Complete vocal score of BALLET BALLADS by Jerome Moross and John Latouche published for 70th Anniversary of Broadway Premiere
MIAMI (PRWEB) June 27, 2018 -- The Estate of Jerome Moross announced the publication of the complete vocal score of Ballet Ballads, the 1948 4-act musical by composer Jerome Moross and lyricist John Latouche. The score was published in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the musical’s world-premiere. The original performance of Ballet Ballads was on May 9, 1948 by the ANTA Experimental Theatre at New York’s Maxine Elliot Theatre. It was the first collaboration of composer Jerome Moross and lyricist John Latouche. 34-year-old Moross and Latouche, 4 years his junior, conceived of their initial partnership as a musical with four distinctly separate short American folk fables, performed together as a complete theater piece. The team described the work as a dance-opera.
Ballet Ballads is available through Amazon.com and other booksellers. It retails at $29.95 for the print edition and $18.00 on Kindle.
At the premiere, only three of the acts were performed, comprised of Susanna and the Elders, Willie the Weeper, and The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett. Riding Hood Revisited, a fourth act, was not included at the premiere. Each act was both musically and theatrically different in narrative and tone.
Six performances were scheduled for the Maxine Elliot Theatre. Following that, the producers moved the show to the Music Box Theatre. Yet, despite critical acclaim and audience raves, a variety of circumstances forced Ballet Ballads to close after only 62 performances. Two years later, the show was revived in Los Angeles at the Century Theatre and again in New York in 1961 at the East 74th Street Theatre. A change was made to the 1961 production in which Susanna and the Elders was swapped out for Riding Hood Revisited, the original fourth act.
According to Susanna Moross Tarjan, the daughter of the composer who produced and published the new edition, “the musical is extremely complex, offering four separate stories with lessons on American values that can be viewed as valid today as they were in post-World War II United States. My father voiced the idea that colleges, universities and community performing arts companies would find Ballet Ballads an attractive and viable vehicle for inter-arts collaboration because of the equal importance and place of dance, music, and theater to the production.”
The book was edited by Larry Moore, the well-known editor, orchestrator and arranger of musicals. The music score was prepared by conductor, composer Scott Tilley. Mariana Whitmer, Executive Director of the Society for American Music and scholar of film scores, Broadway musicals and American music has provided a short history of the production.
Act I Susanna and the Elders, a parable, was based on a biblical story from the Apocrypha. Susanna, a happily married woman, lives in a rural American town during the early 20th century. She is threatened by two evil men, Elders of her congregation. They demand that either she have intimate relations with them or be accused (falsely, of course,) of adultery. Virtuous Susanna refuses to submit to their advances and subsequently is forced to stand trial by the town’s Congregation for betraying her husband. She is found guilty and sentenced to death--that is, until the Parson, Daniel, is charged by God to reveal the truth and expose the lies of the horrific Elders. Happily, Susanna is cleared and the Elders are themselves punished.
Act II, based on a 1904 folk song, is the tale of Willie the Weeper, a very ordinary and bored young man, who is also an avid fan of marijuana. Through song and dance, Willie’s life is revealed via his drug-induced fantasies, taking the audience through seven stages of his disorganized and unfocused mind. Willie sees himself as he wishes he could be, rich, famous and a great lover, but he is also revealed as he really is, lonely, confused, and lost. The act ends with the introduction of the character, Cocaine Lil, who serves as a metaphor for the drugs that have influenced Willie, leaving him longing for love that he will never experience.
Act III is called The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, a mythic retelling of the life of the American folk hero. The story takes him from his birth in the backwoods of Tennessee to his death at the hands of the Mexican army at the Alamo.
The fourth act, Riding Hood Revisited, subtitled a silly symphony, reimagines the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood from an alternate perspective. Characters switch roles where instead of Red Riding Hood finding herself threatened by a hungry wolf, the Wolf becomes the victim of a lustful and seductive Red.
So many theater productions have received high praise and critical acclaim only to end up lost forever from a weak box office. If the critics at the time are to be believed, Ballet Ballads, despite its brief run offered more than just smart entertainment. It was a seminal work that eventually helped evolve the musical to a new kind of structure, the “sung-through” genre.
Highlights of the reviews of Ballet Ballads in 1948 were consistent raves:
Robert Sylvester of The Daily News said, “The Experimental Theater’s Ballet Ballads” is not only the best song and dance show ever attempted by a little theatre group but also—in this opinion at least—the best song and dance show to reach Broadway this season.”
Walter Terry of the New York Herald Tribune said, “Ballet Ballads has been a long time coming…the Experimental Theatre’s new production has come closest to arriving at the desired integration of drama, song and dance.”
