Martin sitting for an interview in the living room
of his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

Martin Halpern’s professional interests have run on two tracks, music and the theater. He has managed to produce a large body of creative works on both tracks during a long academic career, and now, in his l6th year of retirement, he is producing them at a faster clip than ever.

Martin retired from Brandeis University as professor of playwriting and dramatic literature in 1994. He had taught at Brandeis for 29 years. All that time he was not only teaching but also writing – mainly one- or two-act plays, and also music, including chamber operas for which he also wrote the librettos.

Now 80 years old, he is hard at work at creative activities full time at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, in New York City. The emphasis has tilted to chamber operas lately, and these are getting productions in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. Two recent chamber operas, Purgatory and The Death of Oedipus, had four performances in October at a church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Like many of his works, these were based on classical themes.

A two-act play called No Moves Back played for two and a half weeks in February at the Roy Arias studio on West 43rd Street, in Manhattan. Written some years ago, it is based on a chess game between two older men that gets interrupted by unlikely street experiences.

This past November Martin completed arrangements for the performance of two new chamber operas in March – The Enchanted Stone and The Hour Glass. Both are freely based on early plays by William Butler Yeats. They will be performed at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church at 346 West 20th Street in Manhattan from Thursday March 4 through Saturday March 6. (For tickets online, go to www.theatermania.com.)

Martin at the piano in his living room, but this
is not where he works when he is composing.

“My life is work because this is what I live for,” Martin says. “If I don’t have something to work on I get very depressed.” One would think that without work he might also get lonely during the day, since his wife, Barbara Underwood, works full time and then some as the Solicitor General of the State of New York.

Since his retirement Martin has had more than 80 performances in the New York area of his art songs and chamber works, including the first of his four string quartets, which appears on a Meridian String Quartet CD called “Diverse Light,” released by Capstone Records in 2001. He strengthened his composing abilities by earning a master’s degree in musical composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College in 1997.

What he works on as a composer seems always to have a literary source. Some of his chamber operas are based on his earlier plays. An example is the chamber opera The Satin Cloak, written in 1996 and based on one of his earlier plays, Tameem, which in turn was based on one of the parables of the 18th century Hasidic scholar Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava. The parable is called “The Clever Man and the Simple Man” – a contrast that typifies Martin’s preference in thematic material.

“I see words first, and then the music,” he says. “For most composers it’s the other way around. I try to bring a dramatic and literary quality to the operas.”

The PC in his study is a part of the equipment
Martin uses when he works at his composing.

Martin was born in the Bronx on October 3, 1929. He was graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Rochester. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in English at Harvard in 1959.

His teaching career began as an assistant professor of English at the University of California in Berkeley. Five years later he moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1965 he left for Brandeis, and remained there until his retirement.

Over time, academic awards and honors have flowed in: A Fulbright scholarship to Rome in 1956, a writing fellowship in 1962, an arts award from San Jose State University in 1978, three more playwriting awards in 1971, 1978 and 1982 and ten grants from Meet The Composer, a national organization based in New York City that supports the creation of new musical work. On top of all this he has written poetry, and his play Tameem won the 1968 California Olympiad of the Arts Award in Poetic Drama.

The dramatization of conflicting ideas, or moral principles, is characteristic of his playwriting. Conflict lends the dramatic quality to moral or religious issues, he says, and “I can’t write a play without some kind of moral or religious meaning.” His most satisfying plays are those that have set up conflicting but equally valid points of view and have given full expression to both “without saying what is right and what is wrong.”

Accordingly, one of his favorites among his plays is Day Six, which sets up a confrontation between a man who ghostwrites sermons that he claims he doesn’t believe in, and a woman who does believe in those sermons. The play was produced off Broadway in 1986 and ran for two and a half weeks, with the actor Len Carriou in the starring role. It received several favorable reviews.

In another play, What the Babe Said, the manager of a Big League team and his star center fielder are in conflict over the value of the game. The play has had productions by the Circle Repertory Company in Manhattan and in Denver, Colorado. In addition to these cities and Brandeis University, his plays have been produced in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, California, Washington D.C., and Teaneck, New Jersey.

No pen and pencil for Martin – he composes
at his synthesizer in the study of his apartment.

Even his chamber operas present stories of conflicting ideas, sometimes drawn from classical literature. The Siege of Syracuse, which premiered in 2008 at the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse, dramatizes the fall of the Athenian state, and includes a confrontation of the hawkish Cleophon, head of the Athenian council, and the philosopher Socrates. The listener is free to draw analogies with confrontations over American policy in Vietnam and Iraq.

The two chamber operas staged last October at the Church of St. Gregory on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Purgatory and The Death of Oedipus, also demonstrate the composer’s taste for classical themes that are compelling morally and intellectually.

In Oedipus the blind and remorseful fallen king is accompanied in his banishment by his daughter, Antigone, who is helping him achieve his wish of visiting the sacred site of Colonus. On the way they are thwarted by two citizens, but the citizens relent after hearing the story of Oedipus’ agony. In the end Oedipus achieves spiritual fulfillment before he dies.

In Purgatory, freely based on the Yeats play of that name, the issue is more complex. An old peddler is seeking redemption for killing his father during a rage in his youth. The peddler’s son, hearing his father’s laments, seems to take them rather lightly, at least at first. In the end, the father impales himself on the son’s knife to expiate his sin.

Martin giving an introduction to his
two operas before the performance.

The music in Martin’s chamber operas has been scored in the past for small chamber groups, but the more recent ones have been written for the piano. Purgatory and The Death of Oedipus, with the baritone Jim Trainor as leading singer and Earl Buys at the piano, received a highly favorable review from Joel Benjamin in the online publication, TheatreScene (at www.theatrescene.net).

Of Purgatory, the reviewer said, "The music, at once strident and totally appropriate, . . . created drama of its own sort." Of The Death of Oedipus, the reviewer wrote, "Mr. Halpern's stripped-down dramaturgy and angular music add depth and . . . poignancy to the . . . story."

Martin himself describes his musical style as “post-tonal.” He says that he writes “chromatically,” with tonal references in his work, and that much of it grows out of the French tradition of Debussy or Ravel. Among modern composers, Benjamin Britten is an influence. The librettos are metrical in style. “Chamber operas," he says, "give me a chance to exercise my ability as a composer-poet.”

The plays with a modern theme also show the author’s taste for dramatizing clashing principles or attitudes. In No Moves Back the elderly chess players betray their contrasting approaches to life, one positive, the other negative. These attitudes play out as other characters appear in unexpected and sometimes comical circumstances on the stage.

The librettos for the forthcoming chamber operas are free adaptations of early plays by Yeats – A Pot of Broth in the case of the Halpern opera The Enchanted Stone, and The Hour Glass in the case of the Halpern opera with the same title.

One of the actors and singers in Martin’s recent productions has been his 23-year-old son Bobby Underwood. Martin has two other grown children from a previous marriage and two grandsons.

“If people are fortunate as I am to have work to do in retirement that they are dedicated to,” he said, “they should do it!”

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From March 2010 MARTIN HALPERN

Martin introducing two earlier one-
act operas at a performance in Oct.

Two more one-act chamber operas by Martin Halpern, our Spotlight subject in the December 2009 issue, will be performed early in March. The Enchanted Stone and The Hour Glass, both freely based on early plays by W.B. Yeats, will be staged at St. Peter's Church, 346 West 20th Street, Manhattan, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, March 4, 5 and 6, at 8 p.m. Tickets ($20, $10 for students) may be reserved on line at www.theatermania.com or by telephone at 212-352-3101.

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