Zeus und Elida: Wolpe's Kunstjazz opera

Wolpe's one-act buffa Zeus und Elida was one of three theatrical works composed between 1927 and 1929. Wolpe was influenced by the twelve-tone practices of loser Matthias Hauer and Arnold Schoenberg, the Bauhaus theater of Oskar Schlemmer, the anarchic iconoclasm of Dada, the jazz music of the 1920s, and especially Ferruccio Busoni's Arlecchino and his aesthetic of opera. An essay on film music that Wolpe published in 1926 provides a link between Busoni and the composition of Zeus und Elida. This article examines the musical dramaturgy of the opera, with special attention to the use of dance genres, the scoring for a Kunstjazz orchestra and the technical challenges posed to the musicians. It concludes that Wolpe achieved in this opera a concept of the melos as an unfolding fabric of continuously varied actions that arose from Busoni's concept of polyphony. It proposes that in Zeus und Elida Wolpe achieved a concept of a dialectical musical dramaturgy that formed the basis of his later work as a composer and teacher in Palestine, which prompted Adorno to describe him as 'an outsider in the best sense of the word'. Keywords: Adorno, T. W.; Arlecchino; Busoni, Ferruccio; Dialectics; Dramaturgy; Kunstjazz; Schlemmer, Oskar; Zeus und Elida