Eisler, Hanns

(b Leipzig, 6 July 1898; d Berlin, 6 Sept 1962). German composer. He was the second son of the liberal middle-class Viennese philosopher Rudolf Eisler. The family moved to Vienna in 1901 and, although there was insufficient money for a piano (one was rented when possible) or for lessons, Eisler studied music from books and scores. His first attempts at composition date from his years at the Staatsgymnasium (1908–15) during which time he and his brother Gerhart, subsequently a celebrated political journalist, became involved in a progressive middle-class youth group. From 1916 to 1918 he served in a Hungarian regiment, continuing to compose (one work that has not survived was an oratorio Gegen den Krieg), and after the war he enrolled as a student of Weigl at the New Vienna Conservatory, earning money for the fees as a proofreader for Universal Edition.

Finding the teaching not strict enough, Eisler was accepted as a pupil by Schoenberg and he was taught privately by him (and sometimes by Webern) without fee between 1919 and 1923. Schoenberg recommended the Piano Sonata op.1 to Universal in 1923 and the work was given its première by Steuermann in October 1924. The several chamber works of this time are clearly influenced by Schoenberg and his two senior pupils. The Sonata, for which Eisler received the Vienna Arts Prize, the Songs op.2, the Piano Pieces op.3 and the Divertimento op.4 for wind quintet are extremely chromatic, harmonically rich and dense in incident, yet they possess wit, vivacity, elegance and good humour. Palmström, described as ‘studies on 12-note series’ and written at Schoenberg's request to go into a programme with Pierrot lunaire, has a similar lightness of touch and an unmistakable element of parody. The final song, Couplet von der Tapetenblume, is essential Eisler, with a typical throw-away surprise cadence. In 1925 he moved to Berlin and took a teaching post at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. His Second Piano Sonata op.6 is significantly sparer in texture than the earlier works. Although the harmonic flavour remains – augmented triads, 7th chords with major and minor 3rds – the effect is fresher, as if Eisler was using serialism as a discipline, as a way of controlling extreme chromaticism. This work also introduced the distinctive ‘Eisler bass’ and jazz-influenced rhythms.

Eisler developed his strongly Marxist political convictions in those years and his commitment led to involvement in Vienna in the activities of, first, the Karl Liebknecht Gesangverein and later the Stahlklang Chorvereinigung. In September 1925 he moved to Berlin and in 1926 he applied to join the German Communist party. His mounting distaste for the direction new music was taking led, in March, to an unpleasant quarrel with Schoenberg, who found Eisler's views insupportable and his attacks on modern music disloyal. Eisler's dissatisfaction with new music included his own work, and his fully formed political ideology found expression in numerous articles and reviews in the Communist party's periodical Die Rote Fahne and led him to seek more politically aware ways of serving (and changing) society. His association with the Agitproptruppe ‘Das rote Sprachrohr’ began late in 1927 and a series of choral works dates from the years 1926–33, as well as the first of the marching-songs, which were of so strong and distinctive a character that they quickly became popular with left-wing groups throughout Europe. Roter Wedding, Der heimliche Aufmarsch, Stempellied, Kominternlied, Solidaritätslied and the Einheitsfrontlied are classics of the socialist movement. The tunes are constructed with superb economy and are usually in the minor mode, remarkable for music with so positive and exhortatory a message, Eisler feeling that the minor produced a more threatening quality. Many of these songs were first sung by the actor Ernst Busch, whom Eisler had met in 1929 and who played an important part in Eisler's career, not only in the 1930s but subsequently in the DDR.

In 1930 began the lifelong friendship and collaboration with Brecht and the creation at once of two masterpieces, the controversial Lehrstück Die Massnahme and Die Mutter, to Brecht's adaptation of Gorky's novel. Both scores are in Eisler's Massenlieder idiom, diatonic and texturally clear, with a profoundly subtle dialectical relationship between words and music. Instead of expressing the text in an obvious ‘emotional’ way, the music provides a gloss on the words and adds to their meaning; this is a characteristic of all Eisler's word-setting. Other important events during these years were the two visits to the USSR and the production of the film Kuhle Wampe, which included the Solidaritätslied.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the activities of everyone involved in the German workers' movement came to a halt; Eisler's music was banned and there began 15 years of exile and the composition of a series of works dedicated to the overthrow of fascism. The next years were extremely eventful ones. As well as visiting the USA, he worked on film scores in Vienna, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and London (where his Kleine Sinfonie was first performed in April 1935) and collaborated with Brecht in Denmark on the ‘atrocity story’ Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, the music for which contains some of his finest songs. Also from this time are the nine chamber cantatas and Eisler's largest-scale work, the Deutsche Sinfonie, a fiercely anti-fascist sequence of cantatas and instrumental movements, composed in Eisler's distinctively tonal type of serialism. The work received its first performance at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1959. After visits to the Spanish front, Paris and Denmark in 1937, Eisler travelled for a third time to the USA and took a post at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he had been guest-lecturer and composition teacher from October 1935 to January 1936. For five months from May 1939 he was visiting professor at the Mexico Conservatory and in 1940 he was given a three-year grant to undertake research into the function of film music. From this resulted scores for four films and the book, written jointly with Adorno, Composing for the Films.

