From early childhood, Hans Eisler immersed himself in music. However, it would not be until 1918—after he spent two years of World War I in a Hungarian regiment—that he had any formal lessons in composition. After his discharge from the army, Eisler studied composition with Karl Weigl at the New Vienna Conservatory and supported himself with proofreading work at the Universal Editions publishing house. During his first few months as a civilian Eisler composed prolifically, producing dozens of songs, most of them romantic in nature. Eisler's formative musical education began in the late summer of 1919, when he was accepted for private instruction by Arnold Schoenberg. Rather than instruction in the creation of atonal or serial music, Eisler's study with Schoenberg focused on exercises in eighteenth-century counterpoint and harmonic analyses of the music of Johannes Brahms. But Eisler breathed deeply the modernist air of Schoenberg and his circle. He was given a low-level administrative job with the prestigious Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performance) that Schoenberg had founded in 1918, and he frequently accompanied his teacher on music-related trips outside Vienna. Almost by definition, the Schoenbergian aesthetic was elitist; to actually hear relationships between one form or another of a twelve-tone series demanded phenomenal listening skills, but simply to appreciate why some composers might find it necessary to create music in the serial vein required an understanding of the long history of nineteenth-century European art music and its connection with economically fueled societal issues. That Eisler was anti-elitist at heart is evidenced by his involvement, while still in Vienna, with various 'workers' singing societies. After moving to Berlin, where his brother and sister had for several years been active communists, Eisler became a zealot. In 1926 he applied for membership in the German Communist party. And he threw himself into the creation of anthems, marching songs, and pieces for unaccompanied men's chorus that were not just overtly supportive of the proletariat in their texts but also self-consciously 'accessible' in their musical content. Not surprisingly, this led to a break with Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who moved to Berlin in January 1926 to teach at the Prussian Academy of Arts, accused Eisler of being disloyal. Eisler in turn accused Schoenberg of being esoteric and, more damningly, bourgeois. In a bitterly rejective letter to his once-revered teacher, Eisler wrote: "Modern music bores me, it doesn't interest me, some of it I even hate and despise. Actually, I want nothing to do with what is 'modern.'...Also, I understand nothing (except superficialities) of twelve-note technique and twelve-note music." Eisler, of course, understood a great deal about twelve-note music, and despite his bravado he was not about to abandon either his serial skills or his awareness of the melodic/harmonic possibilities that the serial method afforded. During Hitler’s rise to power, Eisler’s travels took him to Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, Strasbourg, Moscow, New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Madrid. Even under the duress of traveling almost constantly and without a passport, Eisler managed to compose. His output from these years includes film scores and, as one might expect, music overtly supportive of the proletariat cause. Even in his scores for these commercial Hollywood films Eisler occasionally used serial techniques. Regardless of its genre, the music from Eisler's years of exile often demonstrates what German critic Martin Hufner in 1998 described as "serialism with a human face." Eisler left the United States in March 1948 and traveled to London, Vienna, and Prague before settling in East Berlin. Upon arriving in East Berlin one of his first compositional activities was the setting to music of Brecht's poem "Auferstanden aus Ruinen," and the result was promptly selected as the national anthem for the newly established German Democratic Republic.

 

—James Wierzbicki

 

Begun in early 1961 and completed in August 1962, the cycle for baritone solo and string orchestra Ernste Gesaenge (Serious Songs) was Eilser’s last, as he died less than a month after its completion. Talking to Hans Bunge on August 14, 1962, Eisler reported: “Arranging the songs took me the most trouble. It took me a year to put seven little pieces into shape.” Asked for the meaning of this shape, he said: “It is consciousness—reflection—depression—revivaland again consciousness...It just must be done that way, otherwise it is not good. One cannot always write optimistic songs...one must describe the up and down of the actual situations, sing about it and comment on it.” For this purpose Eisler used Hoelderlin fragments which he had already set (“Asyl” (refuge) 1939; “An die Hoffnung” (to hope) 1943), and a text by Bertolt Viertel, written in 1936 to mark the years of Hitler’s dictatorship and already set to music as “Chanson allemande” in 1953. Now included in the cycle, “Traurigkeit” (sadness) received a new meaning. Eisler noted: “now each may seek out the anniversaries that make him sad.” The third song “Verzweiflung” (despair), to an old text by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, set for singing voice and piano by Eisler in 1953 as “Faustus Verzweiflung” (Faust’s despair), also received a new status in the cycle: “I need the deep starting-point to jump high”—or to raise hopes. The title of the fifth song, “XX.Parteitag”, was chosen by Eisler himself. Taking a few lines from a poem by Helmut Richter, he had headed them: “I believe it to be the honesty of the artist to name these things that have been so hard to live through.” Sadness and the hope of future happiness permeate the whole work. Autumn is a multiple metaphor: we look back at the past and forward to the future both in the entirely personal sphere and in the overall context of life in society. 

 

One day after completing the work he told Hans Bunge about his “modest music”:

 

—Guenter Mayer, translated by Janet and Michael Berridge