infotext:
The turn of the year 1929/1930 marks a break in Stefan Wolpe's life: After many years and many attempts to find his place in the avant-garde cultural life of the Weimar Republic, he finally turns to work as a political composer around this time and is intensively involved in the field of workers' music and agitprop. Without giving up his musical aesthetics, which were geared towards free atonality, the threat of National Socialist tyranny made it necessary for the Jewish avant-garde musician to react musically to this threat to human freedom. By the end of the Second World War, various songs and instrumental pieces were created that reflect the composer's special living conditions and thus document his artistic development. This decisive phase in Stefan Wolpe's musical creativity – his change from a Berlin avant-garde musician to a pioneering mentor of New Music in the United States – is presented on this CD selection. In An Anna Blume for piano and musical clown, the third part of an opera project op. 5, Wolpe set the famous poem by the Merz artist Kurt Schwitters to music in 1929. Musically and aesthetically, this late turn to Dadaism can almost be understood as an apology for the desire to experiment in aesthetics in the 1920s, because Schwitters' early poetic collage has become a symbol of his time like hardly any other poem. In the context of Wolpe's oeuvre, there is a first consistent culmination of his artistic work, in which the aesthetic influences from his time as a member of the November Group, musician at the Bauhaus and film musician, but also as a student of Ferruccio Busoni and Arnold Schönberg come together. In An Anna Blume, Wolpe consistently develops a tonal and melodic texture from the twelve-tone material (six-tone, four-tone motif, seventh-tone) placed at the beginning, which also adopts the (re-)evaluation principles of Schwitters' Merzkunst. Almost at the same time, the artistic experiments were replaced by a concern with political texts: while the songs were written based on poems by Erich Kästner for performances in the context of the Berlin political cabaret »Anti«, a composition such as Decret No. 2: To the Army of Artists, op. 7 based on a text by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a musical structure that is certainly comparable to the fully chromatic and rhythmically complex writing style of the opera project and thus goes far beyond the simple structures of workers' music of the time. In addition, "simple" agitprop music is also created, such as the songs to poems by Walter Mehring and Erich Weinert, which made Wolpe, alongside Hanns Eisler, the best-known composer of workers' songs of the time. Years later, after an odyssey that would lead him to exile in America via Austria and Palestine, Wolpe returned to the "Tribune," an exile association founded in New York, "for free German literature and art in America." Society of the kings Berthold Viertel and Bertolt Brecht, who were »dethroned« by exile, and ties in with the Berlin years with a few concert songs. It was not until a year later that he succeeded in converting the concert music into »combat music«. In the seven-movement Battle Piece for piano composed in America, Wolpe shows a radically renewed compositional technique: as a reaction to the upheavals of his time, he breaks with traditional linear concepts of musical composition and works with the vertical and spatial dimensions of music. In doing so, he leaves the level of simple political battle music and opens up a new musical aesthetic that is not only groundbreaking for the music of his students such as Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey and David Tudor, but also for the music of the post-war period in general. Annette Schwarzer |
program:
[01] 05:06 p.m To Anna Blume for piano and musical clown (tenor) op. 5/III (1929) From: Eight songs on texts by Heine, Ottwalt, Weinert and others, op. 12 From: Four songs on texts by Lenin, Mayakovsky and others, op. 7 From: Masses Songs, op. 17 From: Four songs on texts by Lenin, Mayakovsky and others, op. 7 From: Three songs based on poems by Erich Kästner From: Four songs on texts by Lenin, Mayakovsky and others, op. 7 From: Masses Songs, op. 17 From: Four songs on texts by Lenin, Mayakovsky and others, op. 7 From: Three songs based on poems by Erich Küstner [11] 02:30 3. Speech by a barmaid (1929) From: Eight songs on texts by Heine, Ottwalt, Weinert and others, op. 12 Three Songs after Bertold Brecht (1943) [14] 02:04 2. The gods [15] 02:36 3. None or all From: Eight songs on texts by Heine, Ottwalt, Weinert and others, op. 12 From: Two Songs by Berthold Quarter 24:36 Battle piece (1943-1947) [18] 03:14 I [22] 01:42 v Total time 67:09 Gunnar Brandt Sigurdsson, tenor/vocalist |
Press:
Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972) is one of those significant, fiercely individualistic composers who continue to exert influence, yet also remain underappreciated, in my view. Perhaps one reason for some neglect was his peripatetic life, not only in its trajectory from Germany to Palestine (as then it was called) to the US, but also in successive embrace of early-20th-century expressionism, to leftist politically engaged pieces, and finally to a very personal form of serialism (for one thing, his rows could have more or less notes than 12). There's a whole “second generation” of serialists who made the system very much their own without slipping into academicism—Gerhard, Dallapiccola, early Rochberg, Skalkottas. Wolpe stands as a leader in this uncompromisingly original group. This disc suggests something of this panorama. It is in two halves: the first, 17 songs from 1929–1945; the second, the immense and astonishing Battle Piece for solo piano of 1943–45. The former run quite a gamut: from “Pierrot” speaking voice, to nervous atonal explosions, to lighthearted cabaret, to engaged workers' songs. The first two tend to be quite dissonant and chromatic, the latter resolutely tonal. While, indeed, the gulf seems unbridgeable here, it actually reflects the seething political aesthetic of Berlin at the time, and is not so different from our own era. Further, one senses a strong individual sensibility at work at all times. I might mistake some of these songs for Eisler or Weill, but that's just a compliment for how good they are. Wolpe was a superb musician, with a consistent strong vision and great ear. The vast majority of the songs have great “hooks,” and one immediately wants to whistle them afterwards. The Battle Piece is quite another matter. Clangorous, intense, abrupt in its shifts and juxtapositions, it carves out the territory for Wolpe's grand final period. I once heard it described as “a radiant violence,” and that works well. One feels in Wolpe that (as in Varèse) one enters a musical space where all the parameters are worked to articulate an ironclad architecture, albeit a mysterious one. Bossers plays the piano work superbly, but he has almost insuperable double-competition: David Holzman on Bridge (9116), in an all-Wolpe recital, and Marc-André Hamelin on New World (80354). Holzman studied with Wolpe as a youngster, and Hamelin pairs his performance with that of the Bolcom Etudes, which is a powerhouse piece. It doesn't hurt either that he's one of the world's truly great virtuosos. Each is a stunning performance, though quite different. So if you're going to get this disc, it should be for the songs. Brandt-Sigurdsson is a knockout performer—perfect intonation, dramatic delivery, enunciation (even I could make out some of the German!), an enviable naturalness of delivery. He can change his tone to fit the style and role so well that at first I thought there were more singers than one. Though not claimed on the disc, it also appears that these might be all premiere CD recordings of the songs; at the least, there appears to be no overlap with other recordings. But going back to “making out the German,” there's one glitch—there are no translations, which seems especially sad and unforgivable, since the Wolpe Society is a sponsor, and is based in the US! Since the political/didactic content of many of the songs is so important to our understanding, this seems a real shame; perhaps translations should be put on the society's web site, at least—and a notice pasted into future booklets for the disc. Except for this one omission, though, a great recording, and a portrait of a courageous musical spirit. RobertCarl
Gunnar Brandt and Johan Bossers have dusted off Wolpe's music of political revolution and aesthetic evolution from 1930s Berlin and demonstrated its relevance for our own era. Mr. Brandt's resourceful and vigorous voice and Mr. Bossers' decisive pianism combine in finely detailed and intense readings of the inspired craziness of Schwitters' An Anna Blume and the revolutionary passion of Mayakovsky's Decree No. 2, along with ironic marching tunes and bitterly amusing agitprop songs in simpler style. The CD concludes with the epic Battle Piece for piano that Wolpe composed during the war. Mr. Bossers projects the cyclic, seven-part work with a virtuosity and structural imagination that does full justice to the mind of this most challenging and visionary composer. The CD is a valuable pendant to the stage show Wolpe!, produced by Muziektheater Transparent, in which Mssrs. Bossers and Brandt collaborate with the actress Viviane de Muynck to create an evening that provides a lively context for music that has not lost its power to inspire the struggle for justice and human rights. Austin Clarkson, Stefan Wolpe Society.
10/08
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