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From his birth in 1894 to his death in 1979, Paul Dessau’s life spanned most of the twentieth century. Profoundly affected by the two world wars, he had great hope for the democratic renewal of East Germany (GDR), and worked in tandem with Bertolt Brecht. Both politically committed and deeply attached to artistic freedom, he sought out musical forms and techniques that resisted dogmatism of any kind. Despite the Iron Curtain, he worked with musicians from many different countries, including René Leibowitz, Luigi Nono, Otto Klemperer, and Hans Werner Henze, which meant that neither his reputation nor his inspiration were limited to the GDR.
Dessau’s early work, written during or shortly after World War I, is in a post-Romantic aesthetic. The pieces express the suffering of a generation that was sacrificed in combat (Symphonic Cantata, for male choir, solo tenor and soprano, orchestra, and organ), who sometimes find a soothing sense of peace, or an echo of their own states of mind, in nature (e.g., the lieder Beruhigung, Helle Nacht, Verkündigung, Nachtglanz). The military music that Dessau had to compose during his military service also made a mark on his later work, but in parody.
His Concertino (1924) for solo violin, flute, clarinet, and horn, which was awarded the music publisher Schott’s prize, is based on Baroque forms like the fugue and the passacaglia. In stylistic terms, Dessau, was inspired by Paul Hindemith, a friend of his, and by the New Objectivity, playing with stylistic imitations. In 1927, his First Symphony premiered in Prague: in a single movement, it reprises fragments of the traditional Kol Nidre melody. With the entire orchestra playing in homorhythm, the theme takes on a stubborn and combative feel.
In 1930, Dessau began composing for workers’ choirs, with pieces in an agitprop style that prioritizes the intelligibility of the lyrics. One example, Chormusik 1931, using text from the Old Testament, features the Israelites pleading with their God; the pleading is, however, presented as a militant demand: “It is time to give bread to the hungry,” the narrator concludes. Dessau’s lieder gradually take on a political slant. Breaking with the expressive lyricism of the lieder he wrote during World War I, they display ironic, caustic wit and pared-down language.
Even prior to 1933, Dessau had occasionally followed the tradition, on his father’s side of the family, of composing for Jewish services. His Third Psalm, from 1933, written for a string trio and alto voice, betrays concern about rising anti-Semitism. He also began composing the Haggadah oratorio, setting a text that Max Brod had written in Hebrew so as to avoid German, a language that had become too strongly associated with the Nazis. This oratorio for choir, children’s choir, soloists, and orchestra, relates the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. The parallel with the events of the time is obvious. Destined for a wide audience, the work has a blend of styles: Hebrew songs combined with nineteenth-century Italian opera, with recitative, arias, choruses, and marches.
Dessau also contributed musically to other current political events: in 1936, during France’s Popular Front period, he wrote choruses setting newspaper articles to music. During the Spanish Civil War, he composed songs for the International Brigades, most notably for Ernst Busch. Most of those songs have remained anonymous, but the Thälmann-Kolonne, an iconic battle anthem, remains linked to his name. It became a standard in East Germany, much to his chagrin; he found it oversimplified the ideology of his composition.
The songs he wrote for Brecht’s plays, on the other hand, tend to be ironic and self-parodying. The August 1936 Song of the Battle of the Black Straw Hats, for the second scene in Saint Joan of the Stockyards opens with a march that is soon disturbed by the intrusion of foreign musical elements. For the Song of a German Mother, Dessau drew inspiration from popular song and the standard verse-chorus form. In it, he sets a tragic text to joyful music — contributing to the alienating effect of Brecht’s work.
Dessau had already shaken off tonality in Lyrisches Intermezzo (1919), after Heinrich Heine, for voice and orchestra, and in Twelve Etudes for Piano, op. 36 (1932, revised in 1933 and renamed Nine Etudes, the eighth of which was reprised in the Song of the Battle of the Black Straw Hats). In search of material whose coherence would come from something other than tonality, Dessau was receptive to the twelve-tone techniques that Leibowitz taught him in France starting in 1936. He assimilated dodecaphony loosely into Guernica (1937), a piano piece dedicated to his teacher and which created a dialogue between music and the visual arts. In this case, rather than a moving image from a film, Dessau chose Picasso’s famous painting (displayed at the World’s Fair in Paris that same year) portraying the horror of the bombing of the town of Guernica. The chords that open the piece evoke the bombing acoustically. The music alternates between movements of extreme tension and ones of funereal calm, without falling into pathos or pomposity. The work’s interest lies in the polysemy of its musical language — dodecaphony, in this case — which cannot be reduced to a mere sound description of the painting.
