Eisler: Deutsche Sinfonie

German composer Hanns Eisler was sometimes dismissed by his critics as a "miniaturist"--a gifted composer of songs, film scores, stage music and tightly-structured chamber pieces who was incapable of larger-scale orchestral works. This assessment was partly the result of Eisler's theory of "applied music"--music should "climb down from its lofty heights" and take part in life's struggles. For Eisler, that meant music with a message. Before World War II, Eisler was one of the first serious composers to experiment with the new technologies of radio, sound film and recording, but he was best known for his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht in the radical musical theater that flourished in Berlin during the last crisis years of the Weimar Republic. Both content and form dictated Eisler's style, which tended to produce concentrated bursts of meaning through carefully constructed forms.

Then the Nazis came to power, and Brecht and Eisler fled for their lives. The "German Symphony" dates from this period, and shows that Eisler could indeed write for large musical forces. The symphony's 11 movements may perhaps be better described as an extended oratorio than an integrated choral symphony, but still, the effect is impressive, and the opening Praeludium is one of the finest cultural legacies of Eisler's "lost generation" during the years of exile from Nazi-dominated Europe. It is a powerful cry of protest, partly to words by Brecht, against the evil that raged through their German homeland.

Last year was the Centenary for composer Hanns Eisler(1898-1998),and this work was given its United States premiere in New York under the baton of Leon Botstein. Eisler emerged from the Berlin avant-garde, a student of Arnold Schoenberg, yet a Marxist one who believed in the vigours of modernity yet tempered to a political reality,unlike Schoenberg who mindlessly scoffed at political engagement. Eisler devoted his creativity toward the resolution of the problematics of politically useful art. So he organized and wrote for Worker Choirs in Berlin,also writing hundreds of songs(lieder). This "Symphonie" is actually a cantata,with a text by Bertold Brecht. It is a dark work with Eisler's harmonic penchant for what he developed as a meeting ground between high and low art. An atonality that is straightforward melodically with a lyricism that provides a context for message projection. The richness of this work is in the exploitation of the genre,of song placed in the symphonic context,yet never really arching into symphonic shape. Eisler knew consummately the vocal contrapuntal achievements of Johann Sebastian Bach and Handel,and you feel this here in the seemless flow of alternating moments of solo,chorus and orchestra. There are orchestral interludes to inhance the contextual richness,even a movement entitled "concentration camp" written long before that became a reality in Germany.

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) is probably best-known for his communist politics, and as a composer, best-known for his lieder, many of them settings of poems by Bertolt Brecht. This 64-minute "Deutsche Symphonie op. 50" is his longest work, and it too features Brecht's incomparable poetry as well as Eisler's uniquely populist 12-tone music.

Eisler was from Vienna, and studied with Schoenberg after serving in the Great War, during the period when Schoenberg developed 12-tone music. Eisler remained committed to the form throughout his life, but adapted it to music that was aimed at a mass audience of workers. Eisler broke with Schoenberg and became actively involved with the German DKP (Communist Party) in Berlin during the Weimar Republic years when the Left battled the Nazis as they grew in strength. Eisler fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. He began the "Deutsche Symphonie" in 1935, originally centered on two Brecht poems: "To the fighters in the concentration camps" and "Burial of the trouble-maker in a zinc coffin." It was originally sub-titled "The Concentration Camp Symphony." The vocal parts were finished by 1937, but Eisler continued to add parts and change the structure. Two instrumental movements were added, including the the 11-minute "Allegro for orchestra" that follows the climactic "Arbeiterkantate (Song of the class enemy)," and so it was not finally completed until 1957, and first performed in 1959 in the DDR (East Germany), where Eisler settled after being run out of America in 1947 by McCarthy's witch-hunt.

The "Deutsche Sinfonie" is a great and powerful work, but one clearly of another time. It takes multiple listenings to enter the world of its creators, the apocalyptic world of fascism and the militant fight against it. When Eisler began composing the work he was in exile, tirelessly agitating against the Nazi regime. His music had been rooted among the workers, and he utilized popular forms. This of course no longer comes across at all, especially in this epic work. (It is interesting to speculate as to whether Eisler would have turned to the use of rock music as a vehicle for his political music had he lived on into the rock era... ) There is a tension in Eisler's music and his life between his lofty intellectual ambition and his fierce ethical commitment to social justice. But the "Deutsche Sinfonie" has power, and it culminates in the "Song of the class enemy," a 15-minute movement with a fierce, moving libretto by Brecht and a stunning melodic score by Eisler.

This is an absolutely brilliant performance, unlike the first one I heard. That disc was recorded for Decca in 1995 in Leipzig by a former-DDR orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, with Lothar Zagrosek conducting, and the Ernst Senff Chor of Berlin, led by Sigurd Brauns. It is difficult to identify exactly what it is that goes wrong -- the 65-minute timing is very similar to that of this Berlin Classics performance by the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin led by Max Pommer, and the Rundfunk Chor, recorded in the Schauspielhaus in October, 1987. (The Berlin Classics label is a treasure-trove of the music of the DDR.) But it seems as though Zagrosek and his forces are trying too hard, and the result is that it sounds affected and distorted. This earlier recording, from the DDR before the Wall fell, sounds more classical, more restrained, and in this case less is more. The playing also sounds more precise, and the singing is more natural, more like a workers' choir instead of an operatic choir.

All in all I would strongly recommend this Berlin Classics recording. It is one of those cases where you might not realize you were listening to one of the great works of the 20th century if you heard the wrong recording. There is one crucial advantage to the Decca disc, though -- it includes the libretto in English. The power of the work is lost without Brecht's great poetry, and this Berlin Classics disc has only German. So if you take my advice and buy this disc, you are going to need to find the libretto somewhere!

For more Eisler, or as an alternative introduction, I strongly recommend Heiner Goebbels's assembly of his music called Eislermaterial (see my review), which contains several of the songs he wrote based on Brecht's poems, as well as several instrumental works, all woven together.