Biography
Paul Dessau was born on 19 December 1894 in Hamburg and studied composition and conducting from 1909 at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin. He worked as a conductor in Hamburg, Cologne, Mainz and Berlin before fleeing the Nazis in 1933 as a Jewish leftist composer, first to Paris and then, in 1939, to the United States, where he initially lived in poverty. From 1942 he collaborated closely with the likewise exiled Bertolt Brecht, a partnership that shaped the rest of his career. Returning to East Berlin in 1948, Dessau became one of the leading opera composers of the GDR, with works such as 'Die Verurteilung des Lukullus', 'Puntila', 'Einstein' and 'Lanzelot' often based on Brecht material and combining twelve-tone technique with folk-song elements. He died on 28 June 1979 in Königs Wusterhausen near Berlin.
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