JEWISH MUSIC OF THE DANCE For nearly a half century LEON STEIN (1910–2001) was an esteemed figure in the musical life of his native Chicago,...
JEWISH MUSIC OF THE DANCE
For nearly a half century LEON STEIN (1910–2001) was an esteemed figure in the musical life of his native Chicago, enriching the community's cultural vibrancy as a composer, conductor, teacher, author, champion of humanitarian causes, and devoted friend to many young and up-and-coming musicians. His was a career and a steady contribution in which both the Jewish and the general musical spheres of the city took great pride.
Stein's parents had immigrated to Chicago in 1903 from Bratslav, in the Ukraine. That year saw a marked upsurge in immigration from the Czarist Empire, fueled in part by the infamous Kishinev pogrom (in Bessarabia) and its aftermath. His father, a tailor and furrier by trade, was also an amateur singer who sang on occasion in synagogue choirs. The young Stein, too, sang sporadically as a boy chorister in local synagogues. That experience surfaced later in his academic Jewish musical interests as well as in many of his Judaically related compositions. Though his family, which followed mainstream observances and celebrations of Jewish life, was not orthodox in orientation, Stein later recalled the positive and permanent emotional imprint of the ethnically as well as religiously Jewish "feel" of their neighborhood, which always remained a part of his identity and consciousness as a creative artist.
Stein's principal musical activity in his youth centered around the violin, and he studied that instrument and music in general at the city's American Conservatory of Music. After high school, by which time he had become interested in composition, he attended Crane Junior College, where one of his teachers was Robert Gomer Jones—a graduate of London's Royal College of Music, an accomplished organist, and the director of Chicago's Welsh Male Choir. Following a year during which Stein devoted himself to self-study in composition, he was given a scholarship at DePaul University, where he received his bachelor's degree in only a year and, upon graduation, was awarded first prize in composition for his Suite for String Quartet. He was immediately engaged as an instructor on the faculty of DePaul's School of Music. Until his retirement, he remained there without interruption for forty-seven years, rising to the rank of full professor, then serving as chairman of the department of theory and composition, and ultimately becoming the dean. He also earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees from DePaul. In addition to those formal studies, during the 1930s he continued studying composition privately with Leo Sowerby and conducting with Frederick Stock. During the Second World War he served as a petty officer in the United States Navy, and he composed and arranged music for its regularly and internationally broadcast radio programs Meet Your Navy and On the Target. In that capacity he also directed the concert band at the Great Lakes Training Station.
One of Stein's most memorable achievements was his tenure as the conductor of the amateur Community Symphony Orchestra. It was one of several similar local amateur orchestras, composed of businessmen, doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, teachers, and other nonprofessional musicians who enjoyed weekly opportunities to play much of the standard symphonic repertoire as an avocation. Most major and many medium-sized American cities could boast of at least one such amateur orchestra in those days, but this particular one in Chicago had an additional mission. It was founded specifically to create the first interracial local orchestra. It was an effort to offer theretofore unavailable opportunities to "nonwhite"—viz., mostly black at that time—amateur classical musicians in an era when it was usually, but erroneously and sometimes conveniently, assumed that there were none.
Under Stein, the Community Symphony Orchestra served another important role by sponsoring annual auditions to give high school (and sometimes younger) music students opportunities to make solo concerto appearances at its concerts. Later, he conducted other amateur ensembles as well as the professional City Symphony Orchestra, sponsored by the local union, the Chicago Federation of Musicians.
Stein's catalogue contains more than one hundred published works, ranging from his five string quartets (all recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra String Quartet) and much other solo and chamber music—including seven pieces for saxophone and various ensembles, which are among his most frequently performed works—to four symphonies and many other orchestral works; concertos for violin, cello, and oboe; a Rhapsody for flute, harp, and string orchestra (notable for its nine-part division of the strings); liturgical as well as secular choral settings; two one-act operas; and two ballet scores.
Stein refused to align himself with any particular musical movement in vogue at any one time, and he preferred to steer a "middle ground" between conservatism and progressive invention. "The term 'pantonality' best defines my musical language," he explained in an interview, and he expanded upon how it applies to his music:
This is an inclusive idiom that combines 20th-century treatments of modality, tonality, synthetic scales, and post-serial dodecaphony; uses a harmonic-contrapuntal chordal structure of seconds and fourths as well as triads; and is indebted to this century's emancipation of the dissonance and liberation of rhythm…. My music is generally linear, notated traditionally for traditional (acoustic) instruments, and uses forms ranging from established patterns to a free continuum of motion, density, tension, and color.
Stein was also a keen thinker about the nature of music in relation to aesthetics in general and with regard to its communicative priorities, as he outlined in 1963 as his "composer's credo":
I believe the most important function of music is meaningful communication. Musical composition is the transmutation of experience, in its broadest sense, into auditory patterns. The content of music, however, is neither emotion nor experience, but the aesthetic equivalent of both, achieved through its transmutation. A composer is, therefore, an individual who thinks creatively in terms of sonic symbols.… A musical composition as a work of art is a revelation of a reality beyond direct experience … the composer is simply the medium through which the idea is given embodiment in palpable form.
For a few years during his early university days Stein directed the youth and children's choruses at Camp Kinderland near South Haven, Michigan, the children's summer camp of the Chicago branch of the cultural Yiddishist and labor- and socialist-leaning fraternal order known as the Arbeter Ring—the Workmen's Circle. There, he prepared the children for biweekly presentations of song and dance, and he taught them Yiddish songs. Much of that repertoire was new to him, and those summers broadened his own Jewish horizons. He also directed Workmen's Circle youth choruses in town for a while, but he never became actively involved with the organization or its perspectives. Rather, he began to engage in his own research into synagogue music and the varieties of Jewish sacred musical development. Over the years he wrote a number of articles on Jewish musical subjects, ranging from contemporary assessments to the work of the late-Renaissance/early-Baroque Italian Jewish composer Salamone Rossi, and from a summary examination of Hassidic music to deliberations on the work and outlook of Ernest Bloch. Stein developed a particular interest in the musical and emotional dimensions of Hassidic life, lore, and practice, and his article on that subject constituted an important contribution to its appreciation by the layman. He also turned to the melos of Hassidic song, prayer, and dance as a source for a number of his compositions.
