Whenever Marc Blitzstein undertook stage works on themes of crime and punishment, trouble lay ahead. His first attempt was a two-act ballet, Cain (1930), in which the world’s first murderer is slain by Lamech, one of his descendants. Lamech is cursed by Jehovah and receives the mark of Cain as onlookers bury their faces in fear. Jehovah raises His voice again and curses the entire people; as they lift their heads, all their brows are seen to bear the mark of Cain. In the introduction to the scenario, Blitzstein moralizes, “Thus murder, begun in our world by Cain, is perpetuated through the ages: we are all the sons of Cain.” To his great disappointment, the score was rejected by Leopold Stokowski and remained unperformed until 2008, when it was included in the American Composers Alliance’s “Festival of American Music.”
Blitzstein’s second musical setting of a crime subject was The Condemned (1932), a short choral opera inspired by two of his labor heroes, Sacco and Vanzetti, who are embodied in the title character, sung in four-part male voices; the remaining roles are taken by the Wife, the Friend, and the Priest, each performed in multiple voices. The three comforters attempt to bring solace on the day of execution, but the Condemned’s own inner strength enables him to face his death with equanimity: “I need no heaven. The earth shall one day be enough. All men are my brothers.” Although The Condemned was never produced, it led by indirection to Blitzstein’s conception of a larger work, a full-scale opera presenting the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Blitzstein’s biographer, Eric A. Gordon, relates that during the composer’s visit to Rome in 1959, Italian music critic Fedele D’Amico, having remembered The Condemned, gave him an anarchist pamphlet describing Sacco and Vanzetti as “two victims of American-Dollar Justice.” The tract moved Blitzstein to study the history of the case, and he concluded that it had the makings of an opera. It was while he was still considering alternative means of treatment that the Ford Foundation announced its grant of $950,000 to four opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, for the production of new American works. Blitzstein obtained a Ford Foundation grant of $15,000, payable over two years, for his proposed opera, Sacco and Vanzetti, optioned for production by the Metropolitan.
Cries of outrage were heard from conservative journalists when the historical theme of the commissioned work became known. One of the strongest invectives was hurled by George Sokolsky, who made apparent reference to Blitzstein’s 1958 testimony in an executive session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities that he had been a member of the Communist Party between 1938 and 1949. The columnist could not understand how the Metropolitan Opera had agreed to stage an opera “about a pair of anarchists . . . written by one who at a telling period in the history of his country was a Communist which means that he had submitted to the discipline of the Kremlin—a government which since 1917 was an enemy of his country.”
Fully predictable, these expressions of right-wing anger were a minor irritant; Blitzstein’s problems with Sacco and Vanzetti were artistic rather than political. Perhaps it was simply too late in his career for him to shoulder a major operatic assignment on his own. The undertaking of a vast musical drama was particularly daunting because Blitzstein insisted on writing his own libretto, a task that he had recently performed with difficulty. In a 1951 letter to his close friend Mina Curtiss, written while working on his Broadway opera Reuben Reuben, he lamented, “Why the hell can’t I have a collaborator at this point?” The opera took Blitzstein six years to complete and closed during a Boston tryout in 1955. Now, the subject that Blitzstein was to dramatize and score was the most formidable he had ever chosen; the complexity of the Sacco and Vanzetti life histories and of the related trials would require extensive study and pruning of source material by Blitzstein before he could make substantial headway in penning words or music.
It is small wonder that the two-year grant period expired without delivery of Blitzstein’s work product to the Metropolitan, and in November 1960 the Ford Foundation declined his request for an additional payment of $7,500. In many ways, Blitzstein began to exhibit symptoms of writer’s block. Even casual inquiries about his progress enraged him, as he diverted his attention from the opera project by filling his calendar with vacations, travel, minor compositions, and an engagement to teach play-writing (hardly his strong suit) at Bennington College during the 1962–63 academic year.
In November 1963 he traveled to Martinique, where he planned to spend the winter in a villa near the town of Frégate-François on the island’s Atlantic coast. He left his drafts of Sacco and Vanzetti behind, telling a friend, composer David Diamond, that he intended to work instead on his score for a one-act opera based on Bernard Malamud’s story “Idiots First.” He did not live to complete either of these works; the public learned in a shocking Associated Press news report of January 24, 1964, that Blitzstein was “killed in an auto accident Wednesday night [January 22] on the West Indian island of Martinique” where he had been “working on several new operas, including one based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case.”
