Hans Eisler’s music has never really caught on – at least in the UK or USA – yet every schoolchild in the former East Germany must have been familiar with it – he composed the National Anthem of the DDR.
Eisler’s near-contemporary, Kurt Weill (who was two years younger), referred to him as a ‘dried-up herring’, and the general effect of their music, despite the similarity of much of the subject matter in their choice of texts is of opposites – Weill open, tuneful, urgent; contrast Eisler, and one finds him withdrawn, obscure and indeterminate. Only now that we are beginning to hear more of his songs is a slightly different picture emerging, that of someone who developed slowly and succeeded against the odds in carving out a personal sound.
The songs surveyed in this recital cover a period from 1917 until the early 1940s. We can hear Eisler as he is submerged in the musical ethics of his teacher Schoenberg, and then listen to him groping his way out of that dead end towards something quite subtle. Susanne Fontaine points out the influence of Wolf in Eisler’s early Galgenlieder from 1917. These ‘Gallows songs’ to poems by Christian Morgenstern are indeed more lyrical, with plenty of playful commentaries from the piano part. The third song, ‘Die Trichter’ is an early example of concrete poetry, its description of two steam funnels set out on the page in a decreasing triangular shape to suggest the shape of the engine’s chimney. Dietrich Henschel, one of the graduates from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Berlin masterclasses, does honour to his namesake. These songs have a bite to them that could invite a too-knowing expressionist leer. Henschel avoids this but gives them a straightforward yet dramatic performance. Two other early songs, a plea from a girl to her pet dog to keep silent when her lover arrives (‘Bitte an den Hund’) and a nostalgic description of the night sky (‘Rondel’) both suggest the young Eisler struggling to find his individual voice.
Once he took the Schoenberg path, the Fruhe Lieder and Sechs Lieder from the early 1920s, with texts by several poets, strangely have less assurance than his earlier songs. With Zeitungsausschnitte, ten miniature songs, the shortest lasting 32 seconds, the longest only just over two minutes, Eisler seems to have grasped his own sound. The texts are his own adaptations of newspaper clippings, jagged images of urban violence, words from the personal columns, accounts of funerals, readers’ letters. Some of the songs peter out before they have begun, leaving the voice in mid-song, but this must have been a leap forward for Eisler. Michaela Kaune suggests the shifting moods with firm tone.
In his recital of the songs Eisler composed in America, entitled ‘The Hollywood Songbook’ (Decca, 1/99), Matthias Goerne included both the Anakreontische Fragmente, to poems by Morike, and the Holderlin-Fragmente. These cycles were said to have alarmed Eisler’s colleague, Brecht, the poet he set most often. Perhaps the combination of pessimism and lyricism suggested something too bourgeois to Brecht, the eternal revolutionary student. Henschel’s singing is somewhat more operatic in these cycles than Goerne’s extraordinarily intimate, conversational approach.
In sum, this is a satisfying programme of mostly little-known songs by a composer who is likely to be heard quite a lot more in the next century than he was in his own.'