Do you notice a mistake?
Hanns Eisler, for whom music was inconceivable apart from its political function, made it his ideal to put musical revolution at the service of socialist revolution. His work has been subjected to divergent ideological interpretations.1 He himself was unafraid of conflict, whether in his overall musical evolution or within a single work, especially when it came to the relations between text, music, and performance.
Eisler studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg starting in 1919, and sporadically with Anton Webern, from whom he picked up a preference for concise musical ideas. By the time he came back from the front, he had composed music for somber poems by Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Trakl. These songs reflect a deep despair, offering only one way out: the grotesque. This word is even highlighted in the subtitle of Eisler’s Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs, 1917). In these sounds the musical language is that of the Vienna School. Palmström (1925), op. 5, a dodecaphonic work on satiric poems about the petite bourgeoisie by Christian Morgenstern, dialogues with Pierrot lunaire, from which it takes its performing forces and Sprechgesang technique. In the same year, Eisler’s Piano Sonata No. 1 won a prize from the City of Vienna, and Schoenberg’s admiration.
The second half of the 1920s represents the turning point after which Eisler prioritized the social function of music: he left behind “bourgeois” chamber music and wrote instead symphonic music, including six suites between 1927 and 1933, for the cinema, which reaches a broader public. Eisler thought of this music as not a sonic illustration of the image but a “dramatic counterpoint” to it. It therefore had to have an intrinsic meaning, independent of the film. To achieve this independence, Eisler put his works in dialogue with each other, borrowing from ones already written, rewriting them, or adapting them, as though to give them a life of their own. Thus, the theme of the fourth movement of the Suite No. 3 (1931) would become, one year later, that of the Solidaritätslied (Song of Solidarity). In the Kleine Sinfonie (Little Symphony), op. 29, written in the summer of 1932 and stitched together from borrowings, the third movements (“Invention”) cites the accompaniment from the song Lob der dritten Sache (Praise of the Third [that is, the communist] Cause) from Die Mutter (The Mother, by Berthold Brecht, after Maxim Gorky). A notable change is that the flute that, in the song, gently lulls the reciter is replaced by trumpets with wah-wah mutes, which provokes surprise: whereas the word “invention” in the title points to Johann Sebastian Bach, this timbre borrowed from jazz brings us back to the modern world. Combination of classic forms is indeed the guiding thread in this Kleine Sinfonie, at first in a dodecaphonic language (the work opens with a tone-row), then with jazz idioms and pockets of tonality.
During his Berlin years (1925-1933), Eisler wrote for a proletarian public with the goal of transforming the concert hall into a space of political mobilization. He flaunted his anti-lyricism in Zeitungsausschnitte, lieder for soprano and piano written, as the title says, not on poems but on newspaper clippings. The first of the Vier Stücke für gemischten Chor (Four Pieces for Mixed Chorus, 1928), op. 13, begins with a public service announcement: “Today we will not be singing the usual choruses, meaning […] those with a religious theme, […] songs about nature, [… and] love songs.” Each announcement is punctuated by a musical pastiche sending up the repertoire in question, until at last the Internationale is intoned. The male choruses (Männerchöre), opp. 14 (1928), 17 (1929), 19 (1929), and 35 (1930) are concerned with rising unemployment, strike action, and social strife. The topicality of the texts brings with it a musical evolution, as the choruses return to a more classical shape. For example, the political agitation song for mixed chorus Auf den Strassen zu singen (To Be Sung in the Streets), op. 15, while based on a simple alternation between a couplet and an easily retainable refrain, is nevertheless too complex to be sung while marching: more than a true protest song (though referring to the genre), it unites popular music and art music. Eisler also set up a contradiction between text and music. Thus, in the Bankenlied (Song of the Banks), the refrain “Wir sind entlassen” (We’ve been fired) sounds like a joyous popular song with clownish accents.
To this estrangement between text and music must be added another that Eisler expected of the performer. In 1929 he met Ernst Busch, an actor and cabaret singer who excelled in precisely the aesthetic Eisler was looking for. The two would appear together in theaters and smaller Berlin cafes and scored a big success. One example of what Eisler was looking for in performance can be found in an indication in the score of his opus 14, where the choir intones a melody from the sixteenth-century German Peasants’ War: Eisler asks for it to be “blared out, so that it does not sound pretty.” One cannot help but compare this instruction to the estrangement effect that Brecht wanted from actors in the theater, the two men having worked intensively together.
In 1930, Die Massnahme (The Decision, 1930) presented through the medium of theater within theater a sort of secularized Passion of a young comrade whose excessive zeal puts the revolution in danger. A didactic play, it was meant to resemble collective experimentation: the actors cycle through the parts and thereby distance themselves from their characters, while the “Control Choir” is a choir of workers who educate themselves through play, following a principle dear to Brecht. The music also contributes to the estrangement by inserting oddities into familiar archetypes (such as spoken choruses or popular music), or by combining simultaneously conclusive and suspensive figures at the end of the work, thereby leaving the “decision” to the listener.2 From Die Mutter, another didactic piece written by the same authors in 1931, and a sort of optimistic pendant to Die Massnahme, posterity has retained above all the “Praise of Communism” (Lob des Kommunismus), which takes the form of a lullaby rather than the expected protest song. Eisler obliges the listener to be astonished.
The experience of exile (including two spells in Moscow in 1932) and an attempt at resistance, if only musical, changed the direction of Eisler’s evolution. Moscow having transmitted an order for a song to unify the antifascist front, Eisler and Brecht responded with their Einheitsfrontlied (Song of the United Front, 1934). Performed by Busch, the composer himself, and 3,000 singers at the International Workers’ Music Olympiad in Strasbourg in 1935, it is one of the best-known songs from the workers’ movement, and by Eisler. His other battle hymns from the same period are characterized by extreme melodic and rhythmic simplicity, which hammers out the message of the text. The collection Lieder, Gedichte, Chöre (Songs, Poems, and Choruses), published with Brecht in 1934, contains “utilitarian” songs, easy to remember.
For the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Moscow commissioned the Requiem for Lenin (Lenin-Requiem). Eisler started work on it in 1935. Despite the onset of Stalin’s terror, which led Eisler to suspect that this work dedicated to Lenin would not be performed (indeed, it never was in the USSR and had to wait until 1958 in the GDR, after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party), Eisler continued to work on it in 1937 during his stay on the Danish island of Funen with Brecht, the author of the text. This composition stands out for its pathos and grandiloquence, though for a requiem its dimensions are miniature (15 minutes). It opens with a “dissonant” introduction. As usual, Eisler borrows from his own works: the seventh number is a reprise of the “Lob des Revolutionärs” (“Praise of the Revolutionary”) from The Mother; however, the orchestration and choir give it new density and drama. The combination of imitative entries — clichés of polyphonic writing — and battle hymns in, for example, the fourth number is also typical of Eisler. The intelligibility of the text, especially in the recitatives, highlights the main message: Lenin’s injunction to fight against the exploitation of man by man. Eisler seems to embrace the idea that communism is a new religion, but the work’s long, bombastic conclusion is atypical for him. In light of the context in which the Requiem was composed, one could hear the martial apotheosis in the last number as a pastiche intended to keep the cult of personality at a distance.
As though running with the metaphor of communism as religion, during his Danish stay Eisler also wrote nine chamber cantatas, in a stripped-down style opposite to that of the Requiem. The texts have sometimes been attributed to Brecht, but most of them came from the Italian communist writer Ignazio Silone, ostracized by the Party. Silone describes the misery of the peasants in the Abruzzo region, then their revolt. The economical instrumentation (two clarinets, viola, cello) of these cantatas, and their brevity, facilitated their premieres in December 1937 in Prague and then in 1938 in New York. Though the language is tonal, it is not overtly so and even repeatedly uses twelve-tone rows without being strictly dodecaphonic — almost as though Eisler were refusing to be confined to one system. He shows that the same notes need not produce the same effects: in the first number of the Weissbrotkantate (White Bread Cantata), the cell from the first measure (G – B-flat – A – A-flat) returns as the head of a tone-row. This same motif sounds quite different a little further along (measure 58) due to a tonal harmonic support in G minor.3 So Eisler does not separate tonal writing from twelve-tone writing; hence his flat rejection, years later, of the ideological reading imposed by GDR culture officials who accused Expressionism and dodecaphony of paving the way for fascism. What could be called the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” (to borrow a term from Ernst Bloch, with whom Eisler wrote two articles in 1937-1938 in the context of the so-called “expressionism debate” with Georg Lukács) is a characteristic of Eisler’s compositions: in the cantatas, for example, melodies in a popular vein are presented in imitative entries, referencing liturgical music. In the second movement of the Weissbrotkantate, the dialogue between God and Saint Berardo has cabaret-like melodic inflexions, the humor resulting from the disconnect between the (liturgical) text and the music. Thus Eisler recovers the ironic, scathing spirit that he seemed to have almost forgotten in the Requiem.
