Hanns Eisler

Hanns Eisler (left) and Bertolt Brecht, his close friend and collaborator, East Berlin, 1950.

Hanns Eisler (6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was an Austrian composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" is named after him.

Family background

Eisler was born in Leipzig in Saxony, the son of Rudolf Eisler, a professor of philosophy, and Marie Ida Fischer.[1] His father was Jewish and his mother was Lutheran.[2][3] In 1901, the family moved to Vienna. His brother, Gerhart, was a Communist journalist,[4][5] and his sister, Elfriede, was a leader of the German Communist Party in the mid-1920s. After emigrating to America, she turned into an anti-communist, writing books against her former political affiliation, and even testifying against her brothers before the House Un-American Activities Committee.


Early years and Bertolt Brecht

Eisler in uniform, 1917.

During the Great War, Hanns Eisler served as a front-line soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army and was wounded several times in combat. Returning to Vienna after Austria's defeat, he studied from 1919 to 1923 under Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler was the first of Schoenberg's disciples to compose in the twelve-tone or serial technique. He married Charlotte Demant in 1920; they separated in 1934. In 1925, he moved to Berlin—then a hothouse of experimentation in music, theater, film, art and politics. There he became an active supporter of the Communist Party of Germany and became involved with the November Group. In 1928, he taught at the Marxist Worker's School in Berlin and his son Georg Eisler, who would grow up to become an important painter, was born. His music became increasingly oriented towards political themes and, to Schoenberg's dismay, more "popular" in style with influences drawn from jazz and cabaret. At the same time, he drew close to Bertolt Brecht, whose own turn towards Marxism happened at about the same time. The collaboration between the two artists lasted for the rest of Brecht's life.[6]

In 1929, Eisler composed the song cycle Zeitungsausschnitte, Op. 11. The piece is dedicated to Margot Hinnenberg-Lefebre.[7] Though not written in the twelve-tone technique, the piece was perhaps the forerunner of a musical art style later known as "News Items" – musical compositions that parodied a newspaper's content and style, or that included lyrics lifted directly from newspapers, leaflets, magazines, and other written media of the day. Eisler's piece parodies a newspaper's layout and content, with songs in the cycle given titles similar to headlines. The piece offers evidence of Eisler's socialist leanings, as its lyrics indicate the struggles of ordinary Germans who, after World War I, encountered hardship.[8]

Eisler wrote music for several Brecht plays, including The Decision (Die Maßnahme) (1930), The Mother (1932) and Schweik in the Second World War (1957). They also collaborated on protest songs that intervened in the political turmoil of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. Their Solidarity Song became a popular militant anthem sung in street protests and public meetings throughout Europe, and their Ballad of Paragraph 218 was the world's first song protesting laws against abortion. Brecht-Eisler songs of this period tended to look at life from "below"—from the perspective of prostitutes, hustlers, the unemployed and the working poor. In 1931–32 he collaborated with Brecht and director Slatan Dudow on the working-class film Kuhle Wampe.[9]

In exile

After 1933, Eisler's music and Brecht's poetry were banned by the Nazi Party. Both artists went into exile. While Brecht settled in Svendborg, Denmark, Eisler traveled for a number of years, working in Prague, Vienna, Paris, London, Moscow, Spain, Mexico and Denmark. He made two visits to the USA, with speaking tours from coast to coast.

In 1938, Eisler finally managed to emigrate to the United States with a permanent visa. In New York City, Eisler taught composition at New School for Social Research and wrote experimental chamber and documentary music. In 1942, he moved to Los Angeles, where he joined Brecht who arrived in California in 1941 after a journey from Denmark across the Soviet Union and the Pacific Ocean.

In the USA, Eisler composed music for various documentary films and for eight Hollywood film scores, two of which — Hangmen Also Die! and None but the Lonely Heart — were nominated for Oscars in 1944 and 1945 respectively.[10][11] Also working on Hangmen Also Die! was Bertolt Brecht, who wrote the story along with director Fritz Lang. From 1927 to the end of his life, Eisler wrote the music for 40 films, making film music the largest part of his compositions after vocal music for chorals and solo voices.

On 1 February 1940, Eisler started work on the "Research Program on the Relation between Music and Films" funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which he got with the help of film director Joseph Losey and The New School. This work resulted in the book Composing for the Films which was published in 1947, with Theodor W. Adorno as co-author.

In several chamber and choral compositions of this period, Eisler returned to the twelve-tone method he had abandoned in Berlin. His Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain — composed for Arnold Schoenberg's 70th birthday celebration — is considered a masterpiece of the genre.

Eisler's works of the 1930s and 1940s included Deutsche Sinfonie (1935–57)—a choral symphony in eleven movements based on poems by Brecht and Ignazio Silone[12]—and a cycle of art songs published as the Hollywood Songbook (1938–43). With lyrics by Brecht, Eduard Mörike, Friedrich Hölderlin and Goethe, it established Eisler's reputation as one of the 20th century's great composers of German lieder.