In 1950 Stein's doctoral dissertation was published as a book, The Racial Thinking of Richard Wagner, a subject he addressed in journal articles and frequent lectures. He also directed local synagogue choirs for a number of years, and he served twice as consultant to the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem.
Among Stein's works, quite a few pieces have Jewish themes or are related to Judaic or Jewish historical and literary perspectives. Apart from his Three Hassidic Dances, recorded here, these include Aria Hébraïque, the slow movement of his oboe concerto, which is also arranged for other instrumental combinations; The Lord Reigneth (Psalm 97), a cantata for women's chorus, tenor solo, and orchestra; Kaddish, for cantorial tenor solo and strings; Invocation and Dance, for violin and piano; Dance Ebraico, for cello and piano; Adagio and Hassidic Dance, for flute and optional tambourine; several synagogue choral settings; Songs of the Night, on poems by Hayyim Nahman Bialik (also recorded by the Milken Archive); and Exodus, a ballet. One of his most arresting Jewish-related orchestral works is Then Shall the Dust Return (a title taken from Ecclesiastes), inspired by the story of Janusz Korczak [Henryk Goldszmidt]. Korczak was a pediatrician who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, and despite offers of rescue for himself, he refused to abandon the 200 children in his care. Instead he accompanied them to the Treblinka death camp, where he was murdered in 1942, as he knew he would be, along with all the children.
In a series of "Reflections" for an issue of the College Music Symposium, Stein proposed that "originality is not so much newness as genuineness." Indeed, it is a spirit of "genuineness"—of straightforward, direct communication without a trace of artificiality or pompous display for its own sake—that permeates Stein's music, whatever its form and whatever its particular style in any one piece.
Leon Stein: THREE HASSIDIC DANCES
Three Hassidic Dances (1941) was Stein's first successful orchestral work, and it remains one of his most admired expressions—even though he wrote it initially almost as an exercise for a conducting class in which there were opportunities for orchestral readings.
With forceful syncopations, enticing rhythms, alluring repetitive patterns, and quasi-improvisational passages, it reflects the mystic fervor, intensity, and ecstatic states of self-induced joy for which Hassidim typically strive— not only in daily life and prayer, but especially during celebrations that involve a mixture of song and dance. The composer's own subtitles are Dance of the Joyous, Dance of the Enraptured, and Dance of the Exultant. The melodic, modal, and rhythmic material of the first and third movements is traditionally derived from tune prototypes in Hassidic repertoires and from fragments of known melodies. The second movement is entirely original and does not draw on any specific folk material. It calls forth the meditative parameters of Hassidism, with its mood of spiritual searching and clinging to God as well as its deliberate contemplation and even, in the composer's interpretation, brooding.
The piece, which was not intended originally for staged dance production, received its world premiere in Chicago in 1942 by the Illinois Symphony Orchestra conducted by Izler Solomon, and it has been performed in various other cities, including Jerusalem. In 1960, however, it was choreographed and danced by the Pearl Lang Dance Group, with the NBC Symphony of the Air conducted by Warner Bass, at a Jewish Music Festival at Madison Square Garden in New York—an event that featured the Jewish Ministers Cantors Association (Hazzanim Farband) Choir of more than one hundred cantors (the typical exaggeration in the broadside of "200 famous cantors" notwithstanding) and "guest stars of opera and concert hall," with the most powerful television mogul and variety show host of the day, Ed Sullivan, as master of ceremonies.
Neil W. Levin
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DARIUS MILHAUD (1892–1974), one of the 20th century's most prolific composers, belongs historically to the coterie of French musical intellectuals and composers who, loosely bonded by their initial embrace of Jean Cocteau's aesthetic ideas and their allegiance to composer Erik Satie's spiritual-musical tutelage, were known as Les Six. That group also included Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey. Milhaud belongs as well to the significant number of European Jewish émigré composers who took refuge in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s from the Fascist-inspired anti-Jewish persecution that emanated from Germany and culminated in the Holocaust.
Milhaud was born in Marseilles but grew up in Aix-en-Provence, which he regarded as his true ancestral city. His was a long-established Jewish family of the Comtat Venaissin—a secluded region of Provence—with roots traceable at least to the 15th century, and perhaps, as Milhaud wrote, even to the 10th century if not earlier. His paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Milhaud, was one of the founders of the synagogue at Aix, where he gave the inaugural address in 1840. He also wrote exegetical works on the Torah and conducted the census of Jews who had returned to France after the Revolution.
On his father's side, Milhaud's Jewish lineage was neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi (i.e., stemming neither from medieval German-Rhineland areas nor from pre-16th-century Iberian Jewry), but rather, specifically Provençal, dating to Jewish settlement in that part of southern France as early as the first centuries of the Common Era. Like its Ashkenazi and Sephardi counterparts, Provençal Jewry had developed a distinct musical tradition. Milhaud's mother's family tradition, however, was partly Sephardi through her father. This may have lent an additional musical perspective to his internalized Jewish musical repertoire.
Milhaud's parents both came from middle-class families who had been engaged successfully in respected business enterprises for generations, and both were musicians as well. His father founded the Musical Society of Aix-en-Provence; his mother had studied voice in Paris. Darius began violin studies at the age of seven, encouraged by his cultured home atmosphere, and he started composing even as a child. In 1909 he commenced studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where one of his teachers, Xavier Leroux, immediately recognized that his student had discovered a new harmonic language of his own. His other teachers included Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas (for orchestration), and André Gedalge, whom Milhaud later credited as his greatest influence.
In his memoirs Milhaud wrote that when he first began to compose, he was already aware of the path of Impressionism, which he viewed as the end of an artistic current whose mawkishness he found unappealing. He became profoundly affected by literature, as well as by Satie's commitment to a concept of artistic totality, exploring and including the various art forms in complementary expression. Eager to avoid what he perceived to be the "mist of Symbolist poetry," he felt himself "saved" by some of the poets and playwrights then new to the literary scene, such as Francis Jammes (whom he called a "splash of cool water on my face"), Paul Claudel, and his close friend Léo Latil. Milhaud's first opera was a setting of Jammes's La Brebis égarée (composed between 1910 and 1915 but not performed until 1923); and between 1913 and 1922 he wrote several sets of incidental music to Claudel's works based on Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Protée, Les Choëphores, and Les Euménides. Milhaud's stylistic development and his evolved musical individuality have been traced in part to his association and collaborations with Claudel.
