A Welcome Tribute to a Lost Composer

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Friday, July 11, 2003
A Welcome Tribute to a Lost Composer
By JEREMY EICHLER

THE German composer Hanns Eisler wrote music of terse
expressiveness, sharp wit and often immaculate
craftsmanship. If, more than 50 years after his death,
his work is little remembered today, it is largely
because he spent his career prostrate to the faltering
God of socialism, seeking an elusive wedding of
progressive music and progressive politics and
ultimately lending his formidable gifts to history's
losing side.

Arnold Schoenberg gave Eisler his technique, and the
heady culture of Weimar Berlin gave him his musical
voice — sometimes compared to Kurt Weill's — as well
as the grounding for his radical politics. His Marxist
worldview infused his work as a composer, and he
tirelessly strove to find a musical language that
could play its part in the epic battle against the
fascism of his day.

After fleeing Hitler in 1933, Eisler eventually
settled in the United States for a productive 10 years
of exile before he was notoriously called before the
House Committee on Un-American Activities and driven
from the country in 1948. He settled in East Germany,
where he wrote the country's national anthem but was
later condemned for his Western "formalism." He died
in 1962, his great opera unwritten, his faith in the
socialist ideal tempered by his firsthand
confrontation with the bureaucratic machinery of the
state. 

Opportunities to consider Eisler at any length are
rare these days, so the tribute work called
"Eislermaterial," by the German composer Heiner
Goebbels, is a welcome addition to this year's Lincoln
Center Festival. It will be performed by the Ensemble
Modern on Sunday at 7 p.m. at La Guardia High School.

.... To be sure, Eisler's output was widely varied and
uneven. It included symphonies, choral works, art
songs and chamber music but also protest songs, film
scores and music to accompany the plays of his most
frequent collaborator and political soulmate, Bertolt
Brecht.

The best of these reveal an elegant take on modernism,
at once rigorous yet expressive. Eisler's art songs in
particular are masterly miniatures written with a
delicacy of touch and an exceedingly refined ear for
the rhythms and meanings of a text.

Indeed, Eisler deserves more than the strange
purgatory into which he has been consigned: the
composer in residence of a failed utopia, the author
of the national anthem for a country that no longer
exists. He did not always succeed in his goals, but
they were often worthy ones. In a century in which
music's avant-garde too often betrayed its commitment
to an audience, he urged the modern composer "to leave
his airtight room and find his place in society."
Eisler's dream of finding an advanced music of bright
originality and real communicative power speaks as
loudly now as it did in his own deeply troubled time.

Schoenberg's Affection

... he studied with Schoenberg in Vienna and was among
his finest students, but the hydraulics of history
were already in motion, and Eisler was soon drawn to
the tumult of Weimar Berlin, where he could not resist
the call of revolution. He joined the German Communist
Party and began writing agitprop music in a simple and
direct style.

He also met Brecht and collaborated with him on
didactic theater works....

Not surprisingly, Schoenberg disapproved of his
student's new orientation, and they clashed over the
direction music should take. Schoenberg believed in
the imperative of musical progress. He could handle
the "emancipation of dissonance," his phrase for his
12-tone technique, but he had no patience for his
student's politics of emancipation.

Eisler's radical views and his abandonment of pure
musical expression drove Schoenberg to distraction.
"If I had any say in the matter," Schoenberg later
wrote with paternal condescension, "I'd turn him over
my knee like a silly boy and give him 25 of the best
and make him promise never to open his mouth again but
to stick to scribbling music. That he has a gift for,
and the rest he should leave to others. If he wants to
appear `important,' let him compose important music."

... with Hitler's rise to power, Eisler fled through
Europe, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he
made a living writing scores for films like "Hangmen
Also Die" (Fritz Lang, 1943) and "None But the Lonely
Heart" (Clifford Odets, 1944)...

Problems Brewing

But while Eisler thrived beneath the palms, the F.B.I.
was watching him closely .... 

In 1947 Hanns Eisler was brought before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and accused of
being "the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical
field." Eisler, who joined the German Communist Party
in 1926, responded, "I would be flattered." Many
luminaries rallied to his defense, including Pablo
Picasso, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, but to no
avail. Embittered and unrepentant, Eisler left the
country under the threat of deportation in 1948,
eventually settling in East Germany, where he lived
the remainder of his life.

In addition to composing music, Eisler wrote essays
throughout his career that crackle with the workings
of a keen dialectical mind. Time after time Eisler
finds the crisis in 20th-century music to be
inextricably linked to the political crisis. He rails
against the creed of pursuing art for art's sake,
arguing instead for an applied music with a purpose.
Otherwise, he maintains, music functions as a sort of
opiate that placates the workers and forestalls their
struggle for justice. Music must not stupefy but
engage its listeners, he asserts. If avant-garde
composers are losing their audience, he writes, they
can gain a second chance by realigning themselves with
the working class.

[...]

Defined by a Time

... taking the full measure of the composer's legacy
remains tricky. How does one weigh for posterity an
art that by its definition resisted notions of
posterity? Eisler's music was intended to respond to
its own historical moment, and many of the works,
particularly those with texts, are fully understood
only in their original context. Indeed, this music
beckons us back into Eisler's period of cataclysm and
uncertainty, illuminated by the composer's
inextinguishable sense of hope and his combative
belief in the possibility of change.

Certainly, it is impossible to judge Eisler's musical
or political choices divorced from their time and
place. The wars and conflicts of the last century
ripped a hole in music that has not yet healed, and
Eisler's approach was one response to that damage. At
least as salient as his music is his vision of an
advanced art form still able to communicate beyond the
narrow stratum of the elite, a vision of an engaged
composer who in Eisler's words arrives like a
messenger "gasping for breath" with "something to
deliver." After a century whose convulsions shook
music to its core, Eisler's dreams still resonate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/arts/music/11EISL.html

And see as well ...

http://eislermusic.com/index.html

http://www.hanns-eisler.com/index.htm

http://foia.fbi.gov/eisler.htm

Adorno, Theodor and Hanns Eisler.  Composing for
   the Films.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1947.

http://www.semcoop.com/detail/0485121077

Ch. 5, "Elements of Aesthetics" ...

http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/fopa/music/eisler/eisler.pdf

Solidarity Song: The Hanns Eisler Story (1996) ...

http://www.fdk-berlin.de/forum97/f078e.html

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