Disillusionment in Many Voices

IN HIS 2016 NOVEL about Shostakovich, The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes writes: “When the threats against him had first begun, he told friends: ‘Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with my pen in my mouth.’” For all this noble intention romanticized in contemporary fiction, Shostakovich found himself in a near-impossible tugof- war with Soviet authorities, from his first denunciation in 1936 and his second in 1948 to his joining the Communist Party in 1960. In Cold War East Germany, Hanns Eisler faced less violent threats but remained under suspicion for his musical and political elusiveness. Even as the post- Zhdanov thaw occurred in the Soviet Union, allowing Shostakovich's once-banned violin concerto to be performed in 1955 (also following the death of Stalin in 1953), Eisler's fall from favor in the GDR haunted him until the end of his life in 1962. He became a target of surveillance in the Stasi's early years, with reports on his drunkenness (the episode in West Berlin, in which he had not had enough money for cab fare) and his own housekeeper's notes on his travel plans and whether or not his bed had been used. Back in Berlin after a time of reckoning in Vienna, following the violently crushed workers’ protests of 1953 and his own humiliation at the Akademie der Künste, Eisler found himself on difficult personal ground as well. He and his wife Lou separated in 1953. Though he later formed a fruitful partnership with the pianist Steffy Wolfs, he continued to struggle with depression and alcoholism. During this decade Eisler also continued to compose, in collaboration with Brecht and Johannes Becher. His 1955 film score for Alain Resnais's controversial Holocaust documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog or Nacht und Nebel, with the German translation by poet Paul Celan) was borrowed from his own earlier music under pressure of a deadline but won the Jean Vigo Prize for film music. In 1956 Eisler set texts by Kurt Tucholsky, a satirist in the Heinrich Heine vein who had been active in the Weimar Republic and committed suicide in Swedish exile in 1935. Like many of Eisler's projects in the 1950s, these settings expose discrepancies between utopian ideology and reality; they are parodic but employ more simple caricature than the grotesquerie of his early Kunstlieder and Heine choruses.