When the First World War began, Milhaud was still at the conservatory. Medically ineligible for military service, he worked for a while at the Foyer Franco-Belge, a hostel for refugees. When Léo Latil was killed in action on the Western Front in 1915, Milhaud wrote his third string quartet in memory of the poet, and he set Latil's words for dramatic soprano in the second of its two movements.
In 1917, Claudel, who was also a statesman, went to Brazil to take up a post at the French Consular Mission there, and he invited Milhaud to accompany him as his secretary for a two-year period. Apart from the music he had heard and sung in the synagogue in Aix as a youth, this was Milhaud's first experience with "ethnic" (i.e., non-Western or non-classically oriented) music. His first two ballet scores drew directly upon the Brazilian experience.
In the 1920s Milhaud began his association with Jean Cocteau, who had published a seminal aesthetic attack on the contemporary direction of "serious" or "classical" music and its high-flown "romantic bombast." That publication immediately attracted elements of the Paris artistic avant-garde. Encouraged by Satie and his own musical models, a group of French composers including Milhaud embraced aspects of this aesthetic principle, especially with regard to simplicity, directness, avoidance of excess sentimentality, sounds related to nature and everyday life, and, perhaps above all, that attribute so prized by certain French poets of a previous era: la clarité—clarity. Milhaud's designation as one of Les Six—in fact, that very identification of such a group—is owed to Henri Collet's review of a concert at which Milhaud's fourth quartet was played, though the label itself became irrevocably attached only afterward. The designation, however, has been frequently dismissed by many critics and music historians as artificial. In reality, Les Six—the composers and their individual approaches—turned out to have little in common, and each eventually went his separate way. But Satie's love of the music hall, the circus, and other unelevated forms of entertainment was in tune with Milhaud's own adoption of popular material—French folksong, Latin American dance rhythms, Jewish secular and sacred melodies, and one of the most important discoveries of his circle: jazz.
Milhaud first encountered jazz in London in the early 1920s, where he heard the Billy Arnold Jazz Band from New York, and then during his visits to Harlem dance halls when he made a concert tour of the United States in 1922–23. He was instantly engaged, and he created a bit of a stir when he was quoted as saying that jazz was "the American music," according it the same validity as classical repertoire. His first product of this newfound source was another ballet score, La Création du monde (1923), on a scenario by Blaise Cendrars. He was later quoted as observing that jazz could only have sprung from the experience of an oppressed people. After Vichy and his escape to America as a Jewish refugee, as well as the German murder of more than twenty cousins, that must have had additional significance for Milhaud. It is no accident that, notwithstanding several prewar Jewish-related works, it was in his American period and afterward that he turned even more frequently to his Jewish roots for musical sources.
After his return to Paris from his American tour, Milhaud wrote another opera on a text by Cocteau, La Pauvre matelot (1926); three short operas that were all premiered in Germany; and his grand opera, Christophe Columb, also with a Claudel libretto, performed in Berlin in 1930 under Erich Kleiber's baton.
In 1929 Milhaud wrote the first of many film scores, which included music for Jean Renoir's Madame Bovary, and during the 1930s he wrote cello and piano concertos; orchestral works on folk themes, such as the Suite provençal and Le Carnaval de Londres; cantatas; chamber music; songs; and his first music for children. He also followed Edgard Varèse, one of the earliest composers to make use of the newly invented ondes martenot, in his incidental music for André de Richaud's play Le Château des papes (1932).
In 1940, Milhaud's one-act opera Médée (to a text by his wife, Madeleine) had just reached the stage of the Paris Opera when the German invasion resulted quickly in France's surrender and the creation of the Vichy government. The occupation of Paris was a clear sign to Milhaud and his wife that it was time to leave with their son while they still could. The Chicago Symphony had invited him to conduct a new work it had commissioned, and that invitation enabled him to receive visas from the consulate in Marseilles for himself and his family. They made their way to neutral Portugal and to the United States. Their friend, the French-Jewish conductor Pierre Monteux, then conducting the San Francisco Symphony, organized a teaching position for Milhaud at Mills College in nearby Oakland, California. There, while continuing to compose incessantly, he influenced a number of American composers, including Dave Brubeck, Peter Schickele, William Bolcom, and Simon Sargon. Beginning in 1951, Milhaud taught every summer at the Aspen Music School and Festival for twenty years. Though he returned to France two years after the end of the war to become a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, he continued to teach alternate years at Mills College. Milhaud is known to have cautioned his students against what he called "overdevelopment" as a pretension to the profound. "It is false," he told them, "that the profundity of a work proceeds directly from the boredom it inspires."
Over the course of six decades Milhaud produced a vast amount of music, with a catalogue of nearly 450 numbered works. His Provençal heritage has been observed, on a broader level, in his overall approach to sonority, which commentators have associated by analogy with Cézanne's color palette. Tellingly, Milhaud's first quartet (1910) was dedicated to the painter's memory.
Milhaud is often perceived as the champion of polytonality. Though of course he neither invented the technique nor was the first to employ it, he consistently found ingenious ways to use its potential to the advantage of his expressive goals, and often to the service of melody. Perhaps because he so clearly understood its possibilities, it became the harmonic language most commonly associated with his music. In the 1920s, although Milhaud was considered a revolutionary and an enfant terrible of music, his actual approach owed more to the French composer Charles Koechlin than to Satie, and it built upon a particular concept of polytonality derived from Stravinsky's early ballets. Ultimately Milhaud believed not in revolution, but in the development (and extension) of tradition—in a sort of musical stare decisis where, as he postulated, "every work is not more than a link in a chain, and new ideas or techniques only add to a complete past, a musical culture, without which no invention has any validity." Indeed, whether or not he realized it, this respect for continuum was and is a manifestly Judaic concept—one that has proved indispensable to any reconciliation of Jewish identity with natural inclinations toward innovation and the demands of modernity.
