The new production of the opera “Lanzelot” in Weimar was hailed as a “sensation” and a “rediscovery of the first rank”. Four other operas by Paul Dessau await a revival on the stage.

Paul Dessau regarded opera as the “most expressive genre for illuminating the major social problems [of his] day artistically”. Opera forms the heart of his creative work. Within less than 30 years, he created highly individual contributions to this “tradition-laden genre” (Daniela Reinhold) in five masterpieces. In his operatic works he fought for peace, addressed the issues of class war and the social responsibility of science, held a mirror up to existing (socialist) society, and denounced social evils. Dessau saw himself as a political artist who wanted to influence society and politics with his music. How well he succeeded in this was impressively demonstrated in the revival of his third opera Lanzelot. Having lain forgotten for 50 years, its topic remains almost shockingly relevant. The music sounds exciting and tremendously fresh and yet it bears the clear characteristics of the 1960s, for a major event shaped Paul Dessau’s later operatic output: the premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten in Cologne on 15 February 1965. A year later, in October 1966, Dessau heard a performance and wrote in his notebook: “Outstanding work. Amongst the best I have heard for a long time on the operatic stage.”

“Die Verurteilung des Lukullus”

Before 1965, Paul Dessau had composed the anti-war opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus and Puntila after Bertolt Brecht, the latter a “cheerful work”, which was intended to make clear the “seriousness of the class struggle”. Lukullus is to be understood as the authors’ reaction to the recent German past: taking the example of the Roman army commander Lukullus, wars of aggression and conquest were denounced and condemned. A trial of the dead takes place in the underworld before a jury composed of a fishwife, a courtesan, a teacher, a baker and a peasant which weighs up his destructive deeds against his beneficent ones. It exposes Lukullus as a war criminal and a judgement is finally delivered, “Ins Nichts mit ihm!” (Into the eternal void with him). The last scene – “The Judgement” – a large-scale final rondo – is one of the most impressive operatic finales in the music of the second half of the 20th century. The orchestral scoring uses an unusual palette of colours: the softer-toned instruments (violins, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns) are omitted entirely. Instead, accordion, trautonium and a wide range of percussion instruments are used. Even before the trial performance in March 1951 and the actual premiere on 12 October 1951 at the Staatsoper Berlin conducted by Hermann Scherchen, the first Soviet-style “formalism” debate in the still-young German Democratic Republic (GDR) had been sparked over this opera, and its creators wrestled over a final form. The run was called off after eight performances; its revival was only allowed in 1957, though it ultimately went on to become Dessau’s most frequently-performed opera in Germany and abroad (even in capitalist countries).

“Puntila”

Shortly before Bertolt Brecht’s unexpected death in August 1956, Dessau was able to discuss a new project with him – a setting to music of the play Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti. Brecht’s pupils Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth worked closely with the composer on the libretto, so that Brecht’s original ideas were preserved. Puntila is a landowner and a brutal tyrant, egoistical, calculating and inconsiderate. But when drunk, he is no longer in control of himself and becomes a comic social philanthropist. Matti is his man-servant, who reluctantly finds himself dependent on his master. The class differences are ruthlessly portrayed, and the orchestration is used to emphasise the contrasts between the characters even more strongly. Matti ultimately brings an end to his subservient position by leaving his master’s employ, and thus becomes a symbol for the change in (social) relationships. Puntila was composed for Walter Felsenstein and the Komische Oper in Berlin. However, the demands of the dodecaphonic score over-stretched the opera house’s capabilities, so that the work was only premiered in 1966 at the Staatsoper Berlin in a production by Ruth Berghaus (Dessau’s second wife). It went on to become a great success.

“Lanzelot” and “Einstein”

Paul Dessau found “varied, imaginative social commentary” in the fairy-tale comedy Der Drache by Yevgeni Schwartz: the dragon-slayer Lanzelot liberates a village from its usurper. But the people have come to terms with the existing conditions and do not want to be liberated, so that the regained freedom brings forth new dragons. The composer and his librettist Heiner Müller hold an unsparing and astonishingly truthful mirror up to the social realities of communism. The “terrible subject matter” led Dessau not only to employ large-scale forces – which he later looked back on sceptically – but also to change his method of composing. Large parts of the score of Lanzelot are written aleatorically, and Dessau increasingly began to incorporate quotations. Both aspects refer heavily to Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten and are even more clearly worked out in the score of Einstein, the opera which took the longest for Dessau to compose (from 1955 to 1973). It can be read as a parable about the responsibility of the intellectual in the “technical age”. It has nothing to do with actual biography, but is about “the human problem of this great character, which is tremendously dramatic”. Together with his librettist Karl Mickel, Dessau conceived Einstein as a “number opera”. Within the scenes, numerous quotations from Bach and Mozart clearly emerge, which add extra layers of meaning and translate the events into broader contexts.

“Leonce and Lena”

The tension between desire and duty, between utopia and reality is the theme of Leonce und Lena, Paul Dessau’s last opera. The librettist Thomas Körner made considerable alterations to Georg Büchner’s comedy in order to create the “parody of a weary society”, and to portray the characters as puppets of a King behaving arbitrarily and of a distended power structure. Even directly after its posthumous premiere in 1979, the opera was regarded as an allegory for society and as a symbol of the conditions in the GDR. Dessau limited himself to a style of hints, of fragments – here, too, it is definitely comparable with Zimmermann’s late works. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt detected “something of the unfinished”. And yet, this “late work” can be understood as a distillation and successful conclusion of a musico-dramatic oeuvre which is an “important piece in the mosaic of 20th century music history” (Roland Dippel). It deserves to be given its rightful place once more, but above all to be rediscovered and performed again.

Robert Krampe 
(from [t]akte 1/2020 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)