Caricature of Eisler from an interview in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Moscow, in 1935.

Life of a revolutionary in music
Hanns Eisler lifeline: 1898-1962
BBC Composer of the Month
Interview with Wolf Biermann
Jascha Horenstein remembers Eisler
Eisler in the McCarthy Era

Hanns Eisler on the meaning of music
"Someone who knows only music, understands nothing about it."

Some composers may have tried to escape the upheavals of their century through the illusion of "pure music," but not Hanns Eisler. His lifelong conviction was that music should not be subjective but objective, not obscure but transparent, not metaphysical but grounded in history. Eisler's art held up a mirror to the revolutionary hopes and bitter disappontments of his generation—a generation that witnessed two world wars, the rise and fall of empires, an age of revolutions.

"A composer knows," Eisler wrote on the eve of his expulsion from the United States, "that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it."

On these pages you can follow Eisler's:

early years as a World War I veteran and Arnold Schönberg protégé in Vienna.

break with Schönberg in the mid-1920s and conversion to a communicative style of music engaged in great social and political questions.

close personal and professional relationship with Bertolt Brecht.

exile from Nazi Germany and ten-year sojourn in New York and Hollywood.

deportation from the United States during the hunt for "Reds" in the entertainment and music industries.

return to Berlin to again join forces with Brecht and continue the search for a communicative style during a period of social and political upheaval.

Here you will meet the varied and sometimes contradictory faces of Hanns Eisler:

the composer of aggressive political music whose later art songs reveal "an almost Schubert-like tenderness."

Schönberg's "heretical pupil" who never abandoned hope for a modified twelve-tone idiom that could reach a mass audience.

the Hollywood composer who described some of his own work as "cheap" but whose film scores earned two Oscar nominations.

the composer of East Germany's national anthem who fought the government's censorship of jazz and atonal music.

"Eisler was an optimistic fighter, yet bound up with his optimism and his struggle were despair and suffering, but without pathos—which he hated," says contemporary German composer Heiner Goebbels. "He was among the most brilliant polemicists of his day because he stood up to his contradictions by boldly seizing them and forcing them to collide and encourage a creative dynamic. He was a great dialectician. We can learn a lot from him. If I met him today, I would remain silent at first just to listen to him."

Apart from our biographical resources on this page, we invite you to visit our Music and Ideas page where you take a virtual tour with audio samples of Eisler's theater, chamber, vocal and symphonic works.

Written by Andy Lang.

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