Both Milhaud's personal Judaism and his heritage informed a number of his prewar works, beginning with his early Poèmes Juifs (1916), although these did not incorporate the Provençal tradition upon which he later relied. Between the end of the First World War and the French surrender to Germany, in 1940, he wrote three Psalm settings in French; Six Chants populaires Hébraïques; Hymn de sion Israel est vivant; Prières journalières à l'usage des Juifs du Comtat-Venaissin; Liturgie Comtadine; Cantate nuptiale; and two Palestinian-Hebrew song arrangements for an experimental and innovative compilation instigated by German-Jewish émigré musicologist Hans Nathan. After Milhaud's move to America, in 1940, his Jewish identity and roots became even more significant parts of his overall expressive range. Milhaud's Judaically related pieces during a thirty-four-year period include Cain and Abel, for narrator, organ, and orchestra; Candelabre a sept branches; David, an opera written for the Israel Festival; Saul (incidental music); Trois psaumes de David; Cantate de Job; and Cantate de psaumes. His final work, Ani maamin (subtitled Un Chant perdu et retrouvé), on a text by Elie Wiesel, received its premiere in 1975 at Carnegie Hall by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the New York University Choral Arts Society, conducted by Lukas Foss, with soprano Roberta Peters and several narrators, including Wiesel. But perhaps his magnum "Jewish" opus is his Service Sacré, a Sabbath service for cantor, chorus, and full symphony orchestra, commissioned in 1947 by Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco and recorded for the first time in its entirety by the Milken Archive.
Neil W. Levin
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STEFAN WOLPE AND HIS MUSICAL CONTRIbUTIONS A guest biographical essay by Austin Clarkson
Born at the turn of the 20th century, STEFAN WOLPE (1902–1972) belonged to a generation of composers in the German cultural orbit who believed that modern art was a means of transforming both the individual and society. Wolpe was imbued with the idea that avant-garde art can serve the man on the street and the audience in the concert hall, and he dedicated himself to forming an entente between new music and the ordinary listener. He sought to incorporate elements of the vernacular and traditional musics of his successive homelands in an inclusive language. His forceful personality and transgressive music perplexed many listeners, and he remained an outsider for much of his career, but his deeply held optimism sustained him through a continual struggle for livelihood and for recognition of his wide-ranging gifts. In 1951 he affirmed in his diary: "The world has to get conscious of my way of making music … a thoroughly organized but proud, erect, hymnic, profoundly contained, human evocation."
On his father's side Wolpe descended from Sephardi Jews who settled in Kovno, Lithuania (Kaunas). His father was born in Moscow, and as a young man he emigrated to Berlin, where he built up a successful business manufacturing leather goods. Wolpe's mother, née Hermine Strasser, was born in Vienna to a Hungarian-Jewish family from Trieste. The Wolpe family was living in comfortable circumstances in Berlin's upper-middle-class district of Charlottenberg when Stefan, the youngest of the four children, was born.
He began piano lessons at a young age and at fourteen had theory instruction with the distinguished pedagogue Alfred Richter. Wolpe spent the summer of 1920 in Weimar, where he became friends with students and teachers of the Bauhaus, the progressive art school founded by Walter Gropius, which stressed an egalitarian dynamic and dialogue between students and teachers. From then on, Wolpe's ideas about new music were colored by the concepts of design and form, construction and expression of the Bauhaus masters. In the autumn of 1920 he entered the diploma course in composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, but after the experimental atmosphere of the Bauhaus, the Hochschule seemed irrelevant to him. He quit the school in the spring of 1921 and applied to enter the master class of Ferruccio Busoni. Though he was not accepted, Busoni invited him to attend his student gatherings. Wolpe regarded Busoni as his most important mentor and always kept a photograph of the master on his piano.
During the 1920s Wolpe was fascinated by the Dadaists, whose artistic credo attacked coherence, order, and the bourgeois structures of modern society and instead embraced uninhibited creative processes—an art of collage, chance, and provocation fueled by primal instincts, doubt, and irony. Wolpe's interpretation of the Dada spirit led to experimental combinations with, in his own words, "extreme innovations, suddenness, contradictions, shocks, simultaneities, and dissociations" as concepts that were as valid for contemporary art in the 1960s as they had been for the original Dadaists. Wolpe had been in Weimar for the Dada Congress in 1922, where he witnessed a performance by Kurt Schwitters during which the artist released several white mice from his pockets onto the stage, to the consternation of the audience. Later, in 1929, Wolpe set Schwitters's poem "An Anna Blume" as a theatrical scene for a singer in clown costume riding a bicycle.
Wolpe was also a member of the Novembergruppe, an association of communist as well as other left-wing artists and writers, so named after the Bolshevik Revolution (October on the Julian calendar in use in Russia, but November on the western, Gregorian calendar). He was active as a pianist and composer in their concerts. In 1924 he began a new set of opus numbers with a cycle of Songs on Friedrich Hölderlin. Further settings on poems by Kleist, Rilke, and Tagore indicate that, for Wolpe, composing was a spiritual quest. His next works were for the musical stage, with chamber operas that favored the fantastic world of puppets, clowns, and political satire. In the 1920s he earned money from time to time playing the piano for silent films, fairs, and cabarets, and he enjoyed improvising in the latest dance styles. His first marriage was to the Viennese painter Olga Okuniewska. Their daughter is the British pianist Katharina Wolpe.
In 1929 Wolpe, allied with the composer Hanns Eisler, an overt Communist, joined the Workers' Music movement. During the next fours years he supplied dozens of songs, marches, and anthems for labor unions and agitprop groups. In 1931 the director and playwright Gustav von Waggenheim formed a group of communist and communist-leaning actors and actresses into Die Truppe 1931 and invited Wolpe to direct its music and compose for its productions. When the National Socialists emerged victorious from the elections of 1932 and 1933 that led to Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Die Truppe 1931 was banned. With the help of the Romanian pianist Irma Schoenberg, Wolpe left Germany. Eventually he made his way to Vienna in the autumn of 1933, where for a brief time he studied with Anton Webern, the ardent serialist composer and one of the leaders of the so-called Second Viennese School. When Wolpe was threatened with deportation, Irma took him to her home in Bucharest. By that time he was single again, his first marriage having ended in 1933. In 1934 he and Irma emigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem, where they were married.
Wolpe suffered greatly from the trauma of exile. He composed incidental music for a production of the Habima theater, but he was otherwise unable to compose for several months. He was uninterested in Zionist political activity, but he responded deeply to the landscape, cultures, and musics of the Near East. Rather than adapt folklore to European styles of concert music, the so-called Mediterranean style, he adapted "oriental" concepts, such as the maqam of classical Arabic music, to counter the rhetoric of European modernism. Theodor Adorno remarked on Wolpe's nonsubjective, "oriental" espressivo and described him as "an outsider in the best sense of the word. It is impossible to subsume him." Wolpe's settings of Hebrew texts from the Bible and by contemporary poets contributed to the creation of the modern Hebrew art song. But the music community in Jerusalem did not appreciate his radical music and politics, and he decided to emigrate to the United States.