The cantata The Voices was composed between 1939 and 1943, setting Poem XIX in Paul Verlaine’s collection of poetry Wisdom. The first version was for soprano and piano; the second, which premiered in New York at the 1941 International Music Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, called for a soprano, piano, harmonium, and percussion; while the final version, which premiered in Ludwigshafen, West Germany, in 1978, is for soprano, piano, and orchestra. Leibowitz analyzed The Voices in his book Introduction to Twelve-Tone Music.1 He points out that the composition is based on a theme and variations, but adds that
the thematic matter acquires great freedom, a structure that has loosened to the point that it is no longer possible to speak here (no more than one can in reference to Webern’s Opus 27) of variations in the classical sense of the term.
He concludes that it is a perfect example, “both free-form and strict, of twelve-tone technique.”
In Verlaine’s poem, the poet, in search of wisdom, dismisses one by one the impure voices of Pride, Hatred, and the Flesh. Having begun the work in 1939, Dessau adds the “voice of Mars.” The “Voices” are cursed and castigated individually: the thunderous orchestra and soprano express violence and inner despair, torn between the poet’s former aspirations and his renouncing of them. The text is powerfully painted: accompanied by a massive orchestra, the soprano’s vertiginous leaps evoke a battle that culminates several times in nearly apocalyptic moments. Assigned to a more peaceful, soothing violin solo, the final measures seem to suggest that the “Voices” have obeyed the oft-repeated injunction from the second part of the work: “Die,” “Die amidst the terrible voice of Love!” A pivotal work, The Voices was written at a critical time in the composer’s life, during the exile that would lead him from France to the United States.
While in exile in New York, Dessau reconnected with his Jewish roots. Using traditional melodies and composed specifically for services, some of his work was played at Temple Emanu-El and the Park Avenue Synagogue. Other pieces, such as the dodecaphonic Psalm 126 (1940), attempted to blend tradition and modernity. In December 1941, Dessau gave a presentation on Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre at the Jewish Club of New York. He had had an opportunity to meet Schoenberg briefly in New York in late 1940.
It was also in New York, around 1942-1943, that Dessau got back in touch with Brecht, who urged him to take up political themes once again. The fact that Dessau had not heard from his mother since early 1942 made him fear the worst. It is surely no coincidence that this was the year he began composing Deutsches Miserere, for mixed choir, children’s choir, soprano, alto, tenor, solo bass, full orchestra, and Trautonium, to a text by Brecht. Made of distinct numbers grouped into three larger sections, the piece is mostly tonal and within the classical oratorio tradition but shifted to the secular world, and more specifically, the world of World War II. The songs give various representatives of civil or military society a chance to speak. They include both victims and accomplices of National-Socialism, as well as some characters who are both. Footage of Hitler haranguing crowds and of aerial bombing are shown during the central part, the “Kriegsfibel” (“War Primer”); in counterpoint, the recurrent image of a seagull in flight recalls the imperturbable beauty of nature, even in the face of civilization’s atrocities. Dessau keeps the text intelligible and promotes a dialogue between the arts: the music was there neither simply to illustrate the texts or images, nor to overpower them, but to illuminate them from different angles, which is why the same verse is sometimes reprised with different intonations, as though to suggest multiple interpretations. Dessau uses the music as parody or antiphrasis (e.g., in the first part, the parody of a drumroll accompanying the war hero into the grave, which foreshadows the one in Lucullus). The dialogue between the choir and each of the soloists explores individuals’ relationship to the masses in totalitarian societies. Moments of extreme musical tension alternate with ones of great calm, but often in conflict with the images being projected.
In Los Angeles, Dessau set texts that Brecht sent him, like Les Chansons du Dieu Bonheur. He also composed for Brecht’s plays Mother Courage and Her Children and The Good Woman of Szechuan,2 whose title is sometimes translated as The Good Person of Szechuan.
In East Berlin, their collaboration materialized on stage: Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti was the first play performed, in November 1949, by the fledgling Berliner Ensemble. Although Brecht’s plays, with music by Dessau, were performed right away, it took nearly twenty years for the oratorio Deutsches Miserere to have its premiere. The question of collective responsibility for the National-Socialist catastrophe was not on East Germany’s cultural-policy agenda. That fact is also reflected in the example of Lucullus and the sad fate of Hanns Eisler’s Johann Faustus. The post-war period was no time for doubt, but one for unstinting affirmation of a radiant future ahead.
