A Composer without a Country

AS A POLITICALLY ENGAGED COMPOSER facing the twentieth century's global crises, Hanns Eisler struggled with his sense of home, or lack of it, throughout his life. His childhood move from fairly provincial Leipzig to polyglot, multicultural Vienna, combined with his time in a war hospital in Hungary, gave him a complicated sense of “Heimat” from the outset. Exiled from Nazi Germany for anti-fascist music and from the United States for Communist leanings, and later censured by East German ideologues for failure to toe the Socialist-realist line, he stayed true to a deep Marxist sense of social and aesthetic movement through opposites. He also worked consistently from the Brechtian perspective of critical play with received cultural materials. In his settings of iconic German poetry, he transformed the German Lied genre into a laboratory for musical resistance to rigid nationalist ideology, whether on the right or on the left. By problematizing the very idea of homeland via its own aesthetic cues and tropes, he challenged performers and listeners alike to hear German songfulness as strange, fragile, damaged, and still, sometimes in spite of itself, beautiful.

Eisler's early Galgenlieder, composed while he was in a military hospital at the end of the First World War, already show a dynamic of critical contrast. Odd, fable-like texts by Christian Morgenstern play out in theatrical miniatures with just enough dissonance to throw listeners’ expectations off-kilter. Without explicitly commenting on the horrors of war, Eisler creates a soundworld that echoes past lyricism without the Lieder tradition's usual language about love, loss, forest loneliness, homesickness, and grief. The absurdity of two sexually mismatched bottles hardly seems worthy material for a bourgeois Liederabend; the young Eisler exploited such material to show how far away that world was amid the violence and trauma of the First World War. Already steeped in Marxist thought and surrounded by wounded soldiers, Eisler felt politically and personally removed from the comfortable drawing-room with its family piano, though he had heard his father playing and singing Schubert and Wolf there throughout his childhood years. That music continued to haunt him for the rest of his life.