After the Wolpes settled in New York City in late 1938, Stefan felt homesick for Israel, which he had come to regard as his ancestral homeland. In his music of the 1940s he demonstrated that diatonicism, octatonicism, and dodecaphony are not mutually exclusive systems, but belong to a continuous spectrum of resources, as illustrated in The Man from Midian. For Battle Piece, Wolpe looked to Picasso's Guernica mural as the model for an epic protest against war that was on the cutting edge of modernism. Critics found it difficult to place Wolpe's powerful and variegated music, for it eluded the categories of twelve-tone and neoclassicism, folklorism and experimentalism.
Wolpe became an American citizen in 1945. During the later 1940s he composed numerous studies that are collected as Music for Any Instruments. One of them bears the title Displaced Spaces, Shocks, Negations, A New Sort of Relationship in Space, Pattern, Tempo, Diversity of Actions, Interreactions and Intensities. This sets the agenda for replacing traditional thematic space with a constellatory, abstractionist space in which nonfigurative shapes, masses, and planes of sound move freely and independently. To achieve this objective, Wolpe developed the techniques of spatial proportions and organic modes. To demonstrate these techniques, he composed Seven Pieces for Three Pianos, which he dedicated to his friend, the composer Edgard Varèse.
Many jazz musicians came to Wolpe to learn how to compose concert music—among them Eddie Sauter, George Russell, and Tony Scott. As a result, his ideas circulated in the New York jazz community, when Gil Evans and Miles Davis were exploring new paths. John Carisi, whose Israel is on the pathbreaking recording Birth of the Cool, gives Wolpe credit for helping with the piece. In turn, Wolpe modeled the scoring of his Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano on Carisi's Counterpoise no. 1.
With the poet Hilda Morley (who became his third wife), Wolpe began in 1950 to attend meetings of the Eighth Street Artists' Club, where he became close friends with Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jack Tworkov, and Esteban Vincente. As music director at Black Mountain College (1952–56), Wolpe enjoyed a milieu of artists, craftsmen, and poets that reminded him of the Bauhaus. While at the rural campus in North Carolina, he composed several of his most important scores—Enactments for Three Pianos; Piece for Oboe, Cello, Percussion and Piano; and the Symphony—in which he said he aimed for "a very mobile polyphony in which the partials of the sound behave like river currents and a greater orbit-spreadout is guaranteed to the sound, a greater circulatory agility (a greater momentum too)." These works of exuberant complexity mark the high point of musical actionism.
During the 1950s Wolpe wrote a series of lectures in which he discusses music in the imaginative and constructive manner of the Bauhaus masters. He proposes that the theory of music should be concerned with fantasy as much as with technique, because the material is as much a product of the creative imagination as it is of the rational intellect. At the Summer Course for New Music at Darmstadt in 1956 he presented a survey of current trends in the United States. After tributes to Varèse and Copland he discussed the music of Milton Babbitt, Earle Brown, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. Wolpe responded to the Webern revival by studying closely the later scores of his former teacher, and he became greatly interested in the music of Boulez and Stockhausen. He summed up his poetics in the lecture "Thinking Twice," in which he presents his ideas on serialism, organic modes, and the interplay of complementary qualities as the basis for a nondevelopmental discontinuum—"the ever-restored and ever-advancing moment."
After the exuberant and extensive scores of the Black Mountain period, Wolpe began to refine and focus his means, as in his Form for Piano, and like some painters of the period, he titled many works simply as Piece or Form. Images, shapes, and gestures are succinct and sharply contrasted in fully notated yet intuitively composed moment form. Many of the pieces from the 1960s are in two parts, thus projecting complementarities on both the micro and macro level. One part is generally slower, with a gathering centering action; the shapes are well formed; the exposition is sometimes reprised; and the mode of thought is directed, orderly, and stable. The other part, however, is generally faster, with the action scattering and dispersing, and the mode of thought disruptive and dissociated. Disorder is included as the limiting case of order, but the chaotic passages are written out and not left to chance. In his last pieces Wolpe revisited historical forms. From Here on Farther, subtitled Concerto, has a ritornello design, and Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments includes elements of the solo concerto form.
For Wolpe, composing was a process of discovery. Precompositional charts prepare for the spontaneous outflow of the creative imagination. His music thus evades rational criteria of form and style, for he engages varied types of syntax and "levels of language"—from the colloquial to the poetic, from the quotational to the personal, and from the orderly to the dangerously chaotic. He trusted his unique form-sense to combine disparate images into structures that have an intuitive coherence.
Wolpe, like Busoni and the masters of the Bauhaus, regarded teaching as an obligation, not merely as a livelihood. In Palestine and thereafter in America he passed on his unique vision of music to succeeding generations of composers. Some had careers in radio, television, film, and musical theater (Stanley Applebaum, Elmer Bernstein, Kenyon Hopkins, Mike Stoller); others in modern jazz; and still others in concert music (Herbert Brun, Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey, David Tudor). In 1957 Wolpe took up the position of professor of music at C. W. Post College, Long Island University. On returning to New York City, he was "discovered" by a younger generation of composers and performers as a vigorous and masterly practitioner of a radically modernist tradition. His music was championed by the Group for Contemporary Music, founded in 1962 by Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen, as well as by several other New York ensembles. Wolpe at last received many long-overdue awards and honors, including two Guggenheim fellowships and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The final decade of his life was clouded by Parkinson's disease, which hampered his ability to notate music, and by a fire that damaged his papers and destroyed his collection of paintings. Despite these adversities, he continued to compose, completing his last piece only a few months before he died.
Austin Clarkson is one of the foremost authorities on Stefan Wolpe, professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, director of the Stefan Wolpe Archive, and author and editor of several books and monographs, including On the Music of Stefan Wolpe.
