The Unusual Musical Career of German-American Composer Stefan Wolpe
An enlightened and bold child-musician, playing in the dark.
BERLIN (Fall 2024) — Calling himself a “mistake” from birth, Stefan Wolpe once claimed to be the “product of a botched abortion.”
His Berlin childhood home was dominated by a sour, hate-filled father, from whom he quickly fled. Like countless other veterans, David Wolpe harbored deep and directionless anger after coming back from the First World War. Returning home to his couch, the father watched the slow-motion fall of the German kaiser, who’d led the country into social disparity and financial ruin. (The kaiser’s biggest mistake: Supporting the bloody war abroad with his cadre of increasingly militant “noble officers,” donated by the ‘best-bred’ families of the German/Austro-Hungarian ruling class.)
If there was one ray of light in Stefan’s childhood, it was the employment his father took, managing cinemas. The job entailed drawing Berliners into the flickering dark, where new stories were projected in remarkable new media. In this, the father put the son to work and, in the new cinemas, Stefan Wolpe found his first audiences: Before he was 16, the gifted pianist was composing music “on the fly” during live-runs of silent films, many of them being produced by Berlin’s first generation of filmmakers….