During his exile, the only democratic-popular forces in which Eisler still placed any hope were the International Brigades in Spain, which he encountered in January 1937 and for which he wrote battle songs. He also hoped to reach the bourgeoisie with his music so as to prepare for the era to come after the end of fascism. Such is the message conveyed in Brecht’s famous poems “To Those Born Later” (“An die Nachgeborenen”) and “To the Survivors” (“An die Überlebenden”), initially titled Elegies I and II and written in 1937 in Denmark. The famous lines “We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendship could not be friendly ourselves” are set to a twelve-tone row. Despite the dark lyrics, the music of these “elegies” does not become lament. Eisler and Brecht wrote more of them in 1942, included in the collection of lieder published under the title (given by the publishers) Hollywooder Liederbuch — all written in Hollywood between May 1942 and December 1943. In retrospect, Eisler characterized these numerous lieder as a private diary: they record preoccupations that might seem trivial at first, but using metaphor they denounce the “false” paradise that Hollywood offered to artists who, like him, did not support capitalism but had to “earn their bread” (“Jeden Morgen mein Brot zu verdienen”). It is hardly surprising that Eisler had an affinity for the lied, the meeting ground par excellence of elite and popular modes of expression.
During this same period, Eisler composed lieder on poems from more distant eras, such as verses by the Greek poet Anacreon or the quintessential German Romantic writer Joseph von Eichendorff. Yet even these poems, though more metaphorical than those of Brecht, held a certain relevance for Eisler’s own time, as seen for instance in the song “Schatzgräber” (“The Treasure Hunter”), after Goethe, which urges the putting aside of illusions. But Eisler also set fragments from Friedrich Hölderlin that express a longing for the homeland (“Heimat”), at the very moment the Nazis were scoring military victories. This decision, Eisler would say, reflected the dialectic in which he found himself: even while condemning his country, he continued to compose for it.
The Hölderlin songs return to a classical form and give priority to melody. “An eine Stadt” (“To a City”), for example, is dedicated to Schubert and takes him as model, except for the very last chord, which surprises the listener at the moment the lyrical “I” longs for rest. But unlike in Schubert, in Eisler’s music a succession of triads can have a strange consonance, devoid of a tonal center of gravity. Thus, despite the reference to classicism, these lieder remain unconventional. Their endings, usually open or, more rarely, so consonant as to be antiphrastic (in “Die Heimkehr” [“The Return”], on a poem by Brecht), invite listeners to resolve the contradictions of their time themselves.
The fraught relationship he maintained with his homeland led Eisler to name the symphony he wrote during his exile Deutsche Sinfonie (German Symphony). The subtitle projected in 1935 was “Concentration Camp Symphony.” Written for choir, soloists, and orchestra, it is his largest antifascist work, and its process of composition stretched from 1935 to 1947. Depicting the horrors of war and of the camps, it opens with Brecht’s poem “O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter, wie sitzest du besudelt” (“O Germany, Pale Mother, How You Are Besmirched”). It was only premiered partially, after removal of the openly anti-Nazi passages, in 1937 and 1938 in Paris and London, and later in the GDR. It combines twelve-tone technique and battle hymn idioms and shows a pathos unusual for Eisler.
For his film music of this period, Eisler preferred writing for chamber ensemble, avoiding the expressive emphasis of the full orchestra. The Nonet No. 2(/works/work/49506/) (1941), before becoming an independent score, was written for John Steinbeck’s film The Forgotten Village (1940). The music for Joris Ivens’s film Rain (Regen, 1941) is titled Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain (Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben). This quintet, dedicated to Schoenberg, revisits the instrumentation of Pierrot lunaire and opens with the cell A – E-flat (A – Es in German, corresponding to Schoenberg’s initials). The Chamber Symphony, op. 69 (1940), was intended for the film White Flood by William Osgood Fields. Eisler himself provided an analysis of it in his book Composing for the Films.
After relocating to the GDR, Eisler helped to establish the musical heritage of the new state. He wrote the East German national anthem and composed the Neue deutsche Volkslieder (New German Folk Songs) starting in 1950, which return to a certain musical simplicity, with a verse-refrain format and tonal language.
But with Eisler, simplicity need not exclude surprise, usually to be found in the closing measures. Often the ending gives a fragmentary impression: it may end with an oddity (such as an appoggiatura, as in “Im Frühling” (“In Spring”), or the harmony will be unresolved in the voice part as in “Die Welt verändern wir” (“We Are Changing the World”), or the resolution will not occur on the beat (see the piano version of the same song). These techniques are sometimes combined: the ending of “Wenn Arbeiter und Bauern” (“When Workers and Peasants”) is open, with an unresolved chord and rhythmic displacement that breaks the preceding mechanical character.4 As usual, Eisler avoids conclusive endings and seems to leave the listener with a question at the end of each melody. Without unsettling the listener, certainly, he shows a concern to introduce novelty.
Eisler experienced the first throes of cultural politics between December 1952 and May 1953 during the stormy discussions around his opera libretto Johann Faustus (initially called Doctor Faustus). His opera revisits the Faust legend by giving it a quasi-autobiographical twist: the character goes into exile in Atlanta in the second act, from which he is expelled to return to Germany in the third act — a country he describes as “gray, cold,” “narrow and bleak.” Eisler’s Faust lives during the time of the Peasants’ War, sharing the peasants’ demands but abandoning them at the moment of battle. Eisler seems to suggest that intellectuals who went into exile during National Socialism, starting with himself, should be self-critical, but he also paints a grim picture of Germany at a time when the GDR was expecting its artists to embrace a bright future.
To make matters worse, an article by an Austrian philologist, Ernst Fischer, emphasized the dark sides of the libretto: according to Fischer, the German humanist, embodied by this Faust, is a “turncoat.” In the GDR, the word brought to mind the likes of Rudolf Slánský, whose trial was underway at that very moment. To choose a turncoat as the main character of an opera, when the party had commissioned a “national opera,” and to set this turncoat in one of the rare revolutionary periods of German history (the Peasants’ War), moreover in a rewrite that seemed to desecrate Goethe’s Faust (part of the regime’s canon) — all this was perceived as a triple affront by party functionaries, already suspicious of artists returning from the United States. Johann Faustus was thus branded as the kind of “formalism” denounced by Andrey Zhdanov, and Eisler, sunk in depression after this affair, never wrote the music.
He nevertheless continued to compose in the GDR, notably for Brecht, whose Kriegsfibel (War Primer) would serve as the finale to the German Symphony for its premiere in 1959, warning against the possibility of a new war during this time of German rearmament.
Eisler’s last work, the cycle Ernste Gesänge (Serious Songs), for solo baritone and string orchestra, was written from the spring of 1961 to August of 1962. These songs refer to the revelations of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, which gives the fifth number of the cycle its title. But the songs are more metaphorical than directly political. For three of the seven movements Eisler reuses fragments by Hölderlin that he had previously set. The title of the pieces suggests an alternation between sadness, despair, and hope. Eisler himself indulges in rather facile metaphors, for example, “autumn” for the end of the Stalin cult.5 Pastiche is audible in “Epilogue” (No. 7) whose melodic and harmonic beauty is so affirmative that it falls into clichés of lyrical expressivity — for example, by highlighting the violins and progressing from minor to major. For those who know Eisler, a harmonic idyll and absence of conflict can only arouse suspicion and give away that we are dealing here with a pastiche. It is not the least of history’s ironies that the last measures set down by Eisler before his death (which came unexpectedly) resort to a pathos contrary to his habits, but also that the piece — though finished — stops abruptly, with a simple pizzicato, totally unexpected yet entirely in Eisler’s spirit, like one last wink from the composer.
Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey
1. See for example the debate that followed the posthumous premiere of the Chamber Symphony in 1963, summarized by Tobias Fasshauer in the Breitkopf & Härtel edition of the score (Wiesbaden, 2011) ↩
2. See the analysis by Jean-François Trubert: “Quel Gestus pour quelle révolution? Brecht, Eisler et ‘l’emploi de la musique,’” in Francine Maier-Schaeffer et al. (eds), La révolution mise en scène, Rennes, Presses de l’Université de Rennes, 2012, p. 379-382. ↩
3. My thanks to Dimitri Kerdiles for his invaluable analysis of the score. ↩
4. Thanks again to Dimitri Kerdiles for his analyses. ↩
5. Interview with Hans Bunge, 6 November 1961, in Hans-Joachim Bunge, Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht, Hanns Eisler im Gespräch, Munich, Rogner & Bernhard, 1970. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?