After a difficult period of exile in the United States that lasted much of the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht was ready to work with kindred spirits again. And in the composer Paul Dessau, he recognized a fellow burr under the saddle.

Describing a 1949 production of his play “Mother Courage and Her Children” in East Berlin, Brecht wrote that Dessau’s settings of its songs were “not meant to be particularly easy,” adding that the music “left something to be supplied by the audience; in the act of listening they had to link the voices with the melody.”

This amounted to high praise from a playwright known for his theory of the “alienation effect” in the theater. And as Brecht’s troupe, the Berliner Ensemble, blossomed in the years that followed, he drew Dessau into more projects.