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about the possibility of a gradual cultivation of musicaltastes and standards in the Jewish homeland through workwith, and appeal to, “the people”:In Palestine there exists a closer cooperation betweenthe composer and the people, as a result of which thecomposer becomes the guide of the amateurs, graduallyheightening the musical values and preventing thestagnation of musical folklore.Moreover, in the United States he exhibited a logicalsolidarity with other forced émigré artists and, after thewar, with artists who had survived the Holocaust either inEurope or as refugees in America.At the end of 1954 and the very beginning of 1955 Wolpecomposed his Four Pieces for Mixed Chorus—settings ofthree biblical texts and one by a modern Israeli poet, allin Hebrew—for submission to a competition sponsoredby the Israeli government for a work for amateur chorus.Taken together, the four texts constitute a quasi-cantatathat celebrates the Jewish people as a nation and theestablishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as a fulfillment ofbiblical prophecy. He did not receive the prize, only becausethe jury—unanimous in adjudging it the most worthy of theentries—thought it too difficult for amateur choruses. (Theprize was awarded instead to Haim Alexander, a Jerusalemresident who had been a student of Wolpe’s there.) Moresignificant for our understanding of Wolpe’s developedsensibilities are the words he wrote to his by then formerwife, Irma Wolpe Rademacher, upon its completion: “Ohow my Hebrew music settles in my blood! And how thisbloodstream, this remarkably ancient, history-filled stream,deepens, mingles wonderfully and is purified.”—Neil W. Levin8.559439 18ONE BALLET AND TWO COMPOSERSMilhaud’s Moïse and Wolpe’s The Man from MidianDuring the first seven years of Milhaud’s American period,when he resided and worked exclusively in the United States,he collaborated on four ballet projects with importantchoreographers and companies, including The Bells, basedon the poem by Edgar Allan Poe; Jeux de printemps, withchoreography by Martha Graham; La Création du monde(Black Ritual), choreographed by Agnes de Mille; and TheMan from Midian. In August 1940, the fledgling BalletTheatre (known after 1957 as American Ballet Theatre)—which, in its seven-month existence as an independenttroupe under the management of its founder-directorRichard Pleasant, was already gaining critical recognitionas “the American Ballet”—commissioned Milhaud tocompose a score for a one-act (twenty-five-minute) balletto a choreographic scenario by Winthrop Bushnell Palmer.The work was based liberally and poetically on the life,leadership, and mission of Moses. Palmer had titled herhighly personal interpretation The Man from Midian, looselydrawn from the narrative account in Exodus in which Mosestakes refuge in Midian following his flight from Egypt.After killing an Egyptian taskmaster whom he saw beatingan Israelite slave, Moses marries a Midianite woman, sires ason, and lives the life of a shepherd—until he is mandatedby God in the familiar “burning bush” incident to return toEgypt to lead his people out of bondage and to the landthat will be their own as a free nation.Milhaud titled his score MOÏSE (with the subtitle Balletsymphonique in the manuscript), which later, as a concertsuite, became his Opus Americanum no. 2. But the two ballettitles—Moïse and The Man from Midian—appear to havebeen used interchangeably during the contract negotiationsand during the preparation and rehearsal period, and theinitial billing for the subsequently postponed and ultimatelyaborted premiere, first scheduled for February 1941, referredto the production as “Eugene Loring’s The Man fromMidian.” Loring, who had established his reputation as thechoreographer of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid and other