Paul Dessau was born on 19 December 1894 in Hamburg. He grew up in a musical family: his grandfather was a cantor in the Hamburg Synagogue and his father a great lover of music. One of his cousins, Max Winterfeld, better known under the pen name Jean Gilbert, was an orchestral conductor and composer of operettas. Dessau began learning violin at a very early age, but abandoned the idea of becoming a professional violinist because of a problem with his left hand. He became interested in orchestral conducting, which he studied from 1909 to 1913 in Berlin. At the age of just eighteen, he became a répétiteur at the Hamburg municipal theater.

In May 1915, Paul Dessau was drafted for military service and sent to the French front, where he was wounded. He was then sent to serve as a military musician in Schleswig. After the First World War, he worked as an orchestra conductor, first in Hamburg, and then in Cologne (1919-1923) with Otto Klemperer. He then moved to Mainz (1923-1924) before taking up a post at the Städtische Oper Berlin (1925-1926). He began working in the cinema in 1926, (in Wiesbaden, and then in Berlin), conducting and composing scores for silent films. He also wrote several Jewish liturgical pieces, as well as some pieces in 1930 for worker choirs.

As a politically leftist Jewish avant-garde musician, Dessau was under particular threat in Germany once the National Socialist Party came to power on 30 January 1933, and he fled the country for France in 1933. This forced Dessau’s departure from the “classical” composer’s career that had been opening up to him, and for several years he lived a Bohemian, poverty-stricken existence. He could no longer measure his success in terms of broad audience, but rather among a small circle of friends and acquaintances. This time in exile also pushed him to explore his Jewish roots in music, as well as composing songs for the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. His exile in France also marked the beginning of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht.

In July 1939, Dessau emigrated to New York, where he survived by doing odd jobs, correcting and copying scores, teaching piano, and composing small commissions for synagogues. His mother’s death in Theresienstadt in 1942 was a decisive factor in his subsequent work. On Brecht’s advice, Dessau left New York for Hollywood in October 1943, where a network of friends and acquaintances and the presence of a large community of exiled German artists and intellectuals helped him to integrate into life there. He made his living composing for Hollywood studios, and his collaboration with Brecht grew more intense.

With the Red Scare heating up in the United States, Dessau returned to Europe in July 1948, staying first in Paris, then in Stuttgart, and finally settling in East Berlin. The Soviet authorities still allowed a relative degree of artistic freedom in their zone of occupation, even as the fight against “formalism,” led by Jdanov, was in full swing in the USSR itself at that time. Unlike Bertolt Brecht or Hanns Eisler, who were more cautious politically, Dessau joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in November 1948, and acquired East German citizenship after the founding of the RDA, on 7 October 1949. Although he hoped in this way to contribute to the democratic renewal of Germany, and had brought numerous scores back with him from his time in exile, Dessau met with distrust from the East German authorities.

Dessau was never particularly institutionally active, and never held any administrative responsibilities; however, teaching (mostly at the Academy of Arts) was important to him. He became one of the RDA’s most celebrated composers, and forged strong ties to musicians on both sides of the wall, such as Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, Boris Blacher, and Alfred Schnittke. He rapidly joined the small fraction of the East German elite who were allowed to travel. He won the RDA National Prize on multiple occasions (1953, 1956, 1965, 1974) and served as a kind of cultural showcase for the RDA. This position left him with a certain degree of freedom of expression, which he did not hesitate to use in favor of artists and friends who came up against the regime’s rigidities.

This made it all the more suprising when he sided with the Party in 1976, when it expatriated the songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann after a concert Cologne, barring him from reentry into East Germany. Dessau’s stance may be explained by his attachment to East Germany, which in his eyes was far preferable to capitalist West Germany, which had been the cradle of fascism not so long before. Dessau was part of a group of people who hoped to transform the regime from the inside.

Nevertheless, the composer felt increasing scepticism toward his increasingly stagnant country, which seems to come through in his final work, the opera Leonce und Lena, which premiered five months after his death on 28 June 1979, at the age of 84. One of his last wishes was that he not be given a state funeral.