Introduction

Hanns Eisler and the German Lied

SINGING THE ART SONGS of Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), best known for his politically engaged collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, requires a deft dynamic of lyrical sway and critical distance. The German term “Kunstlied” is actually more useful here, to distinguish these songs from Eisler's settings of Brecht's ballads and other popular song forms. For all his percussive, forward-driven music, Eisler grew up surrounded by the nineteenth-century soundworld of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, and this early saturation is as evident in his songs as is his study of twelvetone music under Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler was also well aware of the Lied's potential for sentimental and even narcotic effect. Though he critiqued the musical manipulations of capitalist advertising, bourgeois culture comfort, and fascist appropriation, he often made self-conscious use of lush harmonies and catchy tunes, as well as recognizable tropes such as nineteenth-century “hunting-horn” thirds and Baroque bass lines. Eisler's work with Brecht helped him to develop techniques of musical estrangement, through which musicians and listeners are meant to feel the pull of musical charisma, which accompanies disturbing text or breaks off and exposes itself as fragile, easily appropriated artifice. Often what occurs in performance, however, is more surrender to the music's sonorities than close attention to its interruptions, contradictions, and parodic elements. This tension between beauty and argument, in which beauty is intended to work as argument against its own misuse, reveals the difficult position of a modernist composer committed to Socialist values, as well as his struggle with ideological pressures imposed on him from outside. Exiled from Nazi Germany for his anti-fascist stance, deported from the United States as an “un-American” composer, and criticized by East German cultural authorities for formal experimentation, Eisler found himself at a thorny nexus of art and politics throughout his life. That he integrated both in songs that invoke the very soundworld they distrust, however successfully this dynamic works in practice, makes Eisler's Lieder well worth study as an embodiment of politically fraught art in the twentieth century.