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‘Only a composer’: Reflections on the Eisler Centenary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
37 years since his death, and the bourgeois music world still hasn't much more time for Hanns Eisler than he had for it! But things have moved on. The work of the one who, above all others, has come to be regarded as the very emblem of the revolutionary communist composer does fill a useful gap in the market. To that extent, there can be generosity in victory. Among its new trophies, Berlin Classics has come across and re-released a near-exhaustive collection of recordings of Eisler's music. Some of these, such as Ernst Busch's searing declamations, are documents of a lost age, more hairraisingly alive than anything happening today.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998
References
1 Latest examples of his skills in this regard: the brilliant new CD of Eisler suites and songs – some of his best! (Gruber/Ensemble Modern – RCA 74321 56882 2.)
2 Regarding the change of name: While Lenin's Russia was known simply as ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ – an invitation for anyone to join – Stalinism needed the myth of national identity. With Churchill speaking of ‘defeating the Hun’, and Stalin of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ we cannot begrudge Eisler his ‘German Symphony’.
3 By 1938 Eisler and most of the German exiles had to flee the show-trials or risk execution as Nazi agents.
4 Final answer to ‘proletkult’ illusions: nil the Nazis needed to convert proletarian music to fascist music was to change the name. They took Eisler's Red Wedding song and simply called it Brown Wedding. (Everything about them was second hand.)
5 And more than aesthetically. Listen to Irmgard Arnold's 1958 recording of Eisler songs (there's a volume in the Berlin Classics series devoted to her singing): as amazing in their way as Ernst Busch's thrilling performances of the openly political Kampfmusik songs. Such human properties of intelligence, initiative, delicacy, a sense of justice, humanity, humour and honesty not normally known among professionals – especially singers – show that there are a thousand alternative routes music could have taken in this century. Listen (on the same CD) to Eisler's own gruff and piercingly real-life run-through of a song like the last-period Die halt bare Craugans together with her performance – and you can hear Eisler as the 20th century's Mussorgsky!
6 See Drew, David, ‘Eisler and Austrian Music’. Tempo 161/2, especially pp. 33–4. (Ed.)Google Scholar
7 Partly by the Russian, but mainly, it is now emerging, by the American, British and French occupying forces in the five-six years after the war was nominally over.
8 Or for his adherence to the Anthroposophical ideals of Rudolf Steiner, which he shared with Ullmann – whose 1939 opera Der Stiirz dcs Antichrist, recently recorded by CPO, is an astonishing Steinerian fable of Fascist dictatorship, collaborationist priests and scientists, spaceflight and demonic possession. (Ed.)