This version of Blitzstein’s death lasted only one day. On January 25, the New York Times published a police announcement of “the arrest of three sailors on charges of having fatally beaten the American composer Marc Blitzstein.” The police said that “two Portuguese sailors and one from Martinique, whose names were not released, got into a dispute with the composer Tuesday night and beat him.” The details, according to the New York Times, were “sketchy.” The police had “taken the composer to a hospital, where he died, after treatment, 24 hours later.” The three suspects had been “drunk at the time of the attack on the composer.”
An attorney for the Blitzstein family had told the New York Times about information given a family member by twenty-eight-year-old William Milam, U.S. vice consul in Martinique, that the police were investigating “something suspicious about the death.” The Philadelphia Bulletin also quoted Milam as saying that “the facts show it was a robbery.” The U.S. consular report of February 3, 1964, linked the attack on Blitzstein to his composition of Sacco and Vanzetti, stating that “the victim was visiting those dives [where he encountered the sailors] to find color for the opera he was writing here.”
From the hints dropped in these sources, Blitzstein’s friends in America formed their own speculations about the circumstances of the Martinique assault. Composer Virgil Thomson opined that the “dispute” between the composer and his assailants was a quarrel about politics. The alternative theory that Blitzstein had visited the wrong part of town in search of local color could have rung true to some who were familiar with the intended plot of Sacco and Vanzetti: one of the characters was to be a Portuguese murder convict, Celestino Madeiros.
The brief accounts of the attackers’ sentencing added little information to the public’s understanding of the crime. On April 1, 1965, the New York Times reported: “Two Portuguese sailors and a Martinique youth were convicted today of assault and theft in connection with the death of the American composer Marc Blitzstein. The Portugese sentences of 14 months [Alfred Mendez Rodriguez, age thirty-four] and three years [Armando Fernandez, age twenty-six] respectively.” The “Martinique youth,” Daniel Yves Charles Nicolas, only seventeen, after a trial held in secret because of his minority status, received a fourteen-month suspended sentence and three years’ probation. The reason that none of the sailors was charged with homicide was evidently the absence of an intent to kill.
More precise details of the verdict rendered by three judges and nine jurors are contained in a judgment entered March 31, 1965, by the trial court (Cour d’Assises) of Martinique. The text identifies Armando Fernandez as the principal criminal, who, in violation of provisions of the French Penal Code (deriving from the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810), “intentionally” beat and wounded Blitzstein in circumstances where the blows and injuries were “inflicted without the intent to cause death but nevertheless resulted in it.” The other two defendants were convicted of having “in the same circumstances of time and place” stolen from Blitzstein “the sum of ninety francs, a half dollar, a pair of pants, car keys and a wristwatch,” under circumstances justifying the application of penal laws to the teenage defendant. According to the verdict, the crimes committed by the three sailors involved elements of both aggravation and mitigation. Blitzstein’s unintended death increased the maximum penalty for Fernandez’s attack to imprisonment for a term of ten to twenty years; the robbery entailed an enhanced maximum prison sentence of five to ten years because the crime was perpetrated at night by two or more persons. All the penalties actually imposed, however, were far below these authorized ranges, since the court and the jury found that the defendants were entitled to the benefit of “extenuating circumstances.” As was typical in French verdicts of the era, the nature of extenuating circumstances that were weighed in favor of Blitzstein’s attackers is left unstated. The juvenile defendant escaped his legal ordeal with only a suspended prison sentence and a term of probation to admonish lightly his role in Blitzstein’s death; his mother was ordered to pay a civil fine to reimburse the cost of his condemnation. The Guadeloupe-Martinique newspaper, France-Antilles, in an article of April 2, 1965, justified the generous treatment of the minor by evidence that his participation in the crimes was “minimal.”
Lillian Hellman, whose play The Little Foxes received an operatic setting in Blitzstein’s Regina (1949), was dissatisfied with the outcome of the investigation and trial; she decided to explore the case anew. In his 1989 biography Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein, Eric Gordon summarizes the fruitless result of Hellman’s mission to Martinique aboard Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel’s luxurious yacht: “She told [the consul] how she felt that Marc had not been properly cared for. William Milam and James DeCou [the U.S. Public Information Officer] understood her grief but patiently laid out the facts of the case. It was a confirmation of her worst fears. She invited the consul to lunch on the yacht, and that was the investigation.” In the biography, Gordon undertakes a detailed reconstruction of the assault on the composer. The sources of his account apparently included interviews or communications with Milam and DeCou, with whom Hellman had spoken, but there is no indication that he had access to any judicial findings.