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STEFAN WOLPE AND MODERN JEWISH IDENTITY
As an artist of Jewish birth for whom the Zionist dream became the unsuspecting midwife of Jewish historical-spiritual identity, STEFAN WOLPE was hardly unique. For some Jews who had no religious affiliation, that type of awakening could begin with Zionist activity in the Diaspora. For others, including Wolpe, who had little if any family exposure in Germany either to Judaism (apart from a perfunctory bar mitzvah) or to secular Jewish perspectives such as Zionism, that realization awaited arrival in the y'shuv—the Jewish communal settlement in Palestine under the British Mandate. In that heady environment, Wolpe's previously established commitments in Germany to social and economic ideals of the left found ready resonance in the nonreligious collective orientation of the kibbutz movement and in the pervasive, often infectious optimism of the settlers who were struggling to fashion a new society based on rethought values. On an aesthetic level, he seems to have been gripped almost instantly by the allure of the musical exotica—Near Eastern musics, as well as aural parameters of Hebrew and even Arabic, all of which he first encountered in Palestine and which contributed in no small measure to his new sense of cultural, ethnic, national, and mythical identity.
Paradoxically and unexpectedly, Wolpe's sojourn in the Jewish homeland during its ebullient rejuvenation and ascension toward statehood also became an inner journey from his former, exclusively universalist worldview to one that could accommodate and assimilate strong Jewish national sensibilities. Still, he never abandoned wider concerns for universal social progress, justice, and proletarian causes. During his subsequent American period, while he continued to write music based on both modern and biblical Hebrew and even Yiddish texts, as well as on Jewish historical subject matter, he also continued to write politically engaged music—including settings of words by known Communists; and he retained his political and "class" consciousness through affinities for, and contacts with, internationalist-oriented leftist circles and efforts. Wolpe scholar Austin Clarkson, for example, has revealed that Wolpe even acknowledged privately that he wrote his 1950 Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano to celebrate the founding of the People's Republic of China—at a time in America when it would obviously have been unwise to dedicate it thus in print. He also set to music excerpts from Albert Einstein's address opposing the hydrogen bomb project, which, in the context of cold war politics and Soviet ambitions, Clarkson rightly assesses as "an act of almost reckless defiance."
In Berlin, the national perspectives and aspirations of Zionism would have found little sympathy within the framework of the universalist and antinationalist leanings with which Wolpe had aligned himself. Like many intellectuals and artists in interwar Germany (and, for that matter, in France and elsewhere in western Europe)—for whom the moral high ground in terms of social conscience and world peace was perceived as inseparable from allegiance to the left, for whom ethical virtue was uncritically and synonymously linked to organized workers' causes, and who at the same time recognized a growing danger on the political right—Wolpe had become attracted to radical elements of socialism, and even to outright communist circles.
To many creative people of that period, and especially to much of the artistic avant-garde, the left and its repudiation of nationalist orientations appeared to offer the only intelligent remedies for inequities supposedly fostered by capitalist societies, and also appeared to offer the sole protection against further wars of national or imperial ambitions. Many in that avant-garde naïvely accepted the manipulated rumors and reports from the Soviet Union, looking on that new system and its putative social progress as the model for a new progressive world order.
Whether or not Wolpe actually joined the Communist Party as an official member—and what, precisely, differentiated membership in public perception from fellowship—remains in some question. One account by a fellow Bauhaus adherent and future émigré (to Palestine), the painter Mordechai Ardon [Max Bronstein]—with whom he shared a patron at one time—asserted that Wolpe in fact joined the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) in 1925. But the consensus among scholars now seems to challenge that recollection. Their refutation is supported by the observation of the Austrian painter, actor, and Communist Party member Franz Boensch—with whom Wolpe did collaborate for performances at communist gatherings—that Wolpe was "for the Party," in contrast to certain other composers of similar but more radical bent, such as Hanns Eisler, to whom he referred as having been "of the Party."
Yet the question concerning Wolpe's "membership" is probably irrelevant to the course of events in his life and to the sentiments that guided his artistic path. For his leftist sympathies during the Weimar era, which might have begun as benign liberal proclivities during his teen years, are unmistakable. His membership in Novembergruppe from 1923 on may have been more a matter of creative and artistic attraction to the "spirit" of the revolutionary cause than an intellectually driven agenda of reasoned political ideology, philosophy, or action. Nonetheless, as the vanguard of Fascism grew louder, uglier, and more palpably dangerous by the end of the 1920s, as violent incidents were increasingly instigated by Fascist groups, and as the specter of their goals galvanized a countercampaign of resistance, Wolpe, along with colleagues and friends of various shades of socialist affiliation, gravitated even further to the left. His work with Die Truppe 1931, many of whose members were avowed Communists and whose initial stage production clearly reflected communist doctrines, might be viewed as more politically transparent.
A 1928 stage work by Wolpe mocked Hitler in the character of a thinly veiled would-be god of antiquity, bent on European domination, who inadvertently confuses his love object with a prostitute. And by 1930 Wolpe's evolved solidarity with the radical left led him to attend the Marxist Workers' School (Parteischule) of the KPD. Moreover, his artistic association with the politically inclined cabaret scene and with elements of the musical theater of the absurd; his interest in newly fashionable non-European dance forms and popular genres with association in American Negro culture (blues and jazz influences), perceived American decadence (the Charleston), and Latin American expressions (the tango); and, ironically, his embrace of advanced modernist European-based techniques in his sophisticated art music—all eventually placed him in or close to the camp of those whom both the Nazi ideologues and their party hacks indicted for polluting German society with "degenerate art" and "cultural Bolshevishm."
Between 1929, when he allied himself with Eisler and the Workers' Music movement, and 1933, Wolpe expended considerable creative energy on music for "the cause"—not only for theatrical and cabaret settings and agitprop groups, but also for more mundane contexts such as meetings of communist-affiliated union organizations and rallies. Some of the very titles of his pieces from that period—Vier Lieder auf "Texte von Lenin," including Eine unterdrückte Klasse (On a Text by Lenin) and Decret nr. 2: An die Armee der Künstler; Politische Satyren (including a movement titled Hitler: Neunzehnhundertdreiundzwanzig); Vier Antikriegslieder (including Rote Armee and Rote Soldaten, rote Kolonnen); Couplet der Kapitalisten (from the first theatrical revue of Die Truppe 1931); Links den Kurs; and Arbeit und Kapital, among many others—are revealing about the passion of his alignment and the thicket of future danger into which he had cornered himself by the time Weimar's collapse became the National Socialists' triumph.
