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About Regina

By Frank Loesser

Many important plays get "musicalized." That is, a composer and lyricist-adaptor, having found enough lyrical quality in a prose piece, supply it with music and rhymed words. In most instances they substitute with song what had been dialogue. When this is done effectively (in terms of faithful story telling) it is said that the adaptors have achieved "integration."

In turning The Little Foxes into Regina, Marc Blitzstein has accomplished something much more. Beyond delivering neat musical capsules that conveniently paraphrase steps in the narrative, Blitzstein gives a special magic illumination to the whole thing, making the already enormous emotion of the story even more wonderfully memorable than before.

I think this is because Blitzstein knows that the very purpose of song is to provide extravagant but somehow clear expression for emotional outburst. Time and time again in Regina, the composer-adaptor has found these outbursts and made them resound unforgettably for me. Some are like bells, others like thunder, some piteous and some sprightly, some viciously angry and others full of heroic triumph. But altogether they form more than a chain or series of illuminations. They make a bright new cloth out of the whole strong fabric of the original play - always true to its meaning, but never giving slavish or pious adherence to the mechanics of it. I think that this is the adaptor's special ability.

Blitzstein has made a sort of giant song of the entire piece - consciously and deftly. Yet along with his astounding craftsmanship, he has poured in all his sense of the emotional, his instinct for finding and coloring those exclamation points in human drama (tragic or comic) at which the speaking voice can no longer contain itself and emerges as music. With the same profound talent for the dramatic, his orchestral writing delivers not only an accompaniment to what is happening on stage, but the very feel and smell of it. I'm thinking at this moment of the hysterical melancholy of Birdie's "Lionnet" solo. Musing further, I recall the insistent sound of the wild percussion accompaniment to Horace's death scene. And now my mind fastens on the frighteningly inane quality Blitzstein achieved in a passage called "Deedle Doodle." In these, as well as in many more moments of wonder I get out of Regina, is reflected not mere craftsmanship or know-how. It is something animal and free. It does not have to reach for the cleverness of "integration." The integrity is in the soul - or the guts or the heart or whatever you want to call it - of Blitzstein himself.

(Reprinted from liner notes for New York City Opera recording (1958), made under the auspices of the Koussevitzky Foundation.)

See also Leonard Bernstein's 'Prelude to an Opening' and Lillian Hellman's 'An American Opera'