Gordon relates that on the night of January 21, 1964, after dining with George and Lollie Peckham, new friends he had made in Martinique, Blitzstein did not return to his villa nearby. Instead, he drove across the island into Fort-de-France. The biographer states that the purpose of Blitzstein’s nocturnal visit was “to check out the scene down at the waterfront bars where the sailors and merchant seamen liked to drink. Shortly before midnight, he fell in with three such types, two Portuguese and a native Martiniquan, and together they toured several of the low-class dives around the Place de Stalingrad.”
Disaster followed. “As they drank, Blitzstein fished for bills from his wallet, revealing the tidy sum he was carrying. After two or three hours, en route to the next bar, Blitzstein and one of his three companions slipped into a nearby alleyway, the lure of sex in the air. The other two followed. Then suddenly, all three set upon him. They beat him severely, robbed him of his valuables, and left him there in the alley stripped of every piece of clothing but his shirt and socks. Hearing his cries and moans, policemen found him between three and four in the morning and took him to Clarac Hospital.” At the hospital Blitzstein at first told the staff that he had been injured in a car accident but later confided to Vice Consul Milam that he had been “robbed and beaten by three Venezuelans, which is what he believed his companions were.” According to Gordon’s account, Blitzstein also “admitted to some sexual advances with the men,” but asked that this statement be kept confidential. Acting at Blitzstein’s request, the consulate telegraphed his sister that he was hospitalized in an auto accident; she was further advised that her presence was needed. In the evening of January 22, Blitzstein died of his injuries. Gordon reflects, “What to three sailors seemed like a merry, drunken episode of beating up a queer and humiliating him by leaving him naked and stealing his money turned fatal under less than ideal hospital conditions to a man with a weak liver and in need of a hernia operation.”
Martinique police found about $400 of Blitzstein’s money in a cabin on the vessel of the three arrested sailors. Gordon notes that, in his conversation with American officials, “Police Chief Georges Fluchaire . . . spoke in confidential tones of his knowledge of Blitzstein as . . . a man of strange morals.”
The view of Eric Gordon that Blitzstein’s death resulted from a misadventure in the search for “rough trade” sex accords with entries in the memoirs of his friend, American composer Ned Rorem. Marc Blitzstein, Rorem noted, “forever championed the working class but avoided rubbing elbows with them unless they were rough trade . . . he was murdered by rough trade on the isle of Martinique by three seafarers of the very type he had spent a lifetime defending.” However, not everyone in the creative arts community is persuaded that the circumstances of Blitzstein’s death are established beyond doubt. Film director and actor Tim Robbins, in his book on the filming of Cradle Will Rock, leaves open the issue of the assailants’ motivation: “Whether his murder was a result of gay bashing, a robbery gone awry, or a combination of both is impossible to know for sure.”
When William Milam spoke to me in a telephone interview in February 2008, his memories of Blitzstein’s death were remarkably bright. Over the course of his distinguished career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Milam rose from his position as junior consular officer in Martinique to ambassadorships in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 2003 he became a Woodrow Wilson Center Senior Policy Scholar in Washington, D.C. Milam recalls that when Blitzstein arrived in Martinique, he registered at the consulate. Milam was aware that the newcomer was a composer, but only in the wake of the later tragedy did he come to understand Blitzstein’s eminence in the American music world. Since Blitzstein was wintering in Frégate-François, Milam met him only occasionally after his registration. The two men crossed paths from time to time at the U.S. Information Services Library.
By an odd coincidence, their last encounter was early in the evening on the fateful date of January 21, 1964. After leaving the consulate at the end of the day’s work, Milam found that he could not immediately drive home because his parked car was blocked in by other cars. To while away time until the obstruction cleared, he headed for a bar in a nearby hotel. Blitzstein, seated at a barroom table with two male companions (neither of them, Milam reflected later, could have been among the attackers), waved to Milam, inviting him to join them. Milam did so, and as the conversation proceeded in French, the vice consul had a comforting thought: he had never prided himself on his command of French, but Blitzstein clearly was laboring under greater difficulties with the language.
In the following midday, Milam received a call from a staff member of Clarac Hospital, who asked him to visit an American citizen who was under their care following a car accident. When Milam arrived at the hospital, he found Blitzstein lying on a gurney in a hallway. Milam had previously been given to understand that the injured man had either been involved in a collision or had been hit by a car while walking. At some point, however, Blitzstein gestured to him to come close and whispered that he had been attacked. Milam does not recall Blitzstein confessing to having made sexual advances. It was only later that the vice consul received a more detailed account of the attack from his friend, police chief Fluchaire, and it may be that Blitzstein made his admission to him. The police chief told Milam that the sailors were after Blitzstein’s money, plain and simple; he had been “throwing his money around in the bars.” The sailors pulled him outside in pursuit of his cash; the victim had chosen a “rough area” for his bar-hopping.