Between 1923 and 1925 Wolpe also arranged a set of eastern European Yiddish folksongs. It can be tempting to ascribe his motivation to a moment of Jewish cultural identification, especially since those particular songs stemmed from traditional Jewish life in the small towns and outlying regions of the former Czarist Empire, and not from revolutionary sentiments. But the catalyst was obviously political rather than ethnic or spiritual. To some on the left in Weimar Germany who were unfamiliar with the stratifications of eastern European Jewry and the differences among Yiddish song categories, Yiddish folksongs (or perceived folksongs) could, without regard to their literary content, simplistically symbolize a previously disenfranchised people whose liberation had supposedly come with the Revolution. Wolpe's arrangements were probably conceived simply as an ode to fellow revolutionaries to the east—even though those were not the Yiddish songs of protest sung by Jewish socialists, anarchists, Communists, and other revolutionaries at their rallies.
Throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, the political and quasi-political leanings of artistic avant-garde circles such as Wolpe's invited the contempt of those elements among Germany's conservative old guard that saw not only avowed Communists but also pacifists and social reformers as betrayers of the imperial cause during the First World War and therefore the agents of Germany's disastrous and humiliating defeat. As economic conditions descended to utter havoc, as fear of communist envelopment mushroomed to expanded echoes of a "red menace," and as political factions and adversarial groups grew increasingly polarized, those biases were easily fueled and exploited by the National Socialists. Once they achieved exclusive power in 1933, one of the first items on the agenda of the new regime was the annihilation of communist and perceived communist organizations—with which Jews could conveniently be associated. Wolpe now faced exposure on three counts: his political brand, the nature of his music, and his Jewish birth. The imminent danger in which he naturally felt himself was brought to a peak of panic when his brother, during a roundup of Communists, was brutally beaten. But Wolpe's rapid exit from Germany at that early stage of the Nazi party regime was probably less as a Jew and more out of fear related to his political taint.
After going first to Zurich via Czechoslovakia with the help of Irma Schoenberg, who also managed to retrieve his manuscripts in Berlin, Wolpe went with Die Truppe 1931 to Moscow in May 1933 to attend the International Workers' Olympiad. He stayed for the summer, and he is said to have considered settling there, although he had to return to Switzerland to renew his passport at the German consulate. But after four intervening months of study with Webern in Vienna and then his refuge in Irma's home in Bucharest, Irma—who had given a recital in Palestine in 1931 as a guest of the Jerusalem Music Society and had retained positive memories of the y'shuv—convinced him that Palestine presented the wisest option.
It can be telling in terms of Wolpe's revised post-1934 national-cultural identity to keep in mind some of his earlier politically oriented piece titles. By contrast, one may consider some of the works (arrangements as well as original compositions) that flowed from his pen in Palestine: Olam hadash (A New World), Tz'daktem habonim (You Were Right), and K'vish (Road), from his Hebrew Choral Songs; We Are One Driven Tortured Flock (the original Hebrew setting of which has not survived), from his Hebrew Solo Songs; Ali b'eir (Ascend My Well, on a poem by Hayyim Nahman Bialik); Al admateinu (In [on] Our Land) and Hahayalim tz'u lilh. om (Soldiers Going to War)—On This Our Blessed Land and Know How to Fight, in their English versions, respectively—from his Four Songs from "Ballad of the Unknown Soldier"; and songs about rebuilding the land, such as Saleinu al k'tafeinu (Our Baskets on Our Shoulders), Lamidbar (To the Desert), Tel Aviv hi ir y'hudit (Tel Aviv Is a Jewish City), and Ra'inu amalenu (We Behold Our Toil), included in the collection Folk Songs of the New Palestine (1938), solicited and edited by Hans Nathan.
Although they do not necessarily imply political involvement or action, these pieces and their freely selected texts suggest Wolpe's new receptivity to the Zionist enterprise and its premise of a dispersed nation now reclaiming and rebuilding its legitimate ancestral homeland in socially collective and egalitarian contexts. For one already drawn to the vision of a new world order as a remedy for entrenched injustice and subjugation, we may imagine the initial appeal of that radical "new Jewish world order," in which selfless idealism, common spirit, labor organization, and collective agricultural endeavor were viewed as replacing individual material quest. And for Wolpe the artist, there was also a newborn sense of identification with the aesthetic aura surrounding the fashioning of that new society.
Nor did that adopted, expanded identity dissolve with Wolpe's departure from Palestine. To the contrary, various pieces from his subsequent American years underscore its transcendence, such as Zemach Suite (inspired by and dedicated to the celebrated Jewish dancer Benjamin Zemach, who was instrumental in developing a new genre of modern Jewish choreography), in which an Arabic modal cell influences the two fugues, and whose final movement is based on the rhythm of the Israeli hora dance (notwithstanding its title, Dance in the Form of a Chaconne); Three Time Wedding, which comprises movements such as Yiddish Wedding Dance, Yemenite Dance, and Hora; Two Songs of Bialik; Seven Arrangements of Palestinian [Hebrew] Folksongs, which include an early Zionist song, Lo nelekh mipo (We Will Not Go Away from Here); biblical settings in English, Hebrew, and even Yiddish (on Yiddish translations from Jeremiah by the well-known Yiddish poet Yehoash [Solomon Blumgarten]); Piyyutim k'tanim: "Shahar a lei," to words by the medieval Spanish Hebrew poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol; fragmentary or uncompleted works and sketches such as Israel and His Land (a cantata); The Prophets, a cantata on a text by Saul Tchernikowsky; Molad'ti; and Palestine at War, music for a film for the Palestine Labor Committee composed jointly with German-Jewish refugee Trude Rittman (in which the number Jewish Soldier's Day was recycled and adapted from his earlier song Rote Soldaten, written in Germany from a different perspective as part of his Four Antiwar Songs). One of his most arresting completed Judaic works is Yigdal Cantata—a hymn summarizing Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith, believed to have been penned in the 14th century by Daniel ben Yehuda of Rome but sometimes alternatively attributed to his contemporary, Immanuel ben Solomon, also of Rome. Though the hymn appears in the prayerbook at the beginning of the morning service, it is also frequently recited at the conclusion of Sabbath and High Holy Day evening services. The complex setting of the hymn was commissioned by Cantor David Putterman for the third annual service of new music at New York's Park Avenue Synagogue in 1945 (although only portions of the piece were performed then).
