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A merican composer Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964) spent
much of 1932 planning and composing The Condemned, an
ambitious “choral opera” for four choirs and full orchestra,
inspired by the trial and execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Almost ninety years later, the project,
which Blitzstein considered his “best work” to date, has received
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little attention and still awaits its fi rst performance. The score
remains unpublished, despite the enthusiasm of such supporters as
Nadia Boulanger, and the composer’s own plans for performances
in the Soviet Union and England failed to materialize. Even so,
The Condemned occupies a unique position in Blitzstein’s output and
in American choral music: it may be the most extensive socially-
engaged choral work written by an American composer during
the Great Depression, and its themes would continue to occupy
Blitzstein’s imagination through the end of his life. 2

“The Idea for the Opera Has Burst Upon Me”
Marc Blitzstein was one of America’s most gifted composers,
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and one of the most underappreciated. A brilliant pianist who
studied composition at the Curtis Institute, and later in Europe
with Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, his life and
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career were cut short by a tragic and untimely death. While
he would later earn fame as one of America’s leading stage
composers and lyricists through his celebrated musical theater
masterpiece, The Cradle Will Rock (1937), and his successful
adaptation of Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1954), Blitzstein
struggled in the late 1920s and early 1930s to make a mark. His
one-act opera, Triple-Sec (1928), received 150 performances in
1930 as part of a theater revue; the sketch’s clever conceit, in
which an increasingly inebriated audience perceives the action
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onstage, won Blitzstein some early admirers. But his successive

attempts floundered. The esoteric Parabola and Circula (1929), in
which a cast of characters with geometric names explores the
complexities of various love relationships, never saw the stage.
Blitzstein’s next work, the biblically themed ballet Cain (1930), faced
a similar fate, with conductor Leopold Stokowski abandoning the
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project after only a few rehearsals. The composer’s send-up of
mythology, The Harpies (1931), would wait over twenty years for a
premiere, its commission withdrawn by the League of Composers
due to financial problems. Two incomplete opera sketches of the

same period, The Traveling Salesman and The Killers, did not proceed
beyond the earliest planning stages.

CHORAL JOURNAL June/July 2021 Volume 61 Number 11 33