Hanns Eisler was a remarkable composer of Lieder, at times a great one, and this pair of CDs offers an absorbing survey of the songs he wrote in two lyrical outpourings, in the immediate aftermath of his exile from Nazi Germany in 1937 and, a few years later, during the