Once in Palestine, Wolpe immersed himself in local Jewish and other indigenous folk cultures. He explored with enthusiasm Arabic and Turkish music traditions, as well as the musics of oriental (viz., Mediterranean and Near Eastern) Jewish communities that had resettled in Palestine. He was soon intrigued by a subjective feeling that his own ethnic roots somehow lay in the Near East. That self-discovery, of course, was more emotional reaction and adopted cultural perception than historical reality for a Jew with so firmly rooted a European heritage. But it might have satisfied some dormant spiritual instinct, almost as a realization of a theretofore missing link. In Jaffa, he is said to have reacted to his initial exposure to the sound of Arabic, exclaiming, "This is my sound!" And according to Irma, it was not only—or even so much—the "Jewishness" that he loved at first as it was the "native atmosphere" of Palestine, the sum total of its natural aesthetics. He also soon envisioned a potential productive synergy between the local folk cultures and the advancement of a serious concert music.
Writing about what was then perceived as an emerging "new Palestinian music," he observed: "To the professional composer whose material is the European art music, the Jewish and Arab Palestinian folklore opens up a fertile and rejuvenating world." Israeli music historian Jehoash Hirshberg has identified Wolpe as among the first European composers in Palestine to emulate, for example, the plucking sounds of Arabic instruments such as the q?n?n and the oud through clashes of major and minor seconds. And Hirshberg has interpreted as Wolpe's response to the Near Eastern melos his use of heterophonic techniques in certain pieces from that period.
In later comments on the Hebrew songs he composed during those four years, and on the overall imprint of the experience on his artistic direction, Wolpe noted:
When I was in that country, I felt the folklore which I heard there to be profoundly latent within me. To this day I cannot forget how the cadences of the language there struck me, how the light of the sky, the smell of the country, the stones of the hills around Jerusalem, the power and the sinewy beauty of the Hebrew language, all turned into music which suddenly seemed to have a topographical character to it. It seemed new to me, and I felt it as an old source within me.
In his earlier creative life in Germany, Wolpe had experimented with assimilating new cultural and aesthetic influences from outside the European classical mold, incorporating and refining those influences into an evolving, eclectic, multifaceted, and personal idiom. In his new environment he continued those procedures with different materials. His self-discovery of Judaic roots with perceived Near Eastern seeds now broadened his penchant for eclectic musical language.
However, as Clarkson and other Wolpe scholars have emphasized, Wolpe diverged from the path of many colleagues in his insistence that advanced artistic expression should provide the framework for constituent folkloristic elements, rather than bow regressively to the domination of more conventional concert music styles to which folklore is merely adapted. In that approach, he can be said to have rejected the much more widely accepted development of a so-called Mediterranean stylistic umbrella in classical music, as promoted by some of the most famous modern Israeli composers of that era such as Marc Lavry, Paul Ben-Haim, and Alexander Boskovich.
Wolpe's undiminished socialist worldview seems not to have come into conflict with the nationalist underpinning of the Zionist endeavor. To the contrary, that view found mutual encouragement and expression in his music for kibbutz ensembles, his work with choirs, and his tutelage of kibbutz composers such as Sholom Postolsky and Mordecai Zeira, who were among the leading creators of halutz (pioneer) songs and thus the progenitors of an Israeli folk music idiom. Some of the music he provided for kibbutz groups even included new Hebrew translations of earlier German songs of social protest and struggle from his Berlin days. And he contributed to socialist-oriented kibbutz events, such as the May Day celebration in the Jezreel Valley, for which he also wrote music.
In a farewell letter to students, Wolpe recalled with much fondness his travels among kibbutzim (especially Merhavia, Usha, and Kiryat Anavim) to organize and direct choirs— often with a harmonium strapped to his back—as "the happiest hours" of his activities in Palestine.
Among the European émigré composers in Palestine, Wolpe is generally considered the first to have arrived already substantially influenced by the serial techniques of the Second Viennese School and its advocates—an imprint that met with considerable resistance. Throughout his stay there he refused to bend to pressures to mediate his musically progressive path in his serious concert music. Instead, he continued to confront artistic modernity and to further flesh out his personal response to twelve-tone procedures and other contemporary departures from conventional aesthetics. Whether from his Berlin, Palestine, or American periods, Wolpe's music is often characterized as "transgressing" boundaries of popular, folk, and cultivated art genres and their respective languages. Although his music for amateur groups in Palestine found appreciation, the audience for the music he infused more rigorously with dodecaphonic and other avant-garde manifestations was small, and this was a constant source of frustration for him. In fact, Wolpe's experience may illustrate the boundaries of artistic sophistication and acceptance at that stage in the y'shuv. In this regard the supposition of musicologist Philip Bohlman, in his concentrated study of that musical community with respect to the confluence of Central European and local traditions, seems apt: "It is with Stefan Wolpe that one sees, perhaps, the stylistic limit that the musical environment of Palestine in the 1930s would or would not tolerate."
Nonetheless, as the most ardent representative of the avant-garde among the young composers who had come from Europe, and as the most advanced practitioner of serialism there, Wolpe soon attracted a circle of devotees and students in Jerusalem, which, apart from his kibbutz activity, was the principal habitat of his work. He introduced his students to the most progressive techniques and developments of the time, urging them to navigat
3 Hassidic Dances (more info)
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No. 1. Dance of the Joyous: Allegro - 3:10
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No. 2. Dance of the Enraptured: Adagio - Andantino - 6:59
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No. 3. Dance of the Exultant: Moderato - Allegro - 7:16
Moise, Op. 219, "Opus americanum No. 2" (excerpts) (more info)
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I. Overture: Israelites suffering under slavery - 2:20
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II. Modere: Moses birth and discovery - 3:28
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III. Anime: Moses brought to court - 2:17
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IV. Suple et Anime: Moses as pet of the court; political intrigue - 3:08
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VIII. Lent: Moses' descent from Mt. Sinai; smashing the tablets - 0:41
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IX. Modere: Moses' anger and solitude - 3:40
The Man from Midian Suite (more info)
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I. Serfdom - Lamentation - 1:35
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II. Mother Conceives [Conceals] Child - 1:31
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III. Pharaoh's Daughter Bathes in the Nile, Finds the Baby - 2:16
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IV. Procession - 2:33
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V. Pet of the Court - Political Intrigue - 3:37
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VI. Moses Among the Workers - 1:28
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VII. Moses Buries the Taskmaster in the Sand - 3:55
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VIII. Portrait of Moses - 2:10
The Vision of Ariel (excerpts) (more info)
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Scene I (excerpts) - 8:13
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Scene III (excerpts) - 13:45
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