Eisler, Broadway Melody, Blades, Solti, Mozart

Eisler and Brecht in 1950.

Via Wikimedia Commons.

Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht, "In Praise of Learning"

"In Praise of Learning" is one of three rare 78s of leftist songs recorded around the time of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler’s first visit to the United States in early 1935. The record featured the New Singers conducted by Lan Adomian, baritones Mordecai Bauman and Felix Groveman, and alternately Marc Blitzstein and Eisler himself at the piano. Eisler had been writing music with socialist themes for almost a decade, partnering with playwright Bertolt Brecht for several political works for the theatre. This record encapsulates the Eisler-Brecht partnership with tracks like "United Front," "The Soup Song," "The Internationale," "We’ve Not Forgotten," "Rise Up," and the titular "In Praise of Learning."

Via Wikimedia Commons.

Broadway Melody of 1940, draft screenplay and dialogue cutting continuity

Please don’t monkey with Broadway! The plot is predictable: down-and-out entertainer (Fred Astaire) meets Broadway star (Eleanor Powell) and makes good—with a few stumbles and a mistaken identity or two along the way—but we’re in it for the dancing. After his 1930s success with Ginger Rogers at RKO, Astaire’s first starring role in an MGM musical came opposite Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940, their only on-screen collaboration. The film, directed by Norman Taurog, co-stars George Murphy as Astaire’s first dancing partner, to a score by Cole Porter including standards “Begin the Beguine,” “I Concentrate on You,” and “I've Got My Eyes on You.”

Shown here are documents from the beginning and end of production: a draft screenplay with revisions throughout, dated May 18, 1939, and film editor Blanche Sewell’s copy of the dialogue cutting continuity script dated February 3, 1940, only a week before the film’s February 9 release. In the scene below—most of it cut from the final film— Murphy's character storms out for a night on the town after Powell's character breaks off a date. Astaire's character, though named Johnny Brett in the film, is affectionately dubbed "Freddie" in this screenplay.

Rubén Blades, Antecedente and the 1989 Grammy Awards

Rubén Blades Bellido de Luna was born in Panama City, Panama on July 16, 1948. He is an internationally prominent and popular musician, actor and politician, whose career as a singer and composer of Latin popular music styles has won him many accolades, including multiple Grammy and Latin Grammy awards. He played a key role in the salsa music scene in New York in the 1970s. Blades graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985 with a degree in International Law, served a term as Panama’s Minister of Tourism (2004-2009), and founded the political party known as the Papa Egoró (Mother Earth) Movement during his 2009 campaign for the Panamanian presidency. 

The predominant musical genre in the collection is salsa, but Blades’s musical career is distinguished by his many collaborations with musicians across genres, including his work in musical theater forms. The Archives consisted initially of materials assembled by Alison Weinstock, a resident of the Boston area who maintains a website dedicated to Blades’s work, but now includes additional materials donated by his friends in the music industry, his girlfriend in the 1970s, Paula Campbell (inspiration for the song “Paula C”), and Blades himself. Scores, commercial and privately-produced recordings, and handwritten lyrics document his musical career, while contracts, scripts, business documents, political correspondence, and fan mail allow researchers insight into both popular entertainment and Latin American political history. The collection also includes ephemera like his backstage pass to the 31st Grammy awards, in 1989.

Georg Solti in Amsterdam in 1974.

Photo by Rob Croes, via Wikimedia Commons.

Georg Solti, annotated score for Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Berlioz’s first symphony, composed in 1830, chronicles his obsession with the actress Harriet Smithson, whom he later married. An exemplar of program music, the work follows the artist’s despairing, hallucinatory pursuit of his beloved.

This annotated copy owned by Sir Georg Solti chronicles 19 sets of performances from 1959-1992. A Gramophone review of Solti's first recording of Symphonie fantastique in 1972 notes, “The Chicago musicians play superbly and enthusiastically for Sir Georg. Together they find more convincing music in the first three movements than I can recall having heard come out of any single performance. This is due mostly to the prodigies of imagination and sensitivity which Solti lavishes upon Berlioz’s hare-brained musical structures—diligently searching out and developing the tiniest shreds whereby development can be made out.” The recording garnered Solti two of his still-unmatched 31 Grammy awards, spanning recordings of orchestral music, choral works, and several operas (like his 1984 rendition of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro).

Shown here are the inside cover of the score, listing the dates and orchestra for each of the 19 performance groups, including tours and recordings; the closing page of the third movement, "In the country"; and the opening of the fourth movement, "March to the scaffold." The markings are remarkably, even dizzyingly detailed, allowing Solti to quickly attend to a passage's tempo, meter, dynamics, character, and more while rehearsing or performing. Even more fascinating, they find the conductor in dialogue with himself across time, refining or rejecting the details of his previous interpretations in order to arrive at something new.

Hover over the images to view annotations explaining some of Solti's markings.