Hanns Eisler (German pronunciation: [ˈhans ˈaɪslɐ]; 6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was an Austrian and German composer. He is best known for composing the national anthem of East Germany, for his long artistic association with Bertolt Brecht, and for the scores he wrote for films. The Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin is named after him.
Johannes Eisler was born in Leipzig, Saxony, on 6 July 1898 – the third child of Rudolf Eisler and Marie Ida Fischer. His father was a philosophy professor and an atheist of Jewish descent, and his mother was Lutheran of Swabian descent. In 1901, the family moved to Vienna. His older brother Gerhart was a communist journalist, and his older sister Elfriede was a leader of the Communist Party of Germany in the 1920s. After emigrating to North America, she turned into an anti-Stalinist and testified against him and his brother before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
As his family could not afford music lessons nor a piano, Eisler had to teach himself music. At age 14, Eisler joined a socialist youth group.
In 1917, one year after Eisler graduated high school, the 18-year-old Eisler was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army to fight during World War I, where he served as a front-line soldier. He found this time physically demanding, due to his poor health and small stature, and was injured several times in combat.
Returning to Vienna after Austria's defeat, he studied from 1919 to 1923 under Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler was the first of Schoenberg's disciples to compose in the twelve-tone or serial technique.
Eisler married Charlotte Demant in 1920; they separated in 1934. In 1925, he moved to Berlin, which was then a hothouse of experimentation in music, theater, film, art and politics. There he became an active supporter of the Communist Party of Germany and became involved with the November Group. In 1928, he taught at the Marxist Workers' School in Berlin and his son Georg Eisler was born. His music became increasingly oriented towards political themes and, to Schoenberg's dismay, more "popular" in style with influences drawn from jazz and cabaret. At the same time, he became close with Bertolt Brecht, whose own turn towards Marxism happened at about the same time. The collaboration between the two artists lasted for the rest of Brecht's life.
In 1929, Eisler composed the song cycle Zeitungsausschnitte, Op. 11. The work is dedicated to the singer Margot Hinnenberg-Lefebre. Though not written in the twelve-tone technique, it was perhaps the forerunner of a musical art style later known as "News Items" (or perhaps better characterized as "news clippings") – musical compositions that parodied a newspaper's content and style, or that included lyrics lifted directly from newspapers, leaflets, magazines or other written media of the day. The cycle parodies a newspaper's layout and content, with the songs comprising it given titles similar to headlines. Its content reflects Eisler's socialist leanings, with lyrics memorializing the struggles of ordinary Germans subject to post–World War I hardships.
Eisler wrote music for several Brecht plays, including The Decision (Die Maßnahme) (1930), The Mother (1932) and Schweik in the Second World War (1957). They also collaborated on protest songs that celebrated, and contributed to, the political turmoil of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. Their "Solidarity Song" became a popular militant anthem sung in street protests and public meetings throughout Europe, and their "Ballad of Paragraph 218" was the world's first song protesting laws against abortion. Brecht-Eisler songs of this period tended to look at life from "below"—from the perspective of prostitutes, hustlers, the unemployed and the working poor. From 1931 to 1932, he collaborated with Brecht and director Slatan Dudow on the working-class film Kuhle Wampe.
After 1933, Eisler's music and Brecht's poetry were banned by the Nazi Party. Both artists went into exile. While Brecht settled in Svendborg, Denmark, Eisler traveled for a number of years, working in Prague, Vienna, Paris, London, and Moscow, and living briefly in Spain, Mexico, and Denmark. He made two visits to the United States, with speaking tours from coast to coast.
In 1934, Eisler composed music for a song written by Brecht called the "United Front Song". The song was simple to follow to allow workers with limited musical training to be able to sing it.
In 1938, the Eislers emigrated to the United States with a permanent visa. In New York City, he taught composition at The New School for Social Research and wrote 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 trip eastward from Denmark across the Soviet Union and the Pacific Ocean.
In the US, Eisler composed music for various documentary films and for eight Hollywood film scores, two of which – Hangmen Also Die! and None but the Lonely Heart – were nominated for Oscars in 1944 and 1945 respectively. Also working on Hangmen Also Die! was Bertolt Brecht, who wrote the story along with director Fritz Lang. From 1927 to the end of his life, Eisler wrote the music for 40 films, making film music the largest part of his compositions after vocal music for chorus and/or solo voices.
On 1 February 1940, he began work on the "Research Program on the Relation between Music and Films" funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which he got with the help of film director Joseph Losey and The New School. This work resulted in the book Composing for the Films which was published in 1947, with Theodor W. Adorno as co-author.
In several chamber and choral compositions of this period, Eisler returned to the twelve-tone method he had abandoned in Berlin. His Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain, composed for Arnold Schoenberg's 70th birthday celebration, is considered a masterpiece of the genre.
Eisler's works of the 1930s and 1940s included Deutsche Sinfonie, a choral symphony in 11 movements based on poems by Brecht and Ignazio Silone, and a cycle of art songs published as the Hollywood Songbook. With lyrics by Brecht, Eduard Mörike, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Goethe, it established Eisler's reputation as one of the 20th century's great composers of German lieder.
Eisler's promising career in the U.S. was interrupted by the Cold War. He was one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the film studio bosses. In two interrogations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the composer was accused of being "the Karl Marx of music" and the chief Soviet agent in Hollywood. Among his accusers was his sister Ruth Fischer, who also testified before the Committee that her other brother, Gerhart, was a Communist agent.
Eisler's supporters—including his friend Charlie Chaplin and the composers Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—organized benefit concerts to raise money for his defense fund, but to no avail. Eisler was deported early in 1948. His deportation disrupted a number of collaborations, such as composing a new film score for Chaplin's 1928 The Circus, the last Tramp movie, which Chaplin had requested. Eisler turned the score in the 1950s into concert music, which would be performed. Folksinger Woody Guthrie protested the composer's deportation in his lyrics for "Eisler on the Go"—recorded 50 years later by Billy Bragg and Wilco in the 1998 album Mermaid Avenue. In the song, an introspective Guthrie asked himself what he would do if called 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 26 March 1948, Eisler and his wife Lou departed from LaGuardia Airport and flew to Prague. Before he left, he read the following statement: