A Welcome Tribute to a Lost Composer

[joeallonby]

I only heard the East German national anthem when played at the Olympics. I
always thought it was great but I knew nothing about the unfortunate
American experience of Eisler and later ill-treatment by the government for
whom he wrote the anthem. Sort of a highbrow MC5. Thanks, Dave.


on 7/11/03 6:34 AM, Dave Monroe at monrovius at yahoo.com wrote:

> 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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