USOperaWeb - Letter from the Baumans

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Dear USOperaWeb,

"Marc the Blitz" was Betty Bean's invention; she was differentiating the two Marcs - the other was "Mark the Shoe," aka Mark Schubart, who was a music critic at The New York Times and Dean of The Juilliard School. (Betty Randolph Bean was a wonder. She was a violinist, worked with Koussevitsky, was vice president of Boosey & Hawkes, represented Benjamin Britten & Peter Pears, and was Secretary of the American Soviet Music Society. She was very bright and funny. I have verses and limericks she wrote for and about Mordy. Betty lives in a nursing home in Oregon near her son.)

Mordy carefully read the feature on Marc Blitzstein and No for an Answer and found two errors in Blue's article. William Van Dyke was WILLARD. He was a documentary filmmaker who created the film department at the Museum of Modern Art. The other error, more important, is that Marc did not influence Aaron [Copland]. But he was a great influence on Leonard Bernstein.

Aaron was five years older than Marc. They both studied with [Nadia] Boulanger, but not at the same time. "Respect for each other" are the key words. It was a careful relationship. There were real political differences between them. Aaron was a wonderful good guy, maybe the "Purest Kind of a Guy." He was certainly interested in the workers' movement, and wrote a "May Day" song for a competition which he won, but he was not a "Gung ho" political activist. Aaron publicly and often acknowledged Marc's talent; Bill [composer William] Schuman derided Marc as "only a theater composer." Marc and Aaron were active members of the League of Composers, a progressive group.

Selections from No for an Answer were done in the Cleveland Popular Concert Attractions series we produced in 1947-48. [The concert was sponsored by the Progressive Citizens of America and took place on Sunday, January 18, 1948 at Severance Hall.] That was the first time an entire evening was devoted to Marc's works, with Marc at the piano. Mordy sang "Penny Candy" and "Francie" (to Muriel Smith) as well as "Emily" from The Airborne Symphony that night. Unless someone surreptitiously recorded it we have no record of that wonderful evening! Sad to say.

Regina is a great American opera, guaranteeing Marc's immortality as a composer. We hear that Lauren Flanagan will do it soon in Florida. Why doesn't Michael Tilson Thomas put on or encourage a Regina production?

Yours, Irma Commanday and Mordecai Bauman

Mordecai "Mordy" and Irma Commanday Bauman were friends and supporters of Marc Blitzstein throughout his life. Mordy and Irma met in 1941 singing together in the Benjamin Britten/W.H. Auden opera, Paul Bunyan [http://www.sandiego-online.com/opera/bunyan.stm]. Mordy was active in the musical life of Greenwich Village in the 1930s in the Workers' Music League, the Theater of Action, and singing and recording songs of Charles Ives, Elie Siegmeister, Marc Blitzstein, Hanns Eisler and others. He became a favorite singer of the left during the 1930s and 1940s (according to Eric Gordon's biography of Marc Blitzstein) and performed songs from No For An Answer throughout the 1940s. Mordy's credits also include Sean O'Casey's Within the Gates with Lillian Gish and directed by Melvyn Douglas; the Phoenix Theater production of Earl Robinson's and Waldo Salt's Sandhog, about the men who dug the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel; and the Broadway Revue Let Freedom Sing, in which he introduced the song "The House I Live In" by Lewis Allen and Earl Robinson. Mordy and Irma sublet Blitzstein's 12th Street apartment in 1960-61 and eventually moved down the block where they still live.