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dramatic thing, because they couldn't keep themselves out of the
play. That was the trouble with Auden's early work. Of course
Auden had no real sense of the theater anyway, but he did a few
pieces with Isherwood, who had a tiny sense of the theater. Auden
never could do much with those early works; he would never have
gotten into the translation and libretto business-and he wrote
several librettos, as a matter of fact, for very good composers-if it
hadn't been for Chester Kallman. Vulgar as Kallman's mentality
was, he knew what a stage was.
Trilling:
Could we talk for a moment about Marc Blitzstein's work?
When he became a Stalinist, did you feel that he was using musical
composition effectively for social purposes?
Thomson:
His most effective work was his big Commie opera, or
Singspiel, The Cradle Will Rock.
Oh yes. And that he did within a
very few months after Eva's death, as a kind of homage to her and her
teaching, and to Kurt Weill, because the Kurt Weill German operas,
which had been made with Brecht, were Communist morality plays.
Trilling:
Did you have a sense that the Brecht-Weill team was doing
very much in terms of influencing people? Were they influential
when their work was first done here?
Thomson:
t
was present at all that, and I knew Weill from Europe. He
postponed his influence deliberately, because he no sooner arrived
than the whole world of music, including-Broadway, wanted to use
him. He had a little operation
to
do, which was to sever all his
Communist connections, so he cut off the Brecht friendship, he cut
off the collaborations, he wouldn't let his wife appear in any major
role on the stage. He just sat this out; he prevented me from
producing M
ahagonny
at Hartford. When we first spoke about it, he
kept saying, "Yes, yes," but then he arranged so we couldn't do it.
Trilling: Mahagonny
didn't begin
to
have any effect upon people in
this country, to my knowledge, until the mid-fifties.
Thomson:
No. Weill became a model of show-writing to show-writers
very early.
In
the early forties Dick Rodgers said to me that obviously
Kurt Weill was a remarkable composer of great charm and great
ability. "And don't you admire him?" says he. I said, "Indeed I do.
As a matter of fact, he's the only writer on Broadway who knows how
to
write a finale." And Dick Rodgers said, "What's a finale?" You
see, Victor Herbert knew what a finale was. But there were no finales
in Rodgers's time.
Trilling:
Did your world of musical composition and idea have a
natural connection with the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein,
people like that?
