An Icon in Exile

GOETHE's POETRY HAS long been associated with the German Kunstlied tradition. Schubert's songs such as “An den Mond” (To the Moon), “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) from Faust I, and the iconic “Erlkönig” (Erlking) continue to serve as song-recital staples. During the founding years of the German Democratic Republic, reclaiming the legacies of Goethe, Bach, Schubert, and other cultural icons became an important and sometimes controversial project. As Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell have noted in their 2015 study Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic, the East German “narrative of liberation” paradoxically drew on “deep continuities with the German past, both in terms of personnel and inherited cultural baggage.” Following the Soviet pattern of taking up past “Kulturgut” to speak to the future, the GDR developed a doctrine of “Erbeaneignung” (appropriation of heritage), first bringing the working class into contact with older bourgeois aesthetic material and then transforming it “into the narration of past, present, and future class struggles.” Cults of personality—the struggling, forward-thinking Beethoven or the measured, hardworking Goethe—developed around past figures who could be construed as proto-Socialist. A suspicion of Romanticism, with its longing for the past in more irrational, familial, and even proto-fascist terms, led GDR critics and musicologists to favor icons like Bach and Brahms over Schubert and Schumann, whose Lieder were perceived as too bourgeois and too personal to voice collective solidarity. In his settings of Goethe in the early years of the new “anti-fascist” state, Hanns Eisler walked a fine line: valorizing the great poet according to Party ideals, and at the same time transforming Lieder into larger-scale, more Socialistically acceptable forms. In this chapter I detour from the conventionally bound nineteenth-century genre to show Eisler's broader treatment of vocal music in the 1950s, though his Goethe settings certainly lean on the Lieder tradition as much as they do on Baroque forms and twentieth-century film scores. Because Eisler's unwritten Faustus opera of this period is also linked inevitably to Goethe, and because it lies, however silently, at the core of Eisler's conflicted relationship to the East German state, I treat it in some detail at the end of this chapter as well.