Berlin
1929-31
Stefan
Wolpe (Sub Rosa)
For
Stefan Wolpe
The
Choir of Saint Ignatius of Antioch (New World Records)
Wolpe was born in Berlin and became a Marxist early on. With the rise of Hitler, he fled first to Vienna, then to Palestine, ultimately landing himself in New York where he died in 1972. Along the way, he ran the gamut of 20th-century avant-garde experiences: attending lectures at the Bauhaus, joining the November Group, studying with Ferruccio Busoni and Anton Webern, teaching at Black Mountain College during its glory years in the early 50s. You could say he was a de facto–though not official–member of the New York School: he was pals with the Ab Ex painters and his students included Feldman and Tudor. Like so many creative refugees landing in the States, Wolpe was unable to relinquish his heavy academic European training and join the unhinged aleatory experiments of Cage and friends (Tudor is quoted in Musicworks as saying the New York School’s graphically oriented music was "notated in a way that Stefan was unable to understand.")
So it’s shocking to listen to Wolpe’s 1937 composition "Zwei Chinesische Grabschriften" next to Feldman’s 1963 "Christian Wolff in Cambridge" on the New World disc: the two pieces sound like two movements from the same piece. They are almost entirely indistinguishable from one another. To my ears, they both sound like vintage Feldman; the dates prove otherwise. Wolpe’s undramatic piece sets the chorus wavering in a very slight range; for its time, it sounds positively antichoral. Feldman, of course, later took this position to extremes. It’s a textbook study in revisionism.
The Sub Rosa disc features Wolpe’s little-known workers’ anthems, written in Berlin in the 1920s. They’re close to Hans Eisler’s work from the same period, characterized by strident rhythmic piano runs accompanied by both singing and sprechstimme vocals. However, they differ from Eisler’s songs in that the piano is unabashedly modernist and difficult, foreshadowing the insanely complicated piano works such as "Battle Piece" (1947), which Wolpe would be best known for. With so many of Eisler’s anthems, you come away humming, even marching, to the tune; Wolpe is much more elusive and glancing. As such, the pieces hold up to repeated listening and feel more like classical music than they do propaganda pieces. The disc’s spirited performance and arrangement are due to the talents of Marianne Pousseur, who did an equally impressive disc of Eisler’s vocal music for Sub Rosa called War & Exile in 1996.
