Perhaps triggered by the theatrics of choreography as well as his own intense turmoil, Waltz for Merle became a minute and revealing self-portrait in which these experiences revealed themselves within the bizarre rhythms of waltzes and complexities of polyphony.
The music presents the waltz as a metaphor for the hide-bound traditional-a musical conception that Wolpe had taken large doses of not only in his Proletarian and folk-inspired works but even in some of his strict serial works. Wolpe was oppressed by this formalism and with the liberation of 1945, he felt the need for artistic freedom as well.
Wolpe's own presence is felt in two ways. First, one feels his reactions to the music itself- at times boredom, at times, impatience, at times anger- where he can be seen rudely ignoring a dancers rhythmic affectation or engaging in canonical argument- and finally mad fury, where he simply cannot take the sheer banality and overturns the table, clears the dishes and sets a new musical menu. Second, Wolpe is painting a musical cameo of New York City, as the avant-garde sounds stem entirely from his experiences in downtown Manhattan.
Wolpe achieves a grotesque and highly personal synthesis by means of parody-a part of his musical arsenal since his Berlin years. In Waltz, virtually all aspects of Viennese waltz come up for Wolpe's scorn and, at times violent, revenge. Indeed, the parody is so all-pervasive that one is not quite sure what is the ultimate object of Wolpe's mockery: Viennese culture, the waltz, affectation, or perhaps Wolpe himself.
The very opening
presents a Viennese curtain raiser consisting of three 4-bar phrases
sounding rather like trumpet calls. These cheerful hemiola rhythms contain
the three-note group and the six-pitch row that provides Wolpe with
virtually all the material that he will need to both construct and destroy
the waltz edifice.
After a squashing together of the hemiola
patterns leads to a half-cadence, we suddenly find ourselves, not in '90's
Vienna, but in '50's New York. This is heard in the somewhat impolite and
fast-paced downtown sound. One feels in a Village nightclub filled with
smoke and hearing avant-garde jazz (which Wolpe was experiencing at this
time). The right hand sounds like a xylophone, the left hand attacks like
a snare drum. The syncopations float in mid-air.
Even the impoliteness is somewhat impersonal. The
treble starts in what is really 5/4 meter, or a graceful expansion of the
opening hemiola; when it attempts to return to its 3/4 meter in ms.17 the
left hand rudely continues the 5/4 sequence with a violent if impersonal
slap in the face ending with an accent one beat later than the right
hand's downbeat accent. Suddenly, a graceful Viennese rhythmic cliché
appears out of nowhere in the treble (ms.18) which is a metamorphosis of
the 3-note opening motive. This will become the mocking spirit throughout
the work in this and numerous other shapes. After this motive is bandied
about canonically, a new attempt at unity is initiated at bar 30.
This quasi-A-flat Major tune, a Schubertian Valse
Noble, maintains its grace for a few measures before Wolpe becomes
edgy. By ms.34 and 35 the left hand will no longer end phrases with the
right hand and they follow their separate paths to their next tryst at
ms.38. This is the smoothest transformation of the opening yet and the
dance-like grace is so ineffable that Wolpe's 16th note debates barely
dampen the mood. Even this attempt dies down before the gloss of the Trio.
The Trio provides the widest panorama of mindless
ballroom pleasure as one sees couples gliding effortlessly over the floor
accompanied by the clinking of champagne glasses. Wolpe conjures up a horn
trio accompanied by luscious string pizzicatti and bird-like runs in the
winds. The opening motive contracts and expands flirtatiously, but Wolpe's
boredom and disgust are growing and nothing can prevent the music's
eventual evaporation into musical emptiness. It is emotionally of a piece
with tempi di minuetto from Music for a Dancer (1950) in
which Wolpe's utter contempt for affectation is made evident. At a point
where Strauss would cheerfully bring back his Blue Danube, Wolpe will have
none of it. Rather, he appears as an avenging angel ready to purify the
musical world of the decadence that it had been experiencing so
shamelessly.
After a sense of primitive groping towards the
overarching leitmotive, it arrives-neither with a flourish nor with a
twinkle, but with an explosion. The 3-note group initiates a violent
jazz-like chaos in which Waltz is forsaken not only in spirit but
even in meter. Unlike the Village café where cool jazz was heard, this is
hot jazz whose coarse character and even melodic shape bring a
foretaste of the finale of the Saxophone Quartet of 1945. Here, one
is finally back in the world of Battle Piece, where the
dichotomy between the hands is not merely banal, but fraught with peril.
The music is utterly abstract as no attempt is made to create beats for
dancer or listener. All one hears and feels are lines pulling frantically
at one another in an empty void. Perhaps most violent is from bar 134
where the reintroduction of Waltz motives prepares the way for
their dragging down to a kind of musical Purgatory. Bars 136 to 137 pave
the way with mighty chords and then the motives is literally torn to
shreds in various canons-ordinary, inverted, retrograde. In addition the
duple meter of the opening Straussian hemiola holds full sway, so in the
violence of the passage, the concept of waltz has been utterly demolished.
From ms.151, Wolpe's parody is at its most
surreal. In what is a barely noticeable return of the waltz, each strain
is presented misshapen, as though pushed on stage by an uncaring stage
manager. It is as though Wolpe were muttering "see what these
pretentious Viennese gestures amount to now!" Virtually every
measure presents a wraith-like image of puppet-like dancers unaware of the
state of the world around them, rather like Beckmann's Dance in Baden
Baden. By ms.171 the waltz is triumphant as 3/4 reigns supreme and
even the hemiola rests comfortably within its boundaries. When there is
the faintest trace of itchiness by bar 193, as Wolpe sits on the opening
pitches more and more stridently-even canonically- the ghost of the Trio
overhead to calm any arguments and the dance dissolves, never to return.
For the performer,
Waltz presents the same pianistic challenges found in other Wolpe
masterworks. Vast registral leaps, voices (often more than two) moving at
metric and expressive cross-purposes, and a physicality that often requires
one's whole body to take part in the performance all take place within
five minutes of terse dance and make the challenges even greater. As with
all of Wolpe's most challenging music, a performer's eyes must be largely
free not only of the score, but also of the keyboard in order to focus
upon phrase and touch.
One specially relevant interpretative issue is
that of "interpolation". In his preface to the Peer Edition of Battle
Piece, David Tudor describes the concept as an interruption in the
flow of the music by the sudden imposition of another musical line. This
is a dramatic gesture which the performer highlights, in Battle Piece,
often as a tug-of-war between two tempos. In Waltz it is especially
valuable in the recapitulation where misshapen waltz lines come
helter-skelter back into the picture. It needs bearing in mind that there
is no precise definition for "interpolation" and, indeed, any
performer uses various techniques such as agogic accents, rubato, subtle
touch differences in all standard repertoire. To achieve the magical
effect which Wolpe intended in the recapitulation, all of these techniques
must be used to give each motive its separate personality (touch most of
all). What is most challenging is that given the speed and whirling
suddenness of change, only the most subtle use of rhythmic space, finger
weight, crescendi, and variety of staccati have any chance of allowing
this distinction to be felt. This is the challenge of Waltz and its
greatest delight as well.
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