Description
SKU/Barcode: 782124844929
When in 1948 German composer Hanns Eisler was expelled from the United States in the early stages of the Red Scare, Virgil Thomson lamented, "It is a matter of regret to this reviewer to lose a workman so gifted, so skillful, so imaginative. Let us hope that his musical works may come to us regularly from Europe." Arriving in East Germany in 1950, Eisler was welcomed as a hero, composing the East German national anthem. In his last years, however, Hanns Eisler became an internal exile. Having always clearly divided his work between that for mass audiences and "serious" music, Eisler discovered that his serious side, grounded in the twelve-tone aesthetic inherited from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, was not compatible with the Soviet-controlled East German state. Nevertheless, a hero Eisler remained, and in the wake of his 1962 passing, East Germany instituted through the state-owned label Eterna an ambitious plan to record his complete works, a project that wrapped in about 1975. These recordings were not circulated in the West in the LP era, but in the 1990s Eterna's successor Berlin Classics re-edited the Eisler recordings into CD editions and exported them to the U.S., alas a little too late for Thomson. These packages were not exactly friendly to English speakers and difficult to find; though simpler and requiring the listener to take on far more music at once, Berlin Classics' six-CD box set Hanns Eisler: Instrumentalmusik makes far more sense as a product and as a vehicle for understanding the scope of Eisler's achievements. The disc contents have been recompiled once again in order to maximize the quantity of music to each volume, and the set is configured to two discs of piano music, two discs of chamber music, and two discs of orchestral music. The most immediate disc of the set is the last one, "Orchestermusik II," which contains the suites Eisler compiled from his Weimar-era film music. It contains some of the most innovative film music ever written; sassy, brittle, sarcastic, and brimming with characterization, the suites are squarely in the agitprop tradition favored by Eisler near the start of his association with playwright Bertolt Brecht. Eisler's Orchestral Suite No. 3 contains the suite from the film Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was written by Brecht and promptly banned by the Nazi Party in Germany; while the film may have been a pure piece of communist propaganda, what the listener hears is Eisler's driving, imaginative, continental jazz-inspired score with its moaning saxophones, muted trombone, cackling xylophone, and plucky banjo. Anyone who loves the familiar Driegroschenoper of Kurt Weill cannot fail to find loads of excitement here. In direct comparison, there is a significant difference in that Weill had a natural melodic gift, and by Brecht's standards tended to wander into the realm of the sentimental and nostalgic a bit too often; Eisler's music is all motives, mottos, and rhythm and never sentimental, a reason why Brecht and Eisler's collaboration lasted 27 years, whereas that with Weill lasted only about five to seven years. Much of the chamber music included is likewise based on music Eisler composed for the 41 films he scored, making Eisler by far the Schoenberg student most invested in the film industry. Among these are his charming Septet No. 2, begun as a retrospective accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin's film The Circus (1928), but abandoned as Eisler became a prime target of HUAC; Eisler was the first person in Hollywood assigned to the "blacklist." Also included is his Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain (1941), composed for Joris Ivens' silent film Regen (Rain, 1929) and perhaps the finest of Eisler's non-vocal, serious chamber works. Though cast out of the canonical Second Vienna School in 1926, seeking a way to write twelve-tone music that had qualities of mass appeal was a lifelong pursuit for Hanns Eisler; his serial music is oft
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