Paul Dessau

Paul Dessau, born on December 19, 1894 in Hamburg, initially worked as a conductor at theaters in Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Mainz and Berlin from 1912 after completing his training. From 1928, as a composer and conductor, he was caught up in the maelstrom of cinematic art during its transition from silent to sound film. After emigrating in 1933, he met René Leibowitz in France and, at his suggestion, adopted the twelve-tone technique. In 1939, he moved to the USA, where he first lived in New York and later in Hollywood. He composed on Jewish themes and made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht in 1943, setting many of his texts to music. He returned to Germany in 1948 and lived in Zeuthen near Berlin from 1954 until his death on June 28, 1979.
Like many of his fellow composers, he was faced with a new beginning on his return. Using previously unpublished documents from the following three decades, this volume sheds light on the process of self-discovery and self-assertion within musical modernism and within the framework of the cultural policy of the GDR. The letters to René Leibowitz and the private notes in four parallel notebooks show the composer as an open-minded friend and strict critic - searching and at the same time committed to accompanying the development of music in his own generation and the next. The texts also form a personal testimony to contemporary history in divided post-war Germany. The volume is supplemented by an inventory of the music autographs in the Paul Dessau Archive.