Yet no matter how truly Dessau believed in his role as a musician for the new society, he still resisted official guidelines, refusing to imitate the frivolous, sentimental style that was supposedly what the masses wanted. The regime gave pride of place to so-called “popular” music and the “classical, humanist legacy.” Dessau took note, toying with that legacy. His Orchestral Music No. 3, “Lenin” (1970), for instance, was a commission from the Berliner Staatskapelle to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the revolutionary’s birth. Dessau slipped in a tribute to Beethoven — whose two-hundredth anniversary was being celebrated the same year. He incorporated the Andante from the Appassionata (said to be Lenin’s favorite piece), reworking it as a theme and variations. In addition, the introduction and the finale of the orchestral music reprise the Epitaph for Lenin he wrote with Brecht in 1951.3 In that way, Dessau managed to reference both his own work and the classical tradition, acknowledging the legacy and freeing himself from it at the same time. Similarly, in his Symphonic Adaptation of Mozart’s String Quintet No. 6 in E-flat Major (1965), what starts out sounding like a fairly faithful transcription of Mozart goes on to confuse listeners. The imitation is so perfect that the notes that sometimes sound out of place are in fact Mozart’s, not Dessau’s. He finds it acceptable to reference the “humanist legacy” so admired by the regime, but he wants to write music for his own time, the only kind that can reflect the contemporary world. His Requiem for Lumumba (1964) is an example of a “musical chronicle” modeled on Bach’s Passions.
In East Germany, Dessau was best-known for his operas. His fourth wife, Ruth Berghaus, who staged them all, played a crucial role in their success.
The opera The Judgment of Lucullus, from a radio play by Brecht converted into a libretto, was the subject of innumerable long debates by Party officials in 1951. The date of the premiere, 17 March 1951, coincided with the East German Communist Party’s (the SED’s4) fifth plenum, devoted to the “struggle against formalism in art and literature.” The opera featured a trial in the hereafter: General Lucullus has been charged with war crimes. The “common people,” victims of his military campaigns, come to the witness stand. In the end, they pass judgment on Lucullus, whom they decide to send “into the void.”
Explicitly anti-militaristic and pacifist, the opera was problematic for the East German authorities, although they couldn’t admit it. The issue was that, at that time, it was not impossible that the USSR might become involved in another armed conflict. From their point of view, opera was supposed to be contributing to the people’s ideological education, and the attitude of the common people in the opera wasn’t political enough. Objecting to the music, official critics found the opera to be “formalist” and “dissonant.”5 With support from both the opera director Ernst Legal and the conductor Hermann Scherchen, Dessau and Brecht agreed to revise a few passages and, with audiences’ overwhelmingly positive reception, were able to get it into the repertory. The changes involved the libretto more than the music, which proves that the issue was more political than aesthetic, even though the objections were couched in strictly aesthetic terms. Dessau prioritized clarity for the text. Wishing also to avoid the pomposity of opera-house orchestras, he wrote without violins. The timpani, on the other hand, play such a large role that the composer acquired the nickname “Paukenpauli” (combining the German for “timpani” with Dessau’s first name).
Brecht’s premature death, on 14 August 1956, left Dessau distraught, though in retrospect, it gave him greater leeway for innovating musically. The opera Puntila (1966) based on a play by Brecht but composed after his death, is partially dodecaphonic. Class struggle, embodied by the two main characters, Puntila and Matti, is at the heart of the opera. The servant Matti winds up getting the upper hand over his master, the drunkard Puntila. Dessau openly disagreed with interpretations that simplistically moralized the music’s switching between dodecaphony and popular music: he was using them without moral judgment, flouting the social-realist approach that attributed diatonic music to “positive” characters and so-called “dissonant” music to “negative” ones. If Lucullus is neoclassical, Puntila refers to the Second Viennese School and is undoubtedly the comic counterpart to Berg’s Wozzeck. Sigrid Neef also perceives of this opera in intertextual dialogue with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron.6
At first glance, the opera Lancelot, which was strategically premiered for East Germany’s twentieth anniversary (1969) and dedicated “to all those in our Republic who are fighting and working for socialism,” hardly comes across as a parable of class struggle. With a libretto by Heiner Müller, the opera features Lancelot’s battle against the dragon. Some understood it as a parable of Communist struggle (Lancelot and the working class) against capitalism (the dragon). The official interpretation of the opera is that it is a vindication of the Communist regime, evidenced by the E♭(or Es)-E-D motif — a nod to the SED — that rings out when the workers make a pact with Lancelot. Yet Dessau’s intentions should not be reduced to one motif, which, in all likelihood, represented no more than superficial allegiance (which was no doubt ironic).
