Hanns Eisler was born on July 6, 1898, and died on September 6, 1962. He was a composer from Germany and Austria. He is most famous for writing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long working relationship with the writer Bertolt Brecht, and for creating the music for many films. A music school in Berlin called the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin is named after him.

Family background

Johannes Eisler was born in Leipzig, Saxony, as the third child of Rudolf Eisler, a philosophy professor, and Marie Ida Fischer. His father was an atheist of Jewish heritage, and his mother was Lutheran and from Swabia. In 1901, the family relocated to Vienna. His older brother, Gerhart, worked as a Communist journalist, and his older sister, Elfriede, became a leader in the Communist Party of Germany during the 1920s. After moving to North America, Elfriede opposed Stalin and gave evidence against him and her brother before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Early years

Eisler could not afford music lessons or a piano, so he taught himself music. At age 14, he joined a socialist youth group.

In 1917, one year after finishing high school, the 18-year-old Eisler was sent to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. He worked as a soldier on the front lines. He found this experience very difficult because of his poor health and small size, and he was hurt several times during battles.

After Austria lost the war, Eisler returned to Vienna. From 1919 to 1923, he studied music under Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler was the first of Schoenberg’s students to use a specific musical method called the twelve-tone or serial technique.

In 1920, Eisler married Charlotte Demant, but they separated in 1934. In 1925, he moved to Berlin, a city known for its creative work in music, theater, film, art, and politics. There, he supported the Communist Party of Germany and joined the November Group. In 1928, he taught at the Marxist Workers’ School in Berlin, and his son, Georg Eisler, was born. His music began to focus more on political themes and became more "popular" in style, influenced by jazz and cabaret. At the same time, he became close friends with Bertolt Brecht, who also became interested in Marxism around the same time. Their artistic partnership continued for the rest of Brecht’s life.

In 1929, Eisler composed a song cycle called Zeitungsausschnitte, Op. 11. The work was dedicated to the singer Margot Hinnenberg-Lefebre. Though not using the twelve-tone technique, the cycle was an early example of a musical style later called "News Items." This style used newspaper content and headlines as inspiration, and the songs included lyrics taken directly from newspapers, magazines, and other written materials of the time. The cycle imitated the layout and style of a newspaper, with song titles resembling headlines. Its content reflected Eisler’s support for socialism, describing the struggles of ordinary Germans during difficult times after World War I.

Eisler wrote music for several plays by Brecht, including The Decision (1930), The Mother (1932), and Schweik in the Second World War (1957). He also worked with Brecht on protest songs that highlighted the political challenges of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. Their song Solidarity Song became a popular anthem for protests across Europe, and their song Ballad of Paragraph 218 was the first song to protest laws that banned abortion. Songs from this period often focused on the lives of people from the lower classes, such as prostitutes, the unemployed, and the working poor. From 1931 to 1932, Eisler collaborated with Brecht and director Slatan Dudow on the film Kuhle Wampe, which told the story of working-class people.

Exile

After 1933, Eisler's music and Brecht's poetry were forbidden by the Nazi Party. Both artists left Germany and went into exile. Brecht moved to Svendborg, Denmark, while Eisler traveled for many years, working in Prague, Vienna, Paris, London, and Moscow. He also lived briefly in Spain, Mexico, and Denmark. Eisler visited the United States twice, giving speaking tours from one end of the country to the other.

In 1934, Eisler wrote the music for a song called the "United Front Song," which Brecht wrote. The song was easy to follow so that workers with little musical training could sing it.

In 1938, Eisler moved to the United States with a permanent visa. In New York City, he taught composition at The New School for Social Research and created experimental chamber and documentary music. In 1942, he moved to Los Angeles, where he joined Brecht, who had arrived in California in 1941 after a long journey from Denmark through the Soviet Union and across the Pacific Ocean.

In the United States, Eisler wrote music for several documentary films and for eight Hollywood films. Two of these films, Hangmen Also Die! and None but the Lonely Heart, were nominated for Oscars in 1944 and 1945, respectively. Bertolt Brecht helped write the story for Hangmen Also Die! along with director Fritz Lang. From 1927 until his death, Eisler composed music for 40 films, making film music the largest part of his work after vocal music for choirs and solo singers.

On February 1, 1940, Eisler started a research project called "The Research Program on the Relation between Music and Films," funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He received the grant with help from film director Joseph Losey and The New School. This work led to the publication of the book Composing for the Films in 1947, co-written with Theodor W. Adorno.

During this time, Eisler used the twelve-tone method in some chamber and choral compositions, which he had stopped using in Berlin. His piece Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain, written for Arnold Schoenberg's 70th birthday celebration, is considered a masterpiece of its type.

Eisler's works from the 1930s and 1940s included Deutsche Sinfonie, a choral symphony in 11 movements based on poems by Brecht and Ignazio Silone, and a collection of art songs called the Hollywood Songbook. These songs, with lyrics by Brecht, Eduard Mörike, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe, helped establish Eisler as one of the greatest composers of German lieder in the 20th century.

HUAC investigation

Eisler's successful career in the U.S. was stopped by the Cold War. He was one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by film studio leaders. During two questioning sessions by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the composer was accused of being "the Karl Marx of music" and the main Soviet agent in Hollywood. One of his accusers was his sister Ruth Fischer, who also told the Committee that her other brother, Gerhart, was a Communist agent.

Eisler's supporters—including his friend Charlie Chaplin and composers Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein—held benefit concerts to raise money for his defense, but this did not help. Eisler was sent away from the U.S. in early 1948. His removal caused some projects to stop, such as creating a new film score for Chaplin's 1928 movie The Circus, the last Tramp film, which Chaplin had asked Eisler to work on. Later in the 1950s, Eisler turned the score into concert music, which was performed. Folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote about Eisler's deportation in his song "Eisler on the Go," which was recorded in 1998 by Billy Bragg and Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue. In the song, Guthrie wondered what he would do if asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities: "I don't know what I'll do / I don't know what I'll do / Eisler's on the come and go / and I don't know what I'll do."

