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- Williams’ interweaves his significant use of music in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in order to heighten the tension and drama, reveal secrets and the progressive madness of Blanche and to portray the evident insinuation of Stanley’s predatory appeal to the vulnerable prey – Blanche.
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How does Williams use music in A Streetcar Named Desire?
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Why is streetcar considered a musical theater?
A Streetcar Named Desire is a deeply musical work, from the strands of melody that are intertwined with the stage directions to the heroine's poetic speeches that punctuate the dialog like arias. And yet, it is a work that has notably resisted musical adaptation.
- Tennessee Williams
First of all, if you read your stage directions carefully you'll notice that Williams uses music to establish the mood of many different scenes in Streetcar. It’s basically like watching a movie, where the music is fast-paced during a chase scene, tender in a love scene, etc.
Blue Piano is generally used as the ‘upbeat’ music for the play – it is first used by Williams as the introductory music when painting the scene for Elysian Fields, allowing the audience to get a feel for the “spirit of the life”.
An audience will hear the ‘blue piano’ and the ‘ polka ’ in Scene One, and repeatedly throughout the play. In the stage directions, Williams tells us that the blue piano symbolises this part of New Orleans, but its use as a dramatic device is not consistent.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams uses music heavily in his stage directions. It is used by him to foreshadow events later on in the play but also to represent characters and the social class that they in turn also represent.
In the opening scene, Blanche exclaims that “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!”. Here, Williams reveals the. intimate link between Blanche’s desires and the final destruction of her fantasies.