The opera’s message was more universal than the conflict between capitalism and communism. The final chorus, in which the farm workers rejoice at having been freed, is revealing: joy is expressed in the lyrics, but not the music. By the same token, throughout the opera, numerous anachronisms and musical comments offer “resistance” (to employ a favorite term of Heiner Müller) to reductive interpretations. Dessau compiled numerous musical allusions (e.g., to a Handel concerto grosso) and stylistic imitations (to Donizetti and Richard Strauss, among others), as well as nods to his own work, thereby achieving Müller’s ideal of “speeding up history”: making the non-simultaneous simultaneous to challenge the teleological view of history.
Dessau’s fourth opera, Einstein (1974), with a libretto by Karl Mickel, dealt with extremely current events by drawing attention to the threat of nuclear weapons. Exploring the crisis that Einstein experienced while seeking a centrist position between European fascism and American imperialism, the opera ends with a question mark rather than high praise for Communism (three different endings were actually considered). Like in Lancelot, allusions — uprooted musical material — appear in all their strangeness. The dialogue with musical history is made to serve ideological commentary. The extremely violent scene in which SA storm troopers burst into the physicist’s study is set to Bach’s “Dorian” Toccata, overlaid with a distorted (in the highest extremes) interpretation of the music Bach wrote for Luther’s chorale From Heaven Above to Earth I Come. Bach, the “humanist” composer, and Luther, whose legacy East Germany also claimed, collude with the storm troopers. Although the toccata remains recognizable, the chorale devolves into screams of horror: like Einstein’s office, humanism has been demolished.
Like the preceding operas, Leonce and Léna premiered at the East Berlin Staatsoper, but in November 1979, just a few months after Dessau’s death. It is a surprising work, for its pared-down string section and its restraint. For the libretto, Thomas Körner reworked Georg Büchner’s ironic romantic comedy from 1836 (a pre-revolutionary period in Germany). Extending Büchner’s toying with form, Körner presents the plot backward, rendering it absurd, or out-and-out incomprehensible for the uninitiated.
The music is loosely based on dodecaphony. Dessau’s treatment of timbre prioritizes the individual rather than the group, like the chorus of farm workers who are onstage but practically silent from start to finish. Dessau wrote so that the first few beats are masked and the melodies are not developed beyond a measure or two — except for the female characters’ expressive, melancholic, and melismatic a cappella arias. Despite the comic elements, a certain sadness emanates from this final work. It allows Leonce and Lena, two young people stuck in a narrow-minded country and uncertain about their future, a chance to express themselves. “What?” and “How?” are the last words that Dessau left to posterity.
Leonce and Lena can be interpreted as a last bitter smirk from the composer at the end of his life. But doesn’t looking for a political message in a musical work amount to falling into the same ideological frame of reference as the SED at that time? That being said, it is undeniable that Dessau refused to separate the political from the avant-garde in music, and that he looked for forms and techniques that allowed him to connect those two goals.
Translated from the French by Regan Kramer
1. René LEIBOWITZ, Introduction à la musique de douze sons, Paris, L’Arche, 1949, pp. 259-261. ↩
2. See Laurent Feneyrou’s analyses in “Dramaturgie musicale et idéologie,” Musique et Dramaturgie: Esthétique de la représentation au xxe siècle, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003, pp. 132-138. ↩
3. See Matthias Fischer’s analysis in Komponieren für und wider den Staat: Paul Dessau in der DDR, Cologne, Böhlau, 2009, p. 244-247. A summary in English can be found in Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic, Kyle FRACKMAN and Larson POWELL (eds.), Rochester, Camden House, 2015, pp. 190-192. ↩
4. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. ↩
5. Das Verhör in der Oper. Die Debatte um die Aufführung « Das Verhör des Lukullus » von Bertolt Brecht und Paul Dessau, ed. Joachim LUCCHESI, Berlin, BasisDruck, 1993. ↩
6. Sigrid and Hermann NEEF, Deutsche Oper im 20. Jahrhundert. DDR, 1949-89, Berlin, Peter Lang, 1992, p. 88. ↩
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