Born in Berlin on 25 August 1902, died in New York on 4 April 1972; Stefan Wolpe was a German-American composer. He studied at the Berlin Musikhochschule and was close to the Bauhaus, to Dadaism and to the Berlin workers’ movement, for which he wrote fighting songs and stage music. In 1933 he fled by way of Vienna, where he studied with Anton Webern, to Palestine and taught at the conservatory in Jerusalem. In 1938 he went to the USA and taught among other places at Black Mountain College and at Long Island University; his pupils included Morton Feldman and Ralph Shapey. His work combines twelve-note technique with free interval writing and impulses from jazz and Jewish music. In the Cybele catalogue his chamber music is heard on Harmonies and Counterpoints between Germany and America (1999).
Stefan Wolpe
Composer
