Philly-born Marc Blitzstein is the great composer you’ve half heard of

Is the world finally ready for Philadelphia-born composer Marc Blitzstein and his outspoken, unfiltered pieces?

What promised to be his magnum opus, Sacco and Vanzetti, was left unfinished at his death, but was completed this century and is finally being staged for its New York City premiere Sept. 10-11 at Lehman College Studio Theatre in the Bronx. It can’t help but renew attention to Blitzstein, who has a historic birthplace marker at 419 Pine St. and was the influential missing piece in American music, exerting a profound impact on Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Broadway from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The Communist overtones in his work that polarized 20th-century listeners — his best known for his 1937 pro-labor musical The Cradle Will Rock — plus the circumstances of his 1964 death, a gay hate crime on the island of Martinique, make him all the more intriguing in the 21st century, just as living memory of the composer threatens to slip away.

In 1960, with a prestigious Ford Foundation grant and an option from the Metropolitan Opera, Blitzstein began to dramatize Sacco and Vanzetti, based on one of the most debated miscarriages of justice in the 20th century. It remained unfinished at the time of his death.

By luck, the unfinished opera was discovered by a Long Island used-automobile dealer in the trunk of what had once been Blitzstein’s car, which he had left with friends before his fatal trip to Martinique, according to the Eric A. Gordon biography Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein.

Also by chance, composer Leonard Lehrman discovered a complete outline of the opera that Blitzstein wrote in the back of a book. Combined with so much fine music from Blitzstein’s numerous failed projects — Bernstein called them “fallen angels” — Lehrman knew that completion was possible.

“Blitzstein personified for me so many of the musical and social political ideals that I embraced,” said Lehrman, now 73, who has completed other Blitzstein works and has written 12 operas of his own. “My teacher Earl Kim at Harvard said, ‘You’re between two stools. You have one foot in the classical world and the other in the popular theater world.’ And that’s exactly what Blitzstein had.”

The charismatic Blitzstein, with his iconic mustache and sleek profile, defied all personality types. He lived in a humble studio apartment in New York’s East Village, but frequently bounced back to Philadelphia and the genteel Brandywine Valley. He was often the long-term guest of better-off friends, drove a Peugeot , loved martinis and men as tough as he was. It’s fair to say that he’s one of the more fierce artistic personalities to ever come out of Philadelphia.

His Odessa-born parents founded the Blitzstein Bank of Philadelphia, which thrived from 1891 to 1930 at Fourth and Lombard, making loans to newly arrived immigrants. Young Blitzstein studied composition at the Curtis Institute and was such an accomplished pianist that, at age 21, he played the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

A devoted student of Marxism (and member of the Communist Party throughout the 1940s), Blitzstein may have witnessed the every-which-way alliances of the Philadelphia labor movement. Silk mills in Wilkes-Barre were striking. Philadelphia longshoremen were secretly loading explosives to be sent to Poland to fight Russia. Yet the Socialist-Communist movement improved working conditions in 1930s eastern Pennsylvania and had gained such momentum that 1935 photos survive of a massive rally at Philadelphia’s City Hall under a waving hammer-and-sickle flag.

That plus personal tragedy — Blitzstein’s three-year marriage to novelist Eva Goldbeck ended when she died from anorexia in 1936 — sent him into the feverish composition of The Cradle Will Rock. After the production was shut down by the Works Progress Administration at its 1937 Broadway opening for being potentially volatile, the cast (led by director Orson Welles) migrated to another theater, where Blitzstein accompanied them on piano. The song “Nickel Under the Foot” established Blitzstein as a potent theater composer, and the show is periodically revived, most significantly by Saratoga Opera in 2017, led by longtime Blitzstein champion John Mauceri and recorded by the Bridge label.

Blitzstein’s life was dotted with periodic successes and many might-have-beens.

“He could’ve written sonatas and symphonies like the rest of us,” composer Copland once said, “but that wasn’t interesting to him. He wanted to say something.”

In fact, Blitzstein often sacrificed his own musical personality to the subject at hand — a practice that Stephen Sondheim later adopted. “Sondheim was more internally focused, more concerned with emotional impact,” said Lehrman. “Blitzstein was more interested in the social consciousness involved.”.

He loved the gray areas between singing, speaking, and ranting — his characters were often outraged — in what Copland called “a subtle use of talky prose rhythm over a musical background.” Often, that translated into showpieces for great singing actors. Blitzstein’s 1941 “No for an Answer” had the young Carol Channing singing the uproarious seduction song “I’m Fraught” that gives an unfiltered glimpse of Blitzstein’s own love life.

Like a seasoned sociologist, Blitzstein was concerned with presenting stories in a cultural context. Regina, his 1949 operatic adaptation of the Lillian Hellman play The Little Foxes, uses vintage popular music to place the moneygrubbing characters in 1900 Alabama. His 1954 translation of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera bridged the gap between 1920s Germany and modern America. The Irish charm of Blitzstein’s 1959 Broadway show Juno (adapted from Juno and the Paycock) yielded his best-known song, “I Wish It So.” His failed 1955 musical Reuben Reuben, which closed on its pre-Broadway tour and inspired one patron to slug Blitzstein on his way out of the theater, was set in New York’s Little Italy — with music almost-ready made for repurposing for the Italian immigrant story of Sacco and Vanzetti. And Blitzstein had begun to do that shortly before his death.

The trials of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists who were charged with murder during a 1920 armed robbery and executed in 1927 based on shaky evidence, had been a flashpoint for anti-immigrant sentiment and still inspired heated controversy in 1960 when Blitzstein announced he was writing the opera. The project was both hailed and protested, partly because of Blitzstein’s Communist affiliations. The Met was reported to cancel the option, and though lines of communication remained open between Blitzstein and Met chief Rudolf Bing, he chose to leave his Sacco and Vanzetti manuscripts in the United States and take other projects to Martinique.

There, in January 1964, a night on the town left Blitzstein badly beaten and in an alley; he died soon after. Three young sailors were tried and convicted on manslaughter charges. .

Picking up where a singular talent like Blitzstein left off was a considerable barrier to completing his unfinished works, though Lehrman first got the estate permission to finish Blitzstein’s Idiots First (based on Bernard Malamud) and progressed on to the steeper challenge of Sacco and Vanzetti, finishing the project in 2001.

Though the finished opera has been presented with piano accompaniment, the pandemic shutdown stymied efforts to present the orchestral version in New York.

But then, nothing in or around Blitzstein has ever been easy. A fundamental difference between Blitzstein and Bernstein is that Bernstein wanted the world to love him, while Blitzstein just wanted the world to hear him. And now it will.

The staged orchestral premiere of “Sacco and Vanzetti” will be presented by the After Dinner Company, with the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus & Orchestra, at 7 p.m. Sept. 10 and at 3 p.m. Sept. 11 at Lehman College Studio Theatre, 250 Bedford Park Blvd. West in the Bronx. Information and Reservations: 516-825-2939.