Born in Bensheim, Werlé, son of a civil servant, was first a music teacher at a school in Leipzig, and from 1926 in the rank of a study council.
[1] In his contribution Zur Lage der Volksmusik im Rundfunk in the Leipzig magazine Volk im Werden, he described the Weimar Republic as a "period of liberalism lying behind us", which "out of inertial bourgeois comfort even in the popular has mixed so much foreign, false and hypocritical things with each other and intermingled them with each other, that first of all must be cleared away.
Only what is true to life and close to the people finds its way directly to the Germans [...] The prerequisites for another are not based on a new aesthetic, but rest in the moral strength of responsibility-conscious National Socialism.
"[2] From 1937 to 1943 Werlé was main editor of the magazine for folk music Gut Ton in Dresden.
In 1953 he obtained his doctorate at the University of Jena with a thesis on Musik im Leben des Kindes.