Stefan Wolpe’s reputation, to the extent he’s known at all, rests on his later work, composed after his arrival in the United States: it’s language is complex, abstract, atonal, and highly virtuosic. These early pieces on the other hand, which date from his youth in Berlin, clearly reflect the atmosphere of pre-Hitler Germany. Zeus und Elida, a “musical grotesque”, tells the story of the head god’s arrival in 1920s Berlin, where he promptly falls in love with the figure of a woman on a soap billboard. Some rather predictable complications ensue as he makes his way through the nasty, capitalist armpit of society in search of her. The chamber opera Schöne Geschichten (Pretty Stories) adapts a series of nonsense tales sung in a sort of Yiddish dialect to an accompaniment that recalls Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. This absurdist work, it must be admitted, is neither very funny nor is it especially absurd. The change in style from one work to the next is striking: atonal expressionist in Schöne Geschichten, whereas Zeus und Elida is a jazz piece that evokes a sort of spastic, hyperactive Kurt Weill. The last piece returns to jazz idioms in the opening Blues and closing March, but goes totally expressionist in the rather sick central poem called “Voices from the Mass Grave”. Is this great music? Probably not. Its unrelieved cynicism and bitterness make it hard to take, not so much musically as emotionally. Certainly, it’s very much of its period, and if you like Weill, Krenek, or Schulhoff, you’ll find Wolpe’s stuff at least interesting. The performances have all the conviction and intensity that anyone could reasonably ask for, with results as curiously compelling as they are disturbing.