In May 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood and a teaching post at the University of Southern California. He met up with Brecht again and their collaborations continued with Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches and Galileo. In addition to several film scores and various chamber works, Eisler set numerous new Brecht poems on the subject of exile in an individual and personal idiom which is an intriguing amalgam of the style of the 1925–6 Zeitungsausschnitte and the Massenlieder – an original continuation of the German lied tradition. In 1947 Eisler, Brecht and numerous well-known Hollywood producers and scriptwriters were brought before the notorious Committee on Un-American Activities. Eisler was questioned in a fatuous way about Die Massnahme and the Lob des Kommunismus song from Die Mutter, and about being the brother of the ‘communist spy’ Gerhart Eisler. A worldwide protest on his behalf was organized and supported by Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Copland and Cocteau. Eisler was released and expelled in March 1948. He returned to Vienna by way of Prague and after two visits to Berlin – in 1949 he set Becher's poem Auferstanden aus Ruinen, which was chosen as the national anthem of the DDR – he settled there for the second time. He was elected to membership of the German Academy of Arts, at which he held masterclasses in composition, and he was also professor at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.

Thus for his last 12 years Eisler worked within the social system for which he had striven all his life. He had expressed his views in numerous essays on the crisis in bourgeois music, on stupidity in music, on progress in music and on the way out of the crisis and the building of a new music culture. Having overwhelmingly succeeded in the writing of protest music for the fight against capitalism and fascism, he was now faced with the need for music that could serve a new republic to be created out of the debris and disillusion of the war. Significantly there is no chamber music from these years. He was convinced that at this time of transition away from 19th-century habits of performance and listening, progressive music would be mainly ‘angewandte Musik’ – that is ‘applied music’, used for the theatre, cinema, cabaret, television, public events etc. Inevitably, with Brecht and his ensemble also in Berlin, music for the theatre played an important part, and from 1948 to 1961 scores for 17 plays were written. Not all of this music was new. Eisler's Handelian talent for the judicious re-use of existing material had already been evident in the 1920s and 1930s. Brecht's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg was first produced in Warsaw in 1957 but further music was composed for the Frankfurt production of 1959. Eisler's achievement here ranks with his finest. The ironic juxtaposition of heroic, operatic music for Hitler, Himmler and Goering with tuneful cabaret songs accompanied by two pub pianos and interludes for beer garden orchestra matches the humour and flavour of Brecht's play perfectly; the transformation of the opening phrase of Smetana's Vltava theme into a powerful and menacing song about social change is a stroke of genius.

From these years also came music for 17 films, a further 36 settings in cabaret chanson idiom of Tucholsky poems (many specially written for Busch) and the Neue deutsche Volkslieder. Together with many other ‘festival songs’ and children's songs, these represent Eisler's attempt to compose in an idiom which could be immediately understood and quickly learnt. It could be argued that this desire for simplicity is sometimes carried too far, but many of these songs are extremely beautiful. Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe, for instance, has a superbly moulded melodic line, accompanied simply but with great subtlety and ideally complementing the text. A parallel example in a concert work of about the same time is the ‘Symbolum’, the third movement of Das Vorbild to words by Goethe, written in 1952 for his pupils. Other important concert works are the Rhapsodie for orchestra with soprano solo and the cantata Die Teppichweber von Kujan-Bulak in which Eisler most successfully put into practice his belief, expressed as early as 1937, that ‘in our new music’, one would search in vain for ‘bombast, sentimentality and mysticism’ but find instead ‘freshness, intelligence, strength and elegance’. Even in his last work, the cycle Ernste Gesänge for baritone and strings, where the texts might seem sometimes to justify the above undesirable qualities, Eisler asks the singer to refer the listener to the meaning of the words rather than to express them. All his life Eisler felt the need to protect his music from interpreters bred in the opera house and concert hall, and his scores abound with such cautionary directives as ‘without sentimentality’, ‘simply’, ‘friendly’ and even ‘politely’.

