Dessau, Paul (EN)

Dessau Paul, *19 December 1894 Hamburg, †28 June 1979 Berlin, German composer and conductor. Between 1910 and 1912, he studied at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin under F. Zajic (violin), E. Behm (piano) and M. Loewengard (composition). From 1912 to 1914 he was a répétiteur at the Hamburger Stadttheater, and in the following years a conductor at drama and opera theatres in Cologne (1919–23), Mainz (1923) and Berlin (1925–33). In 1933 he emigrated to Paris. From 1939 to 1948 he lived in the USA; during this period, he taught composition at the Jewish Mens Hebrew Association and wrote film music, including for W. Disney. In 1942, he began a long-standing collaboration with B. Brecht, which he continued even after his return to Berlin between 1948 and 1956. In 1959, Dessau was appointed Vice-President of the Deutsche Akademie der Künste. Recipient of GDR awards (1953, 1956, 1965).

A characteristic feature of Dessau’s work (particularly his early compositions) is his reference to Hebrew music through melodic borrowings. This technique is evident, for example, in Sinfonie in einem Satz (1926), in which the theme of the ancient Jewish prayer-song Kol Nidrei is heard throughout the first few dozen bars, and in the oratorio Haggada (1936), considered his work most deeply imbued with Judaism. In parallel with his search for inspiration in his nation’s folklore, the composer worked on the technical aspects of musical expression.

Dessau’s early works, written in the interwar period, reflect certain elements of Hindemith’s “New Objectivity” movement. The promoted ideal of solid compositional craftsmanship, based on traditional techniques and forms, found its main expression in Dessau’s chamber music, namely in the Concertino, String Trio, Sonatina and String Quartet No. 1, as well as in the aforementioned Symphony. Characteristic of these works is the contrapuntal treatment of the melodic line, Baroque motoric rhythms, and the use of the fugue form (including the double fugue, as in the Symphony) and the passacaglia as individual movements. Structural coherence is also sometimes achieved through thematic connections, as in the Quartet No. 1, whose outer movements (Movement I: Intrada and Passacaglia, Movement III: Prelude and Fugue) contain the same melodic idea, a series of twelve notes. However, this quartet is not yet a composition written according to the rules of dodecaphony. Dessau became interested in this technique in the late 1930s.

His first dodecaphonic study was Zwölfton-Versuche for piano (1937). Dessau employed dodecaphony with equal consistency in the songs Abbitte (to text by F. Hölderlin) and Les voix (to text by P. Verlaine), as well as in 3 Stücke for violin and piano and in his String Quartet No. 2. The composer also used the technical means developed in the interwar years sporadically in his later works, but they no longer constituted the compositional principle of the piece.

Dessau’s creative maturity coincided with his years of collaboration with B. Brecht. The composer shared the writer’s views on the socio-political impact of art and, in his own way, implemented Brecht’s concept of the function of music in works with text, according to which it should demonstrate its independence whilst also serving as a commentary on the verbal layer and mediating the conveyance of literary meaning. Dessau solved this difficult task through peculiar exaggerations in characterisation and, among other things, caricatural sound effects. The use of musical grotesque is evident in the satirical instrumentation (e.g. the trombone glissandos in the pompous funeral march in the first scene of Lukullus), in the effects of harmonic “grimacing” achieved through the use of dissonance within a simple, functional structure (e.g. the distortion of the trumpet motif in the aforementioned march from Lukullus), in unexpected “irregularities”, “distortions” in the vocal parts (e.g. the coloratura and declamations of Lukullus), as well as in references to popular music (e.g. the caricatured version of the hit song Je cherche après Titine from Chaplin’s Modern Times, characterising the coquette in Puntila). Dessau commented on the text, maintaining a distance from the world depicted within it.

Literature: F. Hennenberg Dessau-Brecht musikalische Arbeiten, Berlin 1963; “Musik und Gesellschaft” XIV 1964, special issue to mark the 60th anniversary of Dessau’s birth (contains notably a list of Dessau’s compositions); F. Hennenberg Paul Dessau. Eine Biographie, Leipzig 1965; Aus Gesprächen, Festschrift for Paul Dessau, ed. D. Boeck et al., Leipzig 1974 (contains a catalogue of works, discography and bibliography)

F.K. Prieberg Musik im anderen Deutschland, Cologne 1968; F. Hennenberg Paul Dessaus politische Chorkantaten 1944-68 and G. Rienäcker Zu einigen Gestaltungsproblemen im Opemschaffen von Paul Dessau in: Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der DDR, vols. 1 and 2, ed. H.A. Brockhaus and K. Niemann, Berlin 1969 and 1971; G. Rienäcker Zur Dialektik musikdramaturgischer Gestaltung. Analytische Notate zum zwölften Bild der Oper “Lanzelot” von Paul Dessau, “Deutsches Jahrbuch der Musikwissenschaft” XVII, 1972; G. Rienäcker “Einstein” — analytische Bemerkungen zur Oper von Paul Dessau, “Musik und Gesellschaft” XXIV, 1974; F. Henneberg Paul Dessau. Für Sie porträtiert, Leipzig 1974; E. Krause Rebellion und Dialektik. Paul Dessaus Musiktheater-Werke. Zum 80. Geburtstag des Komponisten, «Musikbühne» LXXIV, ed. H. Seeger, Berlin 1974; L. Klingberg “Die Verurteilung des Lukullus” im Jahr 1951, “Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft” XXXIII, 1992.