During his hospital visit, Milam pondered over Blitzstein’s urgent need for medical attention, and his mind shot back to his barroom conversation of the day before when Blitzstein had shown his woeful limitations in French. The vice consul firmly believed that the patient must have an English-speaking physician taking part in his care; he arranged for a doctor of mixed American and French parentage to be present at the examination. The medical intervention was, however, unable to save Blitzstein’s life.
Milam learned the cause of death from a Martinique investigative magistrate, whom he knew socially. The magistrate attributed the death to éclatement de foie (bursting of the liver). From this pronouncement, Milam deduced that the three sailors not only beat Blitzstein savagely but probably kicked him as he lay on the ground.
Answering a question that nags at my mind, Milam is inclined to agree with the hypothesis, expounded in Eric Gordon’s biography, that the sailors stripped Blitzstein to stigmatize him as a homosexual. Another puzzle of the case still eludes him: it is not clear how the police were able to identify and arrest the assailants. Milam doubts that Blitzstein could have been of much help to the investigation. (It should be noted, though, that in the hospital the mortally injured man had been close to correct in referring to the Portuguese as “Venezuelans”; they had taken Venezuelan citizenship.) Milam speculates that police work may have been aided by the fact that there were usually few vessels in Fort-de-France’s harbor.
When the sailors’ cases came up for trial, Milam’s friend, the investigative magistrate, called him to request his testimony. But Milam’s superior, Consul Arva Floyd, did not want him to testify, since he, like information officer James DeCou, wanted as little publicity as possible for an act of violence in the Caribbean paradise. The Blitzstein family was represented by a Martiniquan lawyer during courtroom proceedings.
Fifteen years after the assault on Blitzstein, the facts of his death, never disclosed with precision by Martinique authorities, left only hazy imprints on the islanders’ memories. In 1979 the New Yorker included in its series “Our Far-Flung Correspondents” Truman Capote’s account of his visit to an aristocratic Martinique woman living in Fort-de-France. Capote’s short piece “Music for Chameleons,” later the title story of a like-named collection, is haunted by references to the killing of Blitzstein. Observing that her guest seems to be a traveler, the elderly hostess inquires why he has not visited Martinique before. Unknowingly, she has turned their conversation toward Blitzstein, a subject that will be uncomfortable for them both:
“Martinique? Well, I felt a certain reluctance. A good friend was murdered here.”
Madame’s lovely eyes are a fraction less friendly than before. She makes a slow pronouncement: “Murder is a rare occurrence here. We are not a violent people. Serious, but not violent.”
“Madame” steers their talk in safer directions, but she cannot avoid returning to the murder.
“And so you had a friend who was murdered here?”
“Yes.”
“An American?”
“Yes. He was a very gifted man. A musician. A composer.”
“Oh, I remember—the man who wrote operas! Jewish. He had a mustache.”
“His name was Marc Blitzstein.”
Before the story ends, Capote’s hostess compulsively probes her further recollections of the American composer. He was a dinner guest when her husband was alive, played the piano and sang German songs. She asks Capote to remind her of the circumstances of the killing but balks when he calls it “an appalling tragedy.” It was “a tragic accident,” she insists and adds, “But our police caught those sailors. They were tried and sentenced and sent to prison in Guiana. . . . Those wretches ought to have been guillotined.” The author of In Cold Blood could not have been expected to agree, but he replied that he “wouldn’t mind seeing them at work in the fields in Haiti, picking bugs off coffee plants.”
For several anxious months in 1964, it was thought that the work-inprogress for Sacco and Vanzetti was lost. When Leonard Bernstein announced at a memorial concert for Blitzstein on April 19 that the opera manuscript had apparently disappeared, the audience, according to Eric Gordon, “reacted in audible shock.” On May 12, however, Theodore Strongin reported in the New York Times that the manuscript of the partly completed work “had been found in some cartons in the trunk of Mr. Blitzstein’s automobile, after it was put up for sale after his death.” A news release of the Metropolitan Opera added details: “The manager of the used car lot had noted some cartons in the trunk. When he read a statement from Mr. Bernstein in the newspapers referring to the missing manuscript he checked the cartons and found the partly completed opera.” Leonard Bernstein was quoted as saying that “the first and second acts seemed to be substantially finished and that the third act had been sketched.” He also commented that “the vast amount of material would have to be carefully studied before its final content could be determined.” A cautionary note, however, was sounded by the Metropolitan: the only part of the work the company had seen was an aria for Sacco, “With a Woman to Be.”
