Marc Blitzstein – born in Philadelphia in 1905 – showed musical promise as a pianist at a young age. He began composing Lieder and short piano pieces in his teens, before going on to study composition at the Curtis Institute from 1924-1926, and then briefly in Europe with Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg. He achieved overnight notoriety with his 1937 agitprop musical theater work, The Cradle Will Rock. His other well-known works include his opera Regina, The Airborne Symphony, and his English adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. At the time of his unexpected and tragic death in 1964, much of his work was left unfinished and unpublished, leaving behind a legacy that has been largely overlooked in the ensuing decades.
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Marc-Blitzstein.org is owned and administered by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, which has administered the musical and literary estate of Marc Blitzstein since 2012. For information about KWF and its grant and sponsorship programs as relating to projects and performances of Blitzstein’s music, please visit www.kwf.org, or email kwfinfo@kwf.org.
The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music
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