Audite releases the first recording of “Lanzelot”, Paul Dessau’s opera premiered in 1969.

The German composer and conductor Paul Dessau (Hamburg, 1894-Königs Wusterhausen, 1979) was, together with Kurt Weill and Hans Eisler, one of the regular collaborators of the playwright Bertolt Brecht, for whom he composed the incidental music for numerous plays, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan or The Caucasian Chalk Circle, before completing, between 1949 and 1961, three operas on texts by Brecht: The Trial of Lucullus, Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti and Saint Joan of the Stockyards.

Exiled for his communist ideas in France (in 1933) and the United States (from 1939), after the rise to power of Nazism in Germany, at the end of the Second World War he returned to his country in 1948 and settled in East Berlin, then capital of the German Democratic Republic, where he pursued an active musical career in which he championed the musical avant-garde: Witold Lutosławski, Alfred Schnittke, Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono.

In 1969 he composed his opera Lanzelot, with a libretto by Heiner Müller and Ginka Cholakova, which premiered on 19 December 1969, one of the most significant and elaborate of those premiered in the former GDR, but which fell into oblivion, like other works that are rediscovered at a later date. In Lanzelot‘s case, the reasons are probably political in nature. Dessau was a composer who after his exile decided to settle in the Soviet zone of Berlin, where he lived until his death. However, although politically loyal to the pro-Soviet regime, he was also a dissident within the GDR.

For his fourth opera he turned to the fairy tale Dragon, by the Soviet writer Yevgeny Shvarts, adapted by Müller and Cholakova to Lanzelot‘s libretto. The story is so explosive that its original text was banned under Stalin: a dragon who centuries ago liberated the people from cholera now leads a totalitarian regime, but is loved by the people because he guarantees them order and consumption. The appearance of the self-proclaimed hero of freedom Lancelot provokes resistance from the citizens; ultimately, the question is whether the people are really ready for a revolution. Surprisingly, the material met with no resistance from the GDR authorities at its premiere at the Berlin (East) State Opera in December 1969, not only because of the text, but also because Dessau’s music at that time was one of the most modern and provocative allowed in the GDR. Lanzelot was only performed three times during Dessau’s lifetime, after which the opera disappeared from the stage and was never recorded.

It took fifty years before it was performed again, in 2019, at the German National Theatre in Weimar. At the end of 2019, Lanzelot was premiered in Weimar in a stage version directed by Peter Konwitschny, conducted by Dominik Beykirch. The recording of that event was released earlier this year by the German label Audite, showing the power of Paul Dessau’s music and message, three decades after the end of the Cold War, and the demands on soloists, choir and orchestra are colossal. In no other work does Dessau present a greater variety of musical styles, from baroque concerto grosso and romantic parodies to fully contemporary music.