On March 26, 1948, Eisler and his wife, Lou, left LaGuardia Airport and flew to Prague. Before leaving, he read the following statement:

In East Germany

Eisler returned to Austria and later moved to East Berlin. In East Germany, he wrote the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic. He also composed a series of cabaret-style songs based on humorous poems by Kurt Tucholsky and created background music for plays, movies, television shows, and political events.

His most important project during this time was an opera called Johannes Faustus, inspired by the story of Faust. Eisler wrote the libretto, which was published in the autumn of 1952. The story portrayed Faust as a man who hesitated and betrayed the working class by not joining the German Peasants' War. In May 1953, a major article in Neues Deutschland, a newspaper linked to East Germany’s ruling party, criticized Eisler’s work. The article claimed that the portrayal of Faust as a traitor was disrespectful to German national pride and accused the opera of changing a famous work by German poet Goethe in an unapproved way. Discussions about the opera took place in three meetings called "Mittwochsgesellschaft" (Wednesday Club), held by a group of intellectuals at the Berlin Academy of Arts, starting on May 13, 1953. The final meeting occurred on June 10, 1953.

A week later, the East German uprising of 1953 shifted public attention away from these debates. Eisler became deeply depressed and did not complete the music for the opera. In his final work, Ernste Gesänge ("Serious Songs"), written between spring 1961 and August 1962, Eisler tried to deal with his sadness. He referenced the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which ended the worship of Stalin, as a sign of hope for a future where people could live without fear. Though he continued to compose music and teach at an East Berlin conservatory, Eisler grew increasingly distant from East Germany’s cultural leaders in his final years. During this time, he became friends with musician Wolf Biermann and supported his career. However, in 1976, Biermann was stripped of his East German citizenship while on a concert tour in West Germany.

Eisler worked with Brecht until Brecht’s death in 1956. Eisler never fully recovered from the loss of his friend, and his later years were marked by depression and poor health.

Illness and death

On September 6, 1962, he died from a heart attack in East Berlin at the age of 64. He is buried near Brecht in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery. After his first heart attack, he was unable to move around for three months. He smoked heavily since childhood, sometimes smoking up to 100 cigarettes each day. Later in life, he became a heavy drinker and developed alcoholism. He did not get enough sleep and had a poor diet. These issues led to long-term tiredness and not getting enough nutrients.

Compositions

• 1918: Gesang des Abgeschiedenen ("Die Mausefalle") (based on the work of Christian Morgenstern); "Wenn es nur einmal so ganz still wäre" (based on the work of Rainer Maria Rilke)
• 1919: Drei Lieder (Li-Tai-Po, Klabund); "Sehr leises Gehn im lauen Wind"
• 1922: Allegro moderato and Waltzes; Allegretto and Andante for Piano
• 1923: Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 1
• 1923: Divertimento; Four Piano Pieces
• 1923: Divertimento for wind quintet, Op. 4
• 1924: Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 6
• 1925: Eight Piano Pieces
• 1926: Tagebuch des Hanns Eisler (Diary of Hanns Eisler); 11 Zeitungsausschnitte; Ten Lieder; Three Songs for Men's Chorus (based on the work of Heinrich Heine)
• 1928: "Drum sag der SPD ade"; "Lied der roten Matrosen" ("Song of the Red Sailors," with Erich Weinert); Pantomime (with Béla Balázs); "Kumpellied"; "Red Sailors' Song"; "Couplet vom Zeitfreiwilligen"; "Newspaper's Son"; "Auch ein Schumacher" (based on the work of various poets); "Was möchst du nicht" (from Des Knaben Wunderhorn); "Wir sind das rote Sprachrohr"
• Between 1929 and 1931: "Solidaritätslied"
• 1929: Tempo der Zeit (Tempo of Time) for chorus and small orchestra, Op. 16; Six Lieder (based on the work of Weinert, Weber, Jahnke, and Vallentin); "Lied der Werktätigen" ("Song of the Working People," with Stephan Hermlin)
• 1930: Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken, Lehrstück, text by Bertolt Brecht), Op. 20; Six Ballads (based on the work of Weber, Brecht, and Walter Mehring); Four Ballads (based on the work of B. Traven, Kurt Tucholsky, Wiesner-Gmeyner, and Arendt); Suite No. 1, Op. 23
• 1931: Incidental music for Die Mutter (The Mother) by Bertolt Brecht (based on the work of Maxim Gorky), for small theatre orchestra
• 1931: "Lied der roten Flieger" (based on the work of Semyon Kirsanov); Four Songs (based on the work of Frank, Weinert) from the film Niemandsland; film music for Kuhle Wampe (texts by Brecht) with the famous "Ballad of the Pirates," "Song of Mariken," Four Ballads (with Bertolt Brecht); Suite No. 2, Op. 24 ("Niemandsland"); Three Songs after Erich Weinert; "Das Lied vom vierten Mann" ("The Song of the Fourth Man"); "Streiklied" ("Strike Song"); Suite No. 3, Op. 26 ("Kuhle Wampe")
• 1932: Kleine Sinfonie, Op. 29
• 1932: "Ballad of the Women and the Soldiers" (with Brecht); Seven Piano Pieces; Suite No. 4, Music for the Russian film Pesn' o geroyakh (Song of Heroes) by Joris Ivens with "Song from the Urals" (based on the work of Sergei Tretyakov); reissued as instrumental piece Op. 30 ("Die Jugend hat das Wort")
• 1934: "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitslied" ("Unity Song"); "Einheitsli