Robert Garland of the New York Journal American, in describing the three acts of Ballet Ballads said, “Each nears perfection.”
Richard Watts from the New York Post said, “Nothing I have seen all season in the vital field of the American musical show has had the imagination, creative freshness and the theatrical intelligence revealed in the program of Ballet Ballads with which the embattled Experimental Theatre richly justified its existence in the final bill at Maxine Elliot’s Sunday night. . . Ballet Ballads is a tribute to the imagination in the theatre.”
This newly published score of all four acts of Ballet Ballads brings a significant American work out of the vault and into the daylight to be rediscovered and revived for new generations.
About the Composer
Jerome Moross’s career encompasses three spheres, Broadway, Hollywood, and the concert hall. He is best known to some audiences as the composer of the Academy Award-nominated score for William Wyler’s epic western, The Big Country (1958). An innovative score that challenged the status quo, it has influenced Western film scores ever since. Yet Moross also influenced the theatrical world with his unique approach to musical theater, including Ballet Ballads (1948) The Golden Apple (1954) and his interpretation of American urban mythology in Frankie and Johnny (1938), a work that combined American music and vernacular dance. Moross composed many important pieces that crossed genres and inspired a re-consideration of traditional attitudes.
Moross graduated from New York University in 1931 when he was only 18. During his senior year he simultaneously attended The Juilliard School as a conducting fellow. Moross generally felt that he did not need formal composition lessons, concluding that his musical education was perhaps best served by his experiences outside the classroom. “I had harmony, fugue, form, everything else. All the grammar you needed. But I always felt that I didn’t want to learn how somebody else writes. All he can do is show me how he writes. Besides, by the time I entered Juilliard I was already composing, and I felt that I was pretty good. . . . I did have a complete grounding in musical techniques. And I had already been playing in pit orchestras, so that I knew my orchestra inside out. So that was my training.” Moross was indeed composing. Paeans (1931), his first work, was conducted by Bernard Herrmann when it premiered in the Juilliard concert hall, and was published by Henry Cowell in his New Music Orchestra Series. Clearly influenced by the modernists, it features abundant dissonances, and at one point, quarter tones.
Moross met Aaron Copland in 1931 and was invited to join Copland’sYoung Composers’ Group, which included Herrmann, along with Elie Siegmeister, Arthur Berger, Lehman Engel, and Vivian Fine, among others. Through the group Moross became acquainted with other well-known composers and performers. Together they planned concerts and performed one another’s music. In a 1936 article Copland wrote, “Moross is probably the most talented of these men. He writes music that has a quality of sheer physicalness, music ‘without a mind,’ as it were.” Copland supported Moross’s work, recommending him to Ruth Page, for instance, and their careers would occasionally intersect, particularly in Hollywood. Moross’s next composition, Two Songs (Jabberwocky and Those Gambler’s Blues for low voice with piano), was performed at the first concert of the Young Composers Group held in 1933.
Moross turned to composing dramatic works early in his career, and focused initially on ballet. His first ballet, composed for the Charles Weidman Dance Group, was based on the legend of Paul Bunyan, titled Paul Bunyan: An American Saga (1934). While the music for this ballet has not survived, we may imagine that it was successful, since Moross almost immediately began composing another for Weidman. Called Biguine (1934), it was conceived originally as a dance piece, yet was eventually published (again, by Henry Cowell) as an orchestral work.
With the assistance of Herrmann, who had established himself in radio as a conductor, Moross supported himself beginning in 1935, by writing cue music for The March of Time, the popular radio show that ran from 1931-1942. It used actors to portray real people as it dramatized current events, and music was an important part of supporting the sense of realism. Moross was to compose cues for subsequent radio shows, including In Memory of a Hero, a work for the Free World Theatre in 1943.
Moross worked for Warner Bros. until 1945, and he generally enjoyed his experiences as a studio arranger.
During this time Moross continued his development of dramatic compositions with Ballet Ballads, a set of four short works composed between 1941 and 1946, although not performed together until 1948. With lyrics by John Latouche (1914-1956) each piece presents an unconventional adaptation of well-known narratives. Susanna and the Elders is the biblical story set as a revivalist camp meeting; Willie the Weeper and The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, present the well-known urban and rural (respectively) American folk tales; and Riding Hood Revisited: Simple Symphony in E Flat Major is a provocatively updated version of the story, which would later be orchestrated as Variations on a Waltz.
While in Hollywood, Moross was able to have some of his own music performed. Susanna and the Elders was given its premier performance as a concert work (Moross referred to it as an oratorio) on March 9, 1941, by the Hollywood Theatre Alliance with Alfred Newman conducting. Biguine was performed in 1944 at one of Franz Waxman's Symphony Under the Stars concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. In November of the same year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic included Moross's Symphony No. 1 in the opening concert of the season conducted by Alfred Wallenstein.
