Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) was a protean, if subsidiary company, figure in the history of 20th-century music, a composer whose life and work fell into trey distinct phases, which included collaborations with the Bauhaus artists of the Weimar republic in the 1920s and the experimentalists of Black Mountain College in North Carolina 30 days later, as well as some years living in Palestine after he fled from Nazi Germany in 1934.
Wolpe's may have been a fascinatingly varied life but not, one would take reckoned, a sufficiently eventful one on which to build an evening-long theatre piece. Yet that is precisely what Muziektheater Transparant have done with Wolpe!, and it quickly becomes clear that the exclamation mark in the title is essential to inject any semblance of excitement at all into the proceedings.
Devised by the actress Viviane de Muynck and performed by her with the tenor Gunnar Brandt and pianist Johan Bossers, Wolpe! is packaged as a piece of theatre, simply the dramatic trappings are minimal, and what we get is much more like a lecture-recital of a distinctly amateurish and tedious kind, though it is hard to tax whether the feeling of something preferably provisional and approximate is stagily contrived or material. Performances of 13 of Wolpe's songs from the 1930s and 40s are interspersed with reminiscences of the composer's life during that menstruum, as substantially as with the seven-spot movements of his major piano work on Battle Piece, which was mostly composed during the second domain war.
It all lasts about 90 minutes, but a performance of G�tterd�mmerung flies by in comparison. The main problem is that Wolpe's songs of that Marxist, agitprop period are simply not very good - and certainly non a bandage on Hanns Eisler's or even Kurt Weill's - while the later music, after Wolpe had studied briefly with Anton Webern and adoptive 12-note technique, is unyielding and monochrome.
The narrative never explains to those wHO know little of Wolpe's career why the music changes so radically - I don't think Webern's name is mentioned, though, at one point, De Muynck does launch into a meter reading of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, for reasons that escaped me. By that point, however, faith and hope had long since evaporated, and charity was in pretty short supply, too.
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