Arts and Letters

It was the comet-like radiance, the fervent intensity, the penetrating mind exploring many levels of seriousness and humor, above all it was the adventurousness and originality which marked his outer and inner life that captured you when you came in contact with Stefan Wolpe and his music. He was a man, a musician for whom all those who knew him could not help but feel admiration and affection. Relations with him were such important experiences that, understandably, he was surrounded by many devoted friends and students ready to help to get his music published, performed, to save his manuscripts during the tragic fire of a few years ago, and to help him move about when his physical condition was deteriorating. The force of his artistic personality, motivated as it was by deep conviction and by an innately original way of doing things, occasionally seemed utterly unconcerned with prudence and caution, yet what he did turned out to be the only right way of acting.

I remember a very vivid day in England, while I was teaching at the music school at Dartington Hall where Stefan had come to visit. I asked him to teach my class of young English composers, feeling, really, that he, at least, would give these bright students one worthwhile class. He started by talking about his Passacaglia, a piano piece divided into sections each based on a different musical interval—minor second, major second and so on. At once, sitting at the piano, he was caught up in a meditation on how wonderful these primary materials, intervals, were; playing them over and over on the piano, singing, roaring, humming them, loudly, softly, quickly, slowly, short and hammered out or extended and expressive. All of us forgot time passing—when the class was to finish. As he led us from the smallest, the minor second, to the largest, the major seventh—which took all afternoon—music lived freshly, new light dawned, we all knew we would never listen again to music as we had then. Stefan had made each of us experience very directly the living power of these simple elements. From then on indifference to each of their qualities was impossible. Such a lesson most of us never had before or since, I imagine.

After leaving Berlin, where he was born, grew up and studied, Stefan travelled during the ’30s to Russia, Romania, Austria, to the then Palestine and finally arrived in America in '39 with a considerable number of significant works. His presence here soon attracted attention among those interested in contemporary music by whom he was soon to be held in high esteem. As a result, he was chosen by the League of Composers—ISCM—to be the recipient of a Rodgers and Hammerstein commission for a symphony. This was written in 1955-56 and turned out to be one of the most remarkable but also one of the most difficultly performable pieces of our time.

When it was finally accepted for performance by the New York Philharmonic almost ten years after its completion, Stefan decided to revise the score and had to rush to have the parts copied. The work proved beyond the level of difficulty that the Philharmonic could cope with, given its lack of experience with new music and its limited rehearsal schedule. As all his friends bitterly remember, only two of its three movements were performed and these not at all well.

It may have been as a result of the strain of preparing for this performance-ordeal and the shock of the actual happening that he began to show signs of the illness, Parkinson's disease, which from then on fell like a heavy shadow on the physical body of this extraordinarily animated man. Yet from about 1964 until his death, physically weakened often to the point of not being able to push a pencil across a piece of paper, he still continued, undiminished in spirit, to teach, think and compose, producing many more of his remarkable works. In this frightful phase of his life, the courage, determination, and will to live and act through his art were inspiring. Few have been put to the terrible test that he endured and few that have, have been able to carry on as he did under the circumstances.

His physical life over, what emerges more clearly than ever is that the surpassing moral fortitude Stefan exhibited in his last years is the very quality which gives the radiant power and originality to his music. It unequivocally presents a deeply felt, passionate conviction about the importance of life and art, making its point immediate and overwhelming.