In a 1979 interview, Moross remarked that he was at work on a second symphony, and a quantity of extant sketches attest to this. However, his last compositions are for chamber works. Moross’s last two works are scored for string quartets: Sonata for Piano Duet and String Quartet (1975) and Concerto for Flute with String Quartet (1978). Moross was excited about his final instrumental works, sensing that audiences would appreciate his new sound. As he described his music, “It uses classical grammar and makes modern music with it. . . . It writes music that an audience will like, will listen to; not because I want to just coddle the audience, but because that’s the way I feel.”xxiii Indeed, this was an approach that Moross adhered to throughout his entire career, music that utilizes traditional modes and infuses them with popular American idioms.
Moross returned to dramatic composition once more, composing a single one-act opera, Sorry, Wrong Number (1977), based on the radio play (1943) and later film (1948) by Lucille Fletcher, the former wife of Bernard Herrmann. Moross once commented that it had always been his intent to “change the theatre” to make it operatic, and he cited The Golden Apple as the premiere example. Acknowledging that his attempt may have been unsuccessful, and that “The theatre doesn’t want me. . . .” Moross decided to move into “pure opera.” With Sorry, Wrong Number, Moross ventured into unfamiliar territory by setting prose to music for the first time. As he later noted, “[Fletcher’s] prose is beautifully done and it allowed me to even get ariettas throughout the thing. I trained myself for the first time to write to prose, and now I’m no longer afraid of trying to get a play and turning it into an opera.”
Moross died of heart failure and a stroke on July 25, 1983.
About the Lyricist
John Latouche, born in 1914 in Baltimore, Maryland. His family moved to Richmond, VA when he was four months old. Latouche graduated from public school and, thanks to a scholarship he won in a literary contest, moved to New York City in 1932. He attended Riverdale Country School for a year, Columbia University for two years, then left school to concentrate on writing for the theatre, contributing music and/or lyrics to a number of musical revues on and off-Broadway, as well as writing nightclub material for a variety of performers.
His first great success came with the musical cantata Ballad for Americans, a 13-minute paean to American democracy for soloist and full orchestra and chorus (music by Earl Robinson.) Written to be the finale of the Federal Theatre Project's musical revue, Sing for Your Supper, it achieved national success when performed on the radio by Paul Robeson. It led to the opportunity to write lyrics for the hit Broadway musical, Cabin in the Sky (music by Vernon Duke, book by Lynn Root), which starred Ethel Waters and was subsequently filmed by MGM under the direction of Vincente Minnelli, featuring Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, and Lena Horne. Latouche's second hit song, Taking a Chance on Love, comes from Cabin.
Duke and Latouche followed the show with the songs for two short-lived star vehicles, Banjo Eyes (for Eddie Cantor) and The Lady Comes Across (for Jessie Matthews). World War II intervened in their collaboration; Latouche served in the Seabees.
He resumed his Broadway career in 1944, writing the lyrics for two unsuccessful operettas, Rhapsody (from the music of Fritz Kreisler, adapted by Robert Russell Bennett) and Polonaise (from the music of Frederic Chopin, adapted by Bronislaw Kaper.) Three critically acclaimed but financially unsuccessful musicals for which Latouche did book and lyrics followed: Beggar's Holiday (1946) music by Duke Ellington), an interracial contemporary version of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, starring Alfred Drake as Macheath, from which emerged the jazz standard, Take Love Easy; Ballet Ballads four one-act "dance cantatas"; and The Golden Apple both with music by Moross, which reset Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey in 1900 in the American Northwest and won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. It also gave Latouche and Moross the hit song, Lazy Afternoon.
Next came The Vamp, in 1955, a vehicle for Carol Channing (music by James Mundy, co-book writer Sam Locke). A spoof of the early days of silent films and loosely based on the life and career of Theda Bara, it was a critical and commercial failure on Broadway, despite receiving largely positive reviews on its pre-Broadway tour.
In July of 1956, the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe opened to rave reviews. Though the two were unlikely cohorts--Moore a patrician family man, Latouche an openly gay man --their work ultimately bore the mark of a shared appreciation of the Tabor story, and, after considerable research and a "fact-finding" trip to Leadville, Colorado, a deep understanding of how the story might make for some especially rich musical theatre.
Latouche died of a sudden heart attack at his Vermont home at the age of 41, having just completed revisions on The Ballad of Baby Doe and while at work on revisions to his lyrics for Candide (to Leonard Bernstein's music), produced posthumously on Broadway in December, 1956.
Stephen Belth, Arts Marketing Network, +1 (516) 359-2548, [email protected]
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