Einstein is a mess of an opera, deeply flawed and unsatisfactory. It also has a curious fascination, and is undoubtedly a document of its time; it was premiered in 1974 and this recording, of that original production, was made two years later. Paul Dessau (1894-1979) was a vastly prolific composer and a disconcertingly versatile one, ranging very often in a single work (Einstein, for example) from serialism to derisive pastiche-Strauss, via copious Bach quotations to a bare linear counterpoint that can be bleakly expressive. He was also the composer-laureate of East Germany, and not much notice has been taken of him in the West as a consequence, though some readers may recall more than one broadcast of his highly effective opera Die Verurteilung (or Das Verhor) des Lukullus (“The Trial of Lucullus”). That work was the subject of heated discussion in the GDR on whether an ‘advanced’ language is permissible in music designed to serve the people and the revolution.
Like Lukullus, Einstein dispenses with the more obviously expressive instruments (violins, oboes, clarinets and horns), in a musical equivalent of Brecht’s ‘distancing effect’, an attempt to oblige the audience to judge the drama they are watching. In the Prologue to the opera the clownish figure of Hans Wurst announces its subject: how “Einstein, our hero, fled and was not happy with his life on the other side of the world. Why? Because he chose false friends: the humanitarian in league with the enemies of all humanity”. Pretty standard party-line stuff, and the humour of the piece is often blunt, not to say stale: a blast of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” introduces the bombing of Hiroshima. Dessau’s much discussed ‘modernism’ also now seems rather faceless. What redeems the work from time to time is its ambiguity. A colleague of Einstein’s, grieving over his betrayed idealism, has a lullaby sung to him by a black woman: florid, with hints both of the spiritual and perhaps of synagogue music. The young scientist rejects this implicit if caricatured religious comfort and seeks a “better song”. He finds it in memories of the Internationale, tapped out on the wall by inmates of an internment camp. But it is a rhythm only; the ‘spiritual’ is far more eloquent. Again, the quotations from Bach appear in odd places: when Einstein’s young colleague is betrayed to the Gestapo, when a young technician cynically declares that life and death are the same: a counter-image to treachery and despair? We expect lyricism in a chorus of lament over the destruction of Hiroshima, but when the workers in a nuclear factory lament that peace will put them out of work? Einstein is also unbalanced by the prominence given to the two Intermezzos and the Epilogue, which are apparently on a different plot entirely: Hans Wurst’s repeated encounters with a sardonic crocodile. Einstein departs, burning the results of 20 years’ research, and it is Hans Wurst who ends the opera, despite being eaten by the crocodile, dancing on the edge of an enormous razor-blade crying “I’m glad to be alive!”: a self-image of Dessau the great survivor himself?
The names at the head of the huge cast (45 solo roles) will tell you how seriously East Germany took the premiere, and the production was obviously meticulously rehearsed (the director was Dessau’s wife, Ruth Berghaus). The recording obeys the composer’s Brechtian intention to make every word crystal clear, but those words are provided only in German and one scene is suppressed without explanation. It would be just a chilling document of the later history of East Germany were it not for repeated evidences, no less repeatedly undercut, that Dessau was a composer of real stature.'