Customer Reviews

Keiner Oder Alle/Kampf Mu

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Hanns Eisler's repudiation of "art for art's sake" in the mid-1920s did not prevent him from producing some of the most engaging concert works of the 20th century (especially his broad repertory of chamber music and the monumental "Deutsche Sinfonie"), but Eisler is perhaps best known in Germany for his incidental music for Bertolt Brecht's most radical political plays and the genre of leftist "Kampflieder" (Songs for the Struggle) he largely invented during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic. This album--digitally remastered from recordings made by the East German music industry--is a sampling of this style, notable both for its combative energy and its fusion of 1920s jazz and the German brass band tradition. Most startling are "Der rote Wedding" (Red Wedding)--an aggressive Communist election song dedicated to the Berlin working-class district of Wedding, and the sarcastic "Bankenlied" (Song of the Banks) with a text translated from a 19th-century French protest song. Other tracks include Eisler settings of Communist and Socialist classics. Listeners who are drawn to the politically-engaged protest music of any era might want to compare Eisler's swinging, jazz-influenced style with the plodding beer-hall sentimentality of Nazi "Kampflieder" from the same period.