The HUAC investigation

Eisler's promising career in the U.S. was interrupted by the Cold War. He was one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the film studio bosses. In two interrogations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities,[13][14][15] the composer was accused of being "the Karl Marx of music" and the chief Soviet agent in Hollywood. Among his accusers was his sister Ruth Fischer, who also testified before the Committee that her other brother, Gerhart, was a Communist agent. The Communist press denounced her as a "German Trotskyite." Among the works that Eisler composed for the Communist Party was the "Comintern March", "The Comintern calls you/Raise high Soviet banner/In steeled ranks to battle/Raise sickle and hammer."

His supporters

Eisler's supporters—including his friend Charlie Chaplin and the composers Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland[16] and Leonard Bernstein—organized benefit concerts to raise money for his defense fund, but he was deported early in 1948. Folksinger Woody Guthrie protested the composer's deportation in his lyrics for "Eisler on the Go"—recorded fifty years later by Billy Bragg and Wilco on Mermaid Avenue album (1998). In the song, an introspective Guthrie asked himself what he would do if called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, "I don't know what I'll do/I don't know what I'll do/Eisler's on the come and go/and I don't know what I'll do."[17]

On departing from the USA

On 26 March 1948, Eisler and his wife, Lou, departed from LaGuardia Airport flying to Prague. Before he left he read a statement:

I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heart-broken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.[18]

In East Germany

East German stamp commemorating Eisler, 1968.

Eisler returned to Austria and later moved to East Berlin. Back in Germany, he composed the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic, a cycle of cabaret-style songs to satirical poems by Kurt Tucholsky, and incidental music for theater, films and television, and party celebrations.

His most ambitious project of the period was the opera Johannes Faustus on the Faust theme. The libretto, written by Eisler himself, was published in the fall of 1952. It portrayed Faust as an indecisive person who betrayed the cause of the working class by not joining the German Peasants' War. In May 1953, Eisler's libretto was attacked by a big article in Neues Deutschland, the SED organ.[19] All of these disapproved of the negative depiction of Faust as a renegade and accused the work of being "a slap in the face of German national feeling" and of having "formalistically deformed one of the greatest works of our German poet Goethe" (Ulbricht). Eisler's opera project was discussed in three of the bi-weekly meetings "Mittwochsgesellschaft" [Wednesday club] of a circle of intellectuals under the auspices of the Berlin Academy of Arts beginning 13 May 1953. The last of these meetings took place on Wednesday, 10 June 1953.[20]

Grave of Eisler and his third wife Steffy, as photographed on the 50th anniversary of his death. His grave is one of 800 graves of honour maintained by the authorities.

A week later the workers' rebellion of 17 June 1953 pushed those debates from the agenda. Eisler fell into a depressive mood, and did not write the music for the opera. In his last work, "Ernste Gesänge" (Serious Songs), written between spring 1961 and August 1962, Eisler worked on his depression, taking up the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with its demise of the Stalin cult, as a sign of hope for a future enabling to "live without fear". Although he continued to work as a composer and to teach at the East Berlin conservatory, the gap between Eisler and the cultural functionaries of East Germany grew wider in the last decade of his life. During this period, he befriended musician Wolf Biermann and tried to promote him [21] (in 1976 Biermann would be stripped of the GDR citizenship while he was on a concert tour in West Germany).

Eisler collaborated with Brecht until the latter's death in 1956. He never recovered completely from his friend's demise and his remaining years were marred by depression and declining health. He died of a heart attack (his second)[22] in East Berlin and is buried near Brecht in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery.

Compositions

Die Römische Kantate, opus 60;
Kantate im Exil (Man lebt von einem Tag zu dem andern), opus 62;
Kantate "Nein" (Kantate im Exil No. 2);
Kantate auf den Tod eines Genossen, opus 64;
Kriegskantate, opus 65;
Die den Mund auf hatten;
Die Weißbrotkantate
"Friedenssong" ("Peace Song", after Petere); "Kammerkantaten" ("Chamber Cantatas"); Ulm 1592; "Bettellied "("Begging Song", with Brecht); "Lenin Requiem" (with Brecht)

