Orff and Eisler, half II, 2023

This Week in Classical Music: July 17, 2023.  Hanns Eisler and Carl Orff, Half II.  We’ll proceed with the story of the lives of two German composers, each gifted, born at in regards to the similar time, however whose lives took very completely different turns throughout the Nazi period.  Carl Orff grew to become one of many Nazi institution’s favourite composers; his Carmina Burana (1937) and Catulli Carmina (completed in 1943) had been carried out throughout Germany.  Hanns Eisler, alternatively, had it a lot more durable.  In 1933 his music was banned (as had been the works of his pal Bertolt Brecht).  Each emigrated the identical yr; Brecht settled in Denmark, whereas Eisler grew to become peripatetic: he went to the US on a speech tour, then Vienna, France, Moscow, Mexico and Denmark.  In a few of these locations he labored on movie scores; whereas in Denmark he collaborated with Brecht, writing music for considered one of his performs.   He visited Spain throughout the Civil Battle the place he went to the entrance strains.  Throughout considered one of his subsequent visits to the US he taught composition on the New College for Social Analysis in New York.  In 1940 he obtained a grant from the Rockefeller Basis and moved to New York, and two years later to southern California the place there was already a big German émigré neighborhood.  Brecht moved there too (in 1941), and once more Eisler joined him in writing music to Galileo and different performs.  He additionally collaborated with the thinker and musicologist Theodor Adorno, one of many many German emigres residing in “Weimar on the Pacific,” on a e book about music in movies.  And Eisler wasn’t simply writing, he was additionally composing music for movies, and plenty of of them, thus making an honest residing.

All of it got here to an finish when Eisler, Brecht, and a number of other different Hollywood personalities had been introduced earlier than the Congress’ Committee on Un-American Actions.  He was accused, amongst different issues, of being a brother of a “communist spy” Gerhart Eisler, and was labeled “the Karl Marx of music” (his brother Gerhart very probably was a spy as for a few years he labored for the Comintern as a liaison – not that this someway excuses the actions of the HUAC).  Eisler’s case grew to become a global trigger célèbre, and plenty of artists got here to his protection, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse amongst them.  Eisler was expelled from the US in 1948.  He returned to Vienna however quickly after moved to East Berlin, then the capital of the German Democratic Republic.  There he wrote a track which grew to become the nationwide anthem of the GDR.  He grew to become a professor on the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and a member of the Academy of Arts.  And whereas he was feted and residing in a “employees’ paradise” constant along with his doctrinaire political opinions, the fact of GDR wasn’t simple even for him.  In 1953 he determined to put in writing an opera about Faustus, however the libretto was criticized as “formalistic” – that was Eisler’s final try to put in writing an opera.  One large constructive was that his good pal Brecht was additionally residing in Berlin, they usually continued to collaborate on lots of his performs (Eisler’s brother Gerhart was additionally there: he escaped the US in 1948, moved to East Germany, and have become a senior government within the governing Socialist Unity Get together).  However in 1956 Brecht died and that scarred Eisler for the remainder of his life.  He continued to compose, principally songs but in addition what he known as Angewandte Musik (utilized music)” music for movie and performs.  Eisler died in East Berlin in 1962.

We’ll end our story and hearken to some music by Orff and Eisner subsequent week.