Born 6 July 1898 in Leipzig, Germany, Hanns Eisler moved to Vienna in 1901, where he grew up. He liked to describe himself as the product of a marriage between two social classes: his father, a philosopher, came from a bourgeois family, while his mother’s family was working class. His parents were both music lovers and taught him lieder and opera tunes, but could not afford piano lessons for him. When the First World War broke out, Eisler, still in high school, signed a pacifist pact with his brother, but was sent to the front in 1916, where he was wounded and returned to Vienna in December 1918. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen and Vienna was on the verge of famine. A wave of revolutionary activity, though rapidly repressed, fostered the emergence of the Austrian Communist Party, of which Eisler’s brother and sister were founding members. Eisler himself participated occasionally, distributing leaflets, for example, but did not become fully involved with the Party at this point.

During this period in his life, from 1919 to 1923, music was his priority: Arnold Schoenberg himself gave him free composition lessons. To make a living, Eisler proofread scores for Universal Editions, conducted worker choirs, and taught music classes to workers.

The second phase of Eisler’s life began when he moved to Berlin, which, in the 1920s, was the epicenter of Europe’s avant-garde. He accepted a teaching position at the Klindworth-Scharwenka conservatory and discovered the work of theater director Erwin Piscator. The prevailing social unrest in Berlin at the time reinforced Eisler’s Marxist understanding of contemporary world events. In March 1926, his relationship with Schoenberg ended when Shoenberg accused Eisler of disloyalty and Eisler accused Schoenberg of engaging in elitism, distancing himself from society with New Music. For Eisler, a stay in Paris in the summer of 1926 had changed Eisler’s view of the world: in the salon of Marya Freund, the great interpreter of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, he met Ravel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Ibert, and Roussel, whose discussions were about surrealism and psychoanalysis, while Eisler wished to see New Music serve social causes. Eisler published articles explaining his vision and by the end of 1927 he began working as a composer, pianist, and orchestral conductor for Das Rote Sprachrohr (literally, “the Red Mouthpiece”), a Berlin agitprop theater group. The stock market crash of 1929 reinforced Eisler’s convictions, and he began a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht that continued until Brecht died in 1956.

The third period of Eisler’s life was one of exile and even homelessness: in 1933 he fled to Czechoslovakia and then Paris. In early 1937, he enlisted in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war and composed battle songs for them, before joining up with Brecht in Denmark. That same year, during a stay in Prague, he and Ernst Bloch wrote a set of articles in which they explained why musical and social revolutions went together. In January 1938, Eisler accepted a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. For reasons having to do with his visa, he had to leave the United States from April to September of 1939, and traveled to Mexico, where he taught music theory. Upon his return to the United States, he was entrusted with a research project on film music. In April 1942, he moved to Hollywood, where he renewed his friendship with Schoenberg and worked with Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht, as well as composing film scores. At the end of the Second World War, he and his brother were brought before the House Unamerican Activities Commission, both of them denounced by their sister, who believed her brothers were Stalinists. He was deported and traveled to Prague in March 1948. There, he spoke in favor of rethinking musical aesthetics in view of the current context - of ceasing experimentation to restore music’s “joyful and pleasant” side. From there he traveled to Vienna, which at the time was divided into four zones of occupation, and tried in vain to obtain a post at the Conservatory. Ultimately, he settled in East Berlin, the capital of the all-new RDA, in 1949.

Although he became a kind of official composer for the RDA, notably penning its national anthem, he met with difficulties from the cultural establishment. His Austrian passport allowed him to find temporary harbor in Vienna when in tension with the East German authorities. Despite this, he remained celebrated as a national figure in East Germany, and was showcased as one of the cultural gems of the new state. Eisler, hoever, was torn betwen the idea that modern music ought to serve the social revolution that East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) seemed to be on the cusp of bringing about, and the fact that the SED denounced this same modernity in the arts as having helped to birth fascism. Ideological debates over his work continued long after his sudden death in East Berlin on 6 September 1962.