Writings

References

  1. ↑ Betz 1982, p. 311.
  2. ↑ Levi, Erik (August 1998). "Hanns Eisler: Life: BBC Composer of the Month". eislermusic.com. North American Hanns Eisler Forum. Retrieved 30 September 2012.
  3. ↑ Singer, Kurt D (1953). "The men in the Trojan horse".
  4. ↑ Freeman, Ira Henry (22 May 1949). "A Communist's Career – The 'Story of Eisler – For Thirty Years His Has Been a Life Of Adventure on Three Continents" (Editorial). The New York Times. Retrieved 30 September 2012. Gerhart Eisler, who was caught a week ago Saturday in England in an attempt to escape 'persecution' by the United States Government, is that twentieth-century phenomenon – the professional, international, Communist revolutionary.
  5. ↑ "COMMUNISTS: The Man from Moscow". time.com. Time Magazine. 17 February 1947. Retrieved 30 September 2012. Gerhart Eisler [...] had just been accused of being the No. I U.S. Communist
  6. ↑ Albrecht Betz. Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (1982, Cambridge University Press), p. 230.
  7. ↑ Eisler, Hanns. Zeitungsausschnitte. Hackensack, New Jersey: Joseph Boonin, Inc., 1972.
  8. ↑ Thomas, H. Todd. News Items: An Exploratory Study of Journalism in Music. Abilene, Texas: 1992.
  9. ↑ Albrecht Betz. Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (1982, Cambridge University Press), pp. 104–106.
  10. ↑ "Oscar Legacy • 16th Academy Awards Winners". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 1944. Retrieved 29 January 2013.
  11. ↑ "Oscar Legacy • 17th Academy Awards Winners". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 1945. Retrieved 29 January 2013.
  12. ↑ Arnold Pistiak (2009). "Skovbostrand 1937: Nein und Ja. Erinnerung an Hanns Eislers Kantaten auf Texte von Ignazio Silone und Bertolt Brecht" [Skovbostrand 1937: No and yes. Remeniscences to Hanns Eisler's cantatas on texts by Ignazio Silone and Bertolt Brecht]. In Frank Stern. Feuchtwanger und Exil. Glaube und Kultur 1933 – 1945. "Der Tag wird kommen" [Feuchtwanger and Exile. Belief and Culture 1933–1945. "The day will come"]. Feuchtwanger Studies, Volume 2 (in German). Bern: Peter Lang (published 2011). pp. 305–331. ISBN 978-3-03-430188-6.
  13. ↑ Lang, Andrew (2005). "Hanns Eisler: Life: Eisler in the McCarthy Era". eislermusic.com. North American Hanns Eisler Forum. Retrieved 30 September 2012. To the rising anticommunist star Richard Nixon, then serving his first term as a U.S. Congressman, "the case of Hanns Eisler" was "perhaps the most important ever to have come before the committee."
  14. ↑ Schebera, Jürgen (1978). Hanns Eisler im USA-Exil: zu den politischen, ästhetischen und kompositorischen Positionen des Komponisten 1938–1948 [Hanns Eisler in the US-American Exile. The positions of the composer regardting politics, estetics, and composition from 1938 to 1948] (originally written as 1976 PhD thesis) (in German). Berlin (GDR), and Meisenheim an der Glan (FRG): Akademie Verlag, and Hain. ISBN 3-445-01743-3. Includes a German translation of the HUAC hearings
  15. ↑ Hearings regarding Hanns Eisler. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first session, Public law 601 (section 121, subsection Q (2) ) Sept. 24, 25, and 26, 1947. United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1947. pp. iii, 209 p. ; 23 cm. LCCN 48050031. OCLC 3376771.
  16. ↑ "McCarthy Hearings". McCarthy Hearings 1953–54 Vol. 2. U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved 1 June 2011.
  17. ↑ Guthrie, Woody (1948). "Eisler on the Go" (lyrics). woodyguthrie.org. Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. administered by Bug Music. Retrieved 30 September 2012.
  18. ↑ http://eislermusic.com/depart.htm
  19. ↑ Redaktionskollegium "Neues Deutschland" (14 May 1953). "Das "Faust"-Problem und die deutsche Geschichte. Bemerkungen aus Anlaß des Erscheinens des Operntextes "Johann Faustus" von Hanns Eisler" [The "Faust"-Problem and the German History. Remarks occasioned by the publication of the opera text "Johannes Faustus" by Hanns Eisler]. Neues Deutschland (in German).
  20. ↑ Transcript of those sessions together with related documents in Bunge, Hans (1991). Brecht-Zentrum Berlin, ed. Die Debatte um Hanns Eislers "Johann Faustus": eine Dokumentation [The debate on Hanns Eisler's "Johann Faustus": a documentation] (in German). pp. 45–248. ISBN 978-3-86163-019-7.
  21. ↑ Biermann, Wolf; Hanns Eisler and Gerhart Eisler (October 1983). "Hanns Eisler: Life: Interview with Wolf Biermann". eislermusic.com (Interview). Interview with James K. Miller. North American Hanns Eisler Forum. Retrieved 30 September 2012. Eisler is part of the most precious legacy which they must appropriate. And if I can contribute something to that, by telling people here (in America) about Eisler – from my very limited perspective, of course – then it's a good thing and I'm happy about it. Ja. – Originally published in "Communications", Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 21-35, International Brecht Society.
  22. ↑ Jackson, Margaret R. (2003). "Workers, Unite! The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926–1932" (PDF). Florida State University School of Music. p. 16. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
  23. ↑ "Hanns Eisler DVD-Edition Rockefeller Filmmusik Projekt 1940–42: White Flood". hanns-eisler.de. Internationale Hanns-Eisler-Gesellschaft. 2012. Retrieved 25 September 2012.
  24. ↑ Internationale Hanns-Eisler-Gesellschaft (2012). "Hanns Eisler DVD-Edition Rockefeller Filmmusik Projekt 1940–42: A Child went forth". hanns-eisler.de. Retrieved 25 September 2012.

Works cited

Literature

External links

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