
Paul Green Papers. Southern Historical Collection no. 3693, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. [UNC/PG].Google Scholar
Weill-Lenya Archive. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library (MSS 30: The Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya), Yale University, New Haven, Conn. [WLA].Google Scholar
Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York [WLRC].Google Scholar
WPA Radio Scripts, 1936–40. Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL.Google Scholar
Brooklyn Daily EagleGoogle Scholar
Daily WorkerGoogle Scholar
Los Angeles TimesGoogle Scholar
Newark LedgerGoogle Scholar
New York PostGoogle Scholar
New York TimesGoogle Scholar
Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1931.Google Scholar
Avery, Laurence G., ed. A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916–81. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Carter, Tim. “Oklahoma!” The Making of an American Musical. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, Tim. “Schoenberg, Weill, and the Federal Arts Projects in Los Angeles, Spring 1937.” In Ereignis und Exegese—Musikinterpretation und Interpretation der Musik: Festschrift für Hermann Danuser, ed. Bork, Camilla, Klein, Tobias, Meischein, Burkhard, Meyer, Andreas, and Plebuch, Tobias. Schliengen: Edition Argus, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Conn, Peter. The American 1930s: A Literary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, Stuart. The Living Newspaper: History, Production, and Form. Hull, U.K.: University of Hull Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Crist, Elizabeth B.Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar
Endicott, Samuel. Three Melodies of Revolutionary Times. Boston: Homeyer, 1918.Google Scholar
Fisher, William Arms. The Music That Washington Knew. Boston: Ditson, 1931.Google Scholar
Green, Paul. The Critical Year. New York: Samuel French, 1939.Google Scholar
Green, Paul. “Music in the Theatre.” In Green, The Hawthorne Tree: Some Papers and Letters on Life and the Theatre, 81–89. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943.Google Scholar
Green, Paul. The Common Glory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948.Google Scholar
Green, Paul. “Music in the Theatre.” In Green, Dramatic Heritage, 38–41. New York: Samuel French, 1953.Google Scholar
Green, Paul. “Symphonic Outdoor Drama: A Search for New Theatre Forms.” In Green, Drama and the Weather: Some Notes and Papers on Life and the Theatre, 1–44. New York: Samuel French, 1958.Google Scholar
Green, Paul, and Weill, Kurt. Johnny Johnson, ed. Carter, Tim. Kurt Weill Complete Edition. New York: Kurt Weill Foundation, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Hopkinson, Francis. Colonial Love Lyrics. Boston: Schmidt, 1919.Google Scholar
Juchem, Elmar. Kurt Weill und Maxwell Anderson: Neue Wege zu einem amerikanischen Musiktheater, 1938–50. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenny, Vincent S.Paul Green. New York: Twayne, 1971.Google Scholar
Kowalke, Kim H. “‘I am an American!’: Whitman, Weill, and Cultural Identity.” In Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood, ed. Kramer, Lawrence, 109–31. New York: Garland, 2000.Google Scholar
McDonald, William F.Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Meredith, Burgess. So Far, So Good: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.Google Scholar
Moore, Frank, ed. Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution. New York: Hurst, 1905.Google Scholar
The New Deal Stage. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftplays.html.Google Scholar
Nye, Bill. Bill Nye's History of the United States. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1894.Google Scholar
Parsons Smith, Catherine. Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanders, Ronald. The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980.Google Scholar
Scheinberg, Erica. “Different Trains: Kurt Weill's Railroads on Parade.” Paper presented at the Seventy-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Indianapolis, 4–7 November 2010.Google Scholar
Spence, James R.Watering the Sahara: Recollections of Paul Green from 1894 to 1937, ed. Bauer, Margaret D.. Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2008.Google Scholar
Stringfield, Lamar, and McCall, Adeline (et al.). “The Lost Colony” Songbook. New York: Carl Fischer, 1938.Google Scholar
Symonette, Lys, and Kowalke, Kim H., eds. Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Weber, Horst, and Schwartz, Manuela, eds. Quellen zur Geschichte emigrierter Musiker/Sources Relating to the History of Emigré Musicians, 1933–1950, 1: Kalifornien/California. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2003.Google Scholar
Woolley, John T., and Peters, Gerhard, eds. The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.Google Scholar