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Hanns Eisler Political Musician

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Although written in the mid-Eighties this is still an exhaustive,detailed account of a Twentieth Century master,the first in English. Eisler was a Marxist and wrote music as well, two ultimately unique facets of a creator today. No one forsaw the emergence of culture as a last bastion of internal resistence to the state of the world. This is why Betz's book here is so important, for it gives both the analytic and the historical. Betz traces Eisler's entire career. Beginning with the early days as a Schoenberg student. Eisler to my mind anyway had more of a realist vision of the state of Germany,than his counterparts Weill,Berg or Webern in the Twenties,which is why he adopted his political convictions. His early music adopts a Schoenbergian free atonality but he finds his own voice there. Compelling, neurotic and momentum bound are the main features of this early music,He wrote a powerful "First Piano Sonata" from this period and began dabbling in music as social discourse He utilized newspaper clippings, or "Zeitungsausschnitte" the title of the work for piano and voice. Betz extends his analysis to Eisler's meeting in Berlin with Brecht, one of the most prolific and profound collaboration of this century. Betz develops a concept of Eisler's modernity and the unique creative challenges he faced in uniting text with music. Eisler, who wrote over 500 songs during his life was like the Schubert of our age,almost no text was beyond a run through with piano accompaniment. The thrust of this modernity was Eisler's penchant for a striking image, a compact,terse lyrical musical means. Often his songs are quite short which points to this modernity in fast development and quick,concentrated musical motives, where single exposed tones can trigger an image of violence or terror. There is also here an elaborate discussion of Eisler's last major work the opera "Johann Faustus". When Eisler was thrown out of the United States he returned to the DDR, East Germany, and was wholly ignored by the apparatcik authorities,despite the fact that he wrote their National Anthem. This opera was reason enough for this institutional neglect, with veiled barbs on the seductive sides of tyranny. He used the "Peasant Wars" in Germany in the early 1500's as a remote yet very immediate reality for this opera. Betz also includes a comprehensive list of all of Eisler's works including reference to numerous filmscores.

You would expect that for a book that cost as much as this one you would get an accurate history of Hanns Eisler, his life, his family, and his troubles with his family, but that is not the case. The book spends too much time mitigating Hanns and his brother Gerhardt controversial ties with the Communist party while marginalizing his sister, Ruth Fischer, their chief accuser. Sorry to say that this books, although interesting, is afraid to go beyond the surface and is a whitewash of this controversial, but brilliant musician. By the time you finish it, you will would think that his sister was crazy and that Hanns and his brother were just plain ordinary folks hounded out of America by that mean old committee and Richard Nixon. Go ahead and read it. Read his much marginalized, but brilliant sister's book too. By the time, you are finished both, you just might break out into a chorus of Night and Day instead of the Eisler composition, The Comintern March. Eisler's life, relationship with his familyand politics were much more interesting and complicated than you will find in the pages of this overpriced whitewash. I doubt, however, a true account of the man will ever see the light of day.