Eventually Bernstein declined to attempt completion of Sacco and Vanzetti; he also abandoned his attempt to finish Idiots First, on which Blitzstein had been working in Martinique.
American composer Leonard J. Lehrman, an admirer of Blitzstein’s work, came to the rescue. He completed Idiots First in 1973; the opera was produced with a two-piano accompaniment by the Bel Canto Opera in New York and won the 1978 Off-Broadway Opera award as the “most important event of the season.” In 1992 the work received its orchestral premiere by the Center for Contemporary Opera at New York University.
Lehrman’s task of fashioning Sacco and Vanzetti into a performable opera was much more demanding. He told a symposium on December 1, 1995, of the fragmentary state in which he found Blitzstein’s manuscript. “Blitzstein told the Met [October 9, 1961] that as per the contract that he had, he had completed 75% of the libretto and 40% of the music. That was an exaggeration. You can see the music over there, and in sheer bulk there probably is about 40% of the music. But it contains multiple drafts of many, many scenes. I would say that he had completed 40% of parts of the music and 75% of the libretto.” Blitzstein completed only one scene, Act One, Scene 3, in which Sacco and Vanzetti are arrested; he had not undertaken any sketches of orchestration.
On August 17–19, 2001, Sacco and Vanzetti received its first complete performances, with piano, at the White Barn in Westport, Connecticut. The ill fortune that afflicted the opera since its conception continued to make its presence known. Although many reviewers praised the work, Joel Honig, in an article for Opera News, scathingly attacked Lehrman’s score as unfaithful to Blitzstein even though Honig had not attended a performance. The intemperate critic did not even spare Blitzstein from attack, charging that he had intentionally destroyed his last major work by suicidally inducing the sailors’ attack on the Martinique waterfront: “Early in 1964, while vacationing in Martinique, Blitzstein was robbed and savagely beaten to death by three sailors in an alley outside a waterfront dive. In retrospect, it seems almost suicidal that the normally circumspect composer should have taken such a risk. He could not have been overly preoccupied with Sacco and Vanzetti, or concerned that such a heavy-duty pickup could go fatally awry.” It remains to be seen whether full-scale performances of Sacco and Vanzetti may someday cause the opera to triumph over Blitzstein’s violent death and to take its place among his memorable theater works, including The Cradle Will Rock, Regina, and the translation of the book and lyrics for the longest-running production of The Threepenny Opera.
The principal biographical and bibliographical sources on Marc Blitzstein are Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989); and Leonard J. Lehrman, Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005). I have also cited reports of the Associated Press and the New York Times regarding the death of Blitzstein and the discovery of the Sacco and Vanzetti manuscript materials.
The following works of Marc Blitzstein are referred to in this chapter: Cain (a ballet, 1930), The Condemned (1932), The Cradle Will Rock (1936), Regina (1946–49), Reuben Reuben (1949–55), Juno (1957–59), Sacco and Vanzetti (1959–64, completed by Leonard J. Lehrman), Idiots First (1962–67, completed by Leonard J. Lehrman).
A copy of the judgment against Blitzstein’s assailants was provided to me with a letter in the names of the prosecutor and the presiding judge of the Court of Appeals of Fort-de-France.
Ned Rorem comments on Blitzstein’s death in his memoir Knowing When to Stop (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 104, 313. Tim Robbins’s speculations on alternative theories concerning Blitzstein’s death are quoted from his book, Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment (New York: Newmarket Press, 2000), 61.
Truman Capote’s Martinique travel piece, “Music for Chameleons,” appears in Music for Chameleons (New York: Random House, 1980), 3–12.
Symposia held in 1995 and 2001 on Leonard Lehrman’s completion of Blitzstein’s Sacco and Vanzetti are found respectively at Opera Journal 29, 1 (1996): 26–46; and http://www.artists-in-residence.com/ljlehrman/articles/operajournal8.html (accessed Oct. 5, 2007). Joel Honig’s harsh criticism of the work (which he had not seen performed) was published as “Dead Man Writing,” Opera News 66, 5 (2001): 88.
John Caldwell Ellis’s play, Blitzstein Strikes Back, with songs by Blitzstein, has been given readings by the Neighborhood Playhouse and the American Renaissance Theater Company in New York City. The three sailors who attacked Blitzstein recurrently appear as wordless intruders into the play’s action.