ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Paul Dessau: Einstein
Dortmund, 8 April 2006

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 14 Feb 2007

Paul Dessau has a lot in common with Kurt Weill, his junior by six years, but by comparison is still a shadowy figure in the twentieth-century musical scene. Born in Hamburg in 1894, his family, like Weill’s, included cantors. He studied in Berlin and Hamburg , and until 1933 he had a typically varied career: assistant to Klemperer at the Cologne Opera, compositions including a one-movement symphony performed in Prague in 1927 and a one-act radio opera, even a spell conducting a cinema band in Berlin . Like Weill, Dessau left Germany for Paris in 1933, where he came under the influence of René Leibowitz, the Polish-born arch-serialist, pupil of Schönberg and Webern, resident in Paris since 1926. Weill left Paris for America in 1935, intending to stay for only as long as work on Weg der Verheissung demanded. but made New York his home. Dessau followed in 1939, but returned to Europe as soon as was practicable. His mother, for twenty years a widow, died in Terezín in 1942.

The comparison with Weill is at its most instructive in the relationship of both composers to Bertolt Brecht. There is still a tendency to think of Brecht and Weill in one breath, but in truth the relationship was difficult and short – roughly from the Mahagonny Songspiel of 1927 to Die sieben Todsünden in 1933 – and within this period there were three major non-Brecht works: the operas Die Bürgschaft (with Caspar Neher) and Der Silbersee (Georg Kaiser) and the Second Symphony.

Paul Dessau first met Brecht in Baden-Baden in 1927, and again in Paris in 1938, when he provided music for Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (‘Terror and Misery of the Third Reich’), a sequence of sketches produced in the French capital in 1938. The collaboration was cemented with Dessau ’s scores for the ‘big’ Brecht plays: Mutter Courage, The Good Woman of Szechwan , Puntilla and The Caucasion Chalk Circle. Dessau returned to East Germany in 1948 (having joined the American communist party in 1946, he was unlikely to have been welcome for longer), and became a member of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, which soon became the ‘national theatre’ of the East German state, ironically moving into the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm where DieDreigroschenoper first saw light of day twenty years earlier.

Between his return to Europe , and Brecht’s death in 1956, almost everything Dessau wrote had the latter’s hand somewhere in the process. This is especially true of the works for which he is best known, the series of five operas written for the (East) German Staatsoper between Die Verurteilung des Lukullus of 1951 and Leonce und Lena , produced posthumously in 1979. Einstein was the fourth of these, premiered in 1974, with a cast including Peter Schreier, and Theo Adam in the title role, produced by Ruth Berghaus, Dessau ’s fourth wife. The conductor was Otmar Suitner. The initial impulse for the piece was the death of Albert Einstein in April 1955, and the lengthy gestation included the preparation of a draft scenario submitted to Brecht for comment, before the libretto proper was undertaken by Karl Mickel. There are three acts, dealing with the lead-up to the Second World War, the bomb, and its consequences. The first act opens with books being burnt; two of Einstein’s colleagues, old and young physicists, warn him of impending danger and he decides to emigrate as his study is ransacked. The young physicist joins him, while the older one stays behind. In the second act, Einstein proposes to the President building a bomb against fascism and is given all the assistance required, while the old physicist in Germany is making little headway with his own project. When Einstein sees the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he is appalled at the power he has unleashed, and in the third act Einstein considers his ‘punishment’: the knowledge that he will be forever remembered as the father of the atomic bomb, and dismayed, destroys his research.

In each of the acts there is a scene in which three father-figures from the past – Galileo, Bruno and Da Vinci – appear, giving Einstein counsel, and in the final act preparing for his death, putting a beer in the fridge to cool for his arrival. Yet a third intellectual layer is contained in a Prologue and two allegorical Intermezzi, when Hans Wurst, the man in the street, begins by outlining the politics of the plot and draws his moral, and then twice confronts a hungry crocodile, surviving the first encounter but being devoured in the second.

The Dortmund production which opened on 8 April, only the third since 1974, was staged by Gregor Horres (fresh from his work in Bielefeld) in designs by Kirsten Dephoff. His first stage picture introduced all the characters – and besides those already mentioned there is a host of small parts, from SAS men and Senators to the ‘Führorr’ and the President – in a galleried framework occupying the whole of the stage, from which each stepped forward as necessary. Each scene was swiftly delineated either by projection or obvious scene-setter such as a group of American cheerleaders. All in all simple and efficient.

Dessau ’s music is uncompromising, all the more so for being scored for an orchestra with no violins, clarinets oboes or horns – with snarling low brass and prominent piano part. But there is relief of sorts in his use of quotation: the first act book-burning scene, for example, is accompanied by Bach’s ‘ Doric’ organ toccata, and phrases from Ariadne auf Naxos appear in the two Intermezzi, scored for a conventional orchestra. But these incursions are signalled so obviously as to diminish the effect – Brechtian epic-theatre in overdrive. Similarly the ironic inclusion of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, brought to a sudden stop by the first atomic explosion.

Einstein was sung by Oskar Hillebrandt – a true Heldenbariton, who not only looked the part but carried the evening with distinction. In the near-impossibly high tenor role of the Young Physicist Jeff Martin coped bravely. and Hans Wurst was Björn Arvidsson, who with Maria Hilmes as a rather ungainly Crocodile did well to maintain their composure singing while precariously balanced in front of the orchestra pit. In the pit, Dirk Kaftan and the Dortmund orchestra coped manfully.

This was never going to be an enjoyable ‘evening at the opera’ but still a valuable, if rather chastening, experience.

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