Hanns Eisler (Contemporary Music Studies) [Paperback]

David Blake (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 3, 1995 | Series: Contemporary Music Studies

This volume provides an overview of Eisler's output, from the early compositions and his work as a pupil of Schoenberg, to the development of his individual compositional technique and style. The author balances critical analysis, historical survey and aesthetic argument and includes some of Eisler's own articles and extracts from his conversations. Blake confronts the attitudes of the GDR administration towards this influential composer and shows the valuable insights into the complexities of this century which can be gained from a study of Eisler's life and works, especially from his notation of "applied music" - the linking of music to social and political needs. Also included in this collection of writings by and about Eisler is the publication in English of Eisler's "Faust libretto".

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (August 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3718655756
• ISBN-13: 978-3718655755
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,657,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: Hanns Eisler (Contemporary Music Studies) (Hardcover)

This is an exhaustive survey of Eisler's work,music,aesthetic and life. David Blake the editor and composer studied with Eisler for a time. Blake also has wonderful essays on Ernst Bloch.
Eisler was a marxist activist composer in every respect of the term, he simply worked at whatever the movement and music, the arts needed, and this endeavor was a problematical one even today.
He emerged from Vienna and studied with Arnold Schoenberg,and is never really recognized by anyone(other than Schoenberg) as the third great student of the 12 Tone School(Berg and Webern the obvious others).But bourgeois prejudice has made Eisler actually throughout history, an outcast in the new music community. Even Luciano Berio had nothing perceptive to say about Eisler's work,simply that it was too simple. This from a composer (Berio) who found the shortest distances the dilution and homogenizations of the post-serial languages.He is still however deeply respected by the younger generation composers certainly in England Cardew and Skempton, and Smith,and the Germany,composers H.K. Gruber and H. Goebbels.
Eisler early had found the thread of politics to music writing pieces and conducting within collective settings as the worker chorus,mass songs(United Front Song)(Forwards)became the focus for this period prior to the rise of fascism, where the ruling classes of the globe did have in fact something to fear, with the system not working, the Depression.
With the eradication of the Left,The Nazis had put a price on Eisler's head so he immigrated and remained in the USA living as a film composer in Hollywood.This was a place he found the greatest hypocrisy in the arts.He was only to be deported after the war during the Witch Hunts of the McCarthy era.
This collection of essays reveals Eisler not only the composer but the theoretician,of speaking on problems of creativity,history,structure,text and concept. He found himself on Lecture Tours,throughout his life and this process became an integral part of his music, knowing how to speak to people is just as important as writing music.
Here included are some of his primary essays that perhaps had more mass appeal "On the situation of modern music"and "On the bourgeois concert business". He does have vigorous essays, actually translations of his Lectures on aspects of the sociology of music,on finding the class origins for instance within the history of music,topics seldom discussed even within academia today.Much of this material is still in its original German.He found it a challenge as the essay here by Albrecht Betz"Music and politics:theme and variations" on the paradigm of tracing the line that exists between outright propaganda and serious music.This became an art in and of itself when you also contemplate Brecht's contribution to poetry and literature, where he discovered new literary genres placing his poetry in forever differing context.Eisler as collaborator with Brecht was certainly influenced by this affinity for the new in terms of the aestjetic and structure.(Betz has his own booklength study of Eisler.)And Eisler never simple took the easy route and maintained a sophisticated sense of the aesthetic throughout his life,even coming to terms with atonality the last years of his life. He did in fact write the most interesting atonal music during his early years,a topic Blake takes up as the "First and Second Piano Sonatas", and the pieces"Zeitungausshnitte".Opus 11 "Newspapperclippings" for Voice and Piano.Eisler had a gift for lyricism and transforming the most arduous text into power,directedness and lilting gentleness. Examples abound as his"An den kleinen Radioapparat""to my radio",the" Drei Wiegenlieds" "Three Lullabys","Change the World it Need it!". He found irony for instance in the song on the tric(man of the street) soliciting a prostitute,where he interweaves the famous harmonic progression from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde", that love can be bought, it is simply another commodity as anything else.
Eisler and Brecht being in the forefront of the issues of politics during the pre-and post war times in the arts were frequently the subject of discussion,even Walter Benjamin knew this body of work, and found the genre of "mass art" to be progressive as Brecht practiced it. Along this line Gunter Mayer provides a chapter "Eisler and Adorno" a formidable rendering of these issues between committment and marxist mandarin-ism Adorno.Adorno thought that mixing politics and music only cheapened one for the other. That the highest form of subversion was actually the privatized practicing bourgeois artist as recluse,not sacrificing his aesthtic for the market or the street, as Schoenberg,Berg and Webern had admirably done.
The great works of Eisler are surveyed,primarily the "Songs" the "Holderlin Fragment" is given one chapter by here as well the collaborations with Brecht, "Die Mutter" "Die Massnahme", "The Hollywood Songbooks", and the oratorio-like "Deutsche Sinfonie", and his last work the opera from 1952 "Johann Faustus". This last work was like the summary opus a deeply felt commentary on the state of the world after the war, and the opportunism that existed in the East with the Soviet satellites.Here we are provided with the libretto and Eisler's own notes on this work. Eisler when he returned to the DDR , East Germany he was largely ignored by the DDR government hardly mounting performances of his works.

There are also heretofore unavailable a translated interview with Hans Bunge where we now see Eisler past his career where he reflects on the politicalization of the arts,the situation in the East and when asked where music and politics renders itself,that all art is political the answer was that it is rather useless to politicize everything.It is rather the artist challenge to find the thread to jump over the border to find where this paradigm exists between politics and music.There is also a wonderful narrative on when Eisler brough Brecht to Schoenberg's home while they all lived in Los Angeles. Eisler had though Brecht would insult Schoenberg.

There are also nice vintage phots and ample musical excerpts from score and manuscript.