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''Street Scene'' is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, ''Street Scene'' is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Rice. It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera", intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947.〔(Tony Award for Best Original Score. )〕 Considered far more an opera than a musical, ''Street Scene'' is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's ''Threepenny Opera'' (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's ''West Side Story'' (1957). The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was," with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences, in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House".〔 Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped In a Ribbon and Tied In a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like To Be On Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed", an extended song-and-dance sequence. ==Background== In Germany, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Weill had already begun to use American jazz and popular song elements in his operas. After fleeing from Germany in 1933, he worked in Paris, then England, and then, beginning in 1935, in New York. He made a study of American popular and stage music and worked to further adapt his music to new American styles in his writing for Broadway, film and radio. He strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be both commercially and artistically successful.〔Thuleen, Nancy, ("Realism in Language and Music: Kurt Weill's Street Scene" ). May 1997, accessed May 4, 2008.〕 Weill wrote: : "It's my opinion that we can and will develop a musical-dramatic form in this country (America) but I don't think it will be called 'opera', or that it will grow out of the opera which has become a thing separate from the commercial theater, dependent upon other means than box-office appeal for its continuance. It will develop from and remain a part of the American theater – 'Broadway' theater, if you like. More than anything else, I want to be a part in that development."〔Taylor, p. 253.〕 Weill sought to create musical theatre that would "integrate drama and music, spoken word, song, and movement."〔Sanders, p. 359.〕 He further wrote: :"This form of theater has its special attraction for the composer, because it allows him to use a great variety of musical idioms, to write music that is both serious and light, operatic and popular, emotional and sophisticated, orchestral and vocal. Each show of this type has to create its own style, its own texture, its own relationship between words and music, because music becomes a truly integral part of the play – it helps deepen the emotions and clarify the structure.〔Quoted in Graziano, John. "Musical Dialects in Down in the Valley", ''A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill'', ed. Kim H. Kowalke (1986), New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 299.〕 Weill saw Rice's naturalistic play in 1930 and wanted to adapt it. As he wrote: :"It was a simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death. I saw great musical possibilities in its theatrical device – life in a tenement house between one evening and the next afternoon. And it seemed like a great challenge to me to find the inherent poetry in these people and to blend my music with the stark realism of the play."〔Sanders, p. 348.〕 In 1936, Weill met Rice in New York and suggested the adaptation, but Rice turned him down. After the successes of Weill's ''Knickerbocker Holiday'' in 1938, ''Lady in the Dark'' in 1940, and ''One Touch of Venus'' in 1943 (and after Weill had composed incidental music for Rice's ''Two on an Island'' in 1939), Weill asked again, and Rice agreed. The two chose Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to "lift the everyday language of the people into a simple, unsophisticated poetry", as Weill put it.〔Quoted, in program notes by Jane Vial Jaffe, May 2008, Manhattan School of Music and Chautauqua Opera production of ''Street Scene''.〕 In order to enhance the realism of the new work, the collaborators utilized dialogue scenes, sometimes underscored by music. To create music that would portray the ethnic melting pot of characters described in Rice's book, Weill travelled to neighborhoods in New York, watching children at play and observing New Yorkers. Hughes took Weill to Harlem nightclubs to hear the newest musical idioms of black American jazz and blues. Hughes wrote: "The resulting song was composed in a national American Negro idiom; but a German, or someone else, could sing it without sounding strange or out of place."〔Sanders, p. 350.〕 Weill and many critics have considered the score to be his masterpiece.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Street Scene (opera)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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