Some writers and musicians in capitalist countries have poured scorn on politically committed composers such as Eisler, as if it were reprehensible for an artist to be concerned about his function in society and to wish, through his art, to have some influence on how that society develops. There has also been the assumption that putting one's talents at the service of society inevitably results in propagandist banalities, or that music cannot be at once of use to society and expressive of the artist's self. Obviously, Eisler's enormous output, much of it written at great speed for particular occasions, varies considerably in quality, but the overall standard is extremely high. Even in those works which do not totally succeed, the invention, vitality and superb professionalism give great satisfaction. In his best works, Die Massnahme, Die Mutter, the Zeitungsausschnitte and many of the songs, he achieved undoubted greatness. His ability to write in such a diversity of genres in so individual a way is due to the technical training he received from Schoenberg, his single-minded purpose and his clear-sighted political aims, all controlled by an intellect of the highest calibre. Eisler was a great conversationalist and a master of the art of self-contradiction, using non sequitur and playing devil's advocate in a brilliantly ironic way in an attempt to look at a problem from every angle, to expose it fully to the gaze of his interlocutor. The range of his knowledge was enormous and, like Brecht, he was always intellectually alert.

In the 25 years after his death in 1962, international recognition of Eisler's significance was limited to pockets of enthusiasts restricted by the lack of available scores and recordings. Academic research into his music was assiduously pursued in the DDR but this contrasted with the relatively rare performances there of his larger-scale works. The demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany threw his work and thought into a dramatically new perspective, and has required a rethinking of Eisler's and Adorno's aesthetic positions, previously considered to conflict. The foundation in 1994 of the International Hanns Eisler Society and the resumption of work on the Collected Edition are cause for optimism that a proper international assessment of his significance can be made.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DAVID BLAKE

Eisler, Hanns

WORKS

Edition: H. Eisler: Gesammelte Werke, ed. S. Eisler and M. Grabs (Leipzig, 1968–)

choral with orchestra

vocal with orchestra

vocal with small orchestra

vocal with ensemble

vocal with piano

unaccompanied choral

orchestral

chamber and instrumental

stage

film scores

arrangements

Eisler, Hanns: Works

choral with orchestra

op.

Eisler, Hanns: Works

vocal with orchestra

Eisler, Hanns: Works

vocal with small orchestra

(The majority of these songs exist in versions with pf, and some in other arrs. Some songs have a choral refrain, often ad lib)

Eisler, Hanns: Works

vocal with ensemble

Eisler, Hanns: Works

vocal with piano

Eisler, Hanns: Works

unaccompanied choral

Eisler, Hanns: Works

orchestral

Eisler, Hanns: Works

chamber and instrumental

Eisler, Hanns: Works

stage

Eisler, Hanns: Works

film scores

Eisler, Hanns: Works

arrangements

for selective list see Notowicz and Elsner

Eisler, Hanns

WRITINGS

with T.W. Adorno: Composing for the Films (London, 1947, 2/1971; Ger. trans., rev., 1949, rev., enlarged 2/1969 by T.W. Adorno)

Johann Faustus [text for uncomposed 3-act opera] (Berlin, 1952); ed. H. Bunge (Berlin, 1983)

Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1959)

Materialen zu einer Dialektik der Musik (Berlin, 1973)

ed. G. Mayer: Musik und Politik (Berlin, 1973)

Eisler, Hanns

BIBLIOGRAPHY

books and catalogues

H.A. Brockhaus: Hanns Eisler (Leipzig, 1961)

N. Notowicz and J. Elsner: Hanns Eisler: Quellennachweise (Leipzig, 1966)

G. Mayer: Die Kategorie des musikalischen Materials in den ästhetischen Anschauungen Hanns Eislers (diss., Berlin U., 1969)

H. Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht: Hanns Eisler im Gespräch (Munich, 1970/R)

J. Elsner: Zur vokalsolistischen Vortragsweise der Kampfmusik Hanns Eislers (Leipzig, 1971)

N. Notowicz: ‘Wir reden hier nicht von Napoleon. Wir reden von Ihnen!’ Gespräche mit Hanns Eisler und Gerhart Eisler, ed. J. Elsner (Berlin, 1971)

E. Klemm: Hanns Eisler (Berlin, 1973) [catalogue, fuller version in BMw, xv (1973)]

E. Klemm: Hanns Eisler: für Sie porträtiert (Leipzig, 1973, 2/1977)

J. Lucchesi and R.K. Schull: Musik bei Brecht (Berlin, 1988)

essays

E. Ratz: ‘Hanns Eisler’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, vi (1924)

H. Stuckenschmidt: ‘Hanns Eisler’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, x (1928)

G. Knepler: ‘Hanns Eisler und das “Neue” in der Musik’, in H. Eisler: Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1959), 155

D. Drew: ‘Eisler and the Polemic Symphony’, The Listener, lxvii (1962), 45 only

Sinn und Form: Eisler Sonderheft (1964) [incl. essays by D. Blake, P. Dessau and F. Goldmann, J. Elsner, E. Fischer, N. Notowicz, V. Pozner, G. Schneerson, S. Tretjakow]

B. Brecht: ‘Anmerkungen zur “Massnahme”, II: Die Musik’, Schriften zum Theater, ii, ed. W. Hecht (Frankfurt, 1964), 134–6

B. Brecht: ‘Über die Verwendung von Musik für ein episches Theater’, Schriften zum Theater, iii, ed. W. Hecht (Frankfurt, 1964), 267–80

E. Klemm: ‘Bemerkungen zur Zwölftontechnik bei Eisler und Schönberg’, Sinn und Form, xvi (1964), 771

D. Blake: ‘Hanns Eisler’, The Listener (1966), 398 only

M. Grabs: ‘Über Hanns Eislers Kammerkantaten’, MG, xviii (1968)

J. Elsner: ‘Einiges zur Entwicklung Hanns Eislers in den 20er Jahren’, Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, i, ed. H.A. Brockhaus and K. Niemann (Berlin, 1969), 9–19

M. Grabs: ‘Film- und Bühnenmusik im sinfonischen Werk Hanns Eislers’, Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, i, ed. H.A. Brockhaus and K. Niemann (Berlin, 1969), 20–29

G. Knepler: ‘Erinnerungen an Hanns Eisler’, BMw, xi (1969), 3–10

F. Hennenberg: ‘Zur Dialektik des Schliessens in Liedern von Hanns Eisler’, Sammelbände zur Musikgeschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, ii, ed. H.A. Brockhaus and K. Niemann (Berlin, 1971), 181–227

B. Brecht: Die Massnahme, ed. R. Steinweg (Frankfurt, 1972, 3/1978) [incl. essays by M. Grabs, H. Stuckenschmidt]

G. Mayer: ‘Historischer Materialstand: zu Hanns Eislers Konzeption einer Dialektik der Musik’, DJbM, xvii (1972), 7–24

M. Grabs: ‘“Wir, so gut es gelang, haben das Unsre getan”: zur Aussage der Hölderlin-Vertonungen Hanns Eislers’, BMw, xv (1973), 49–60

G. Knepler: ‘… was des Eislers ist’, BMw, xv (1973), 29–48

J. Mainka: ‘Musikalische Betroffenheit: zum Begriff des Gestischen’, BMw, xv (1973), 61–80

J. Mainka: ‘Zum Verhältnis von politischem und musikalischem Fortschritt: zu Hanns Eislers Konzeption einer Dialektik der Musik’, BMw, xv (1973), 3–28

Das Argument (1975), suppl.5 [Eisler issue, incl. A. Dümling: ‘Rezension der Eisler-Bibliographien’]

A. Betz: Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (Cambridge, 1982)

A. Dümling: Lasst euch nicht verführen: Brecht und die Musik (Munich, 1985)

T. Phelps: Hanns Eisler's ‘Deutscher Sinfonie’: ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik des Widerstands (Kassel, 1988)

C. Albert: Das schwierige Handwerk des Hoffens: Hanns Eisler's ‘Hollywood Liederbuch’ (Stuttgart, 1991)

H. Bunge, ed.: Die Debatte um Hanns Eisler's ‘Johann Faustus’: eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1991)

D. Blake, ed.: Hanns Eisler: a Miscellany (Luxembourg, 1995)

A. Dümling, ed.: ‘Hanns Eisler and Film Music’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xviii/4 (1998) [Eisler issue]

J. Schebera: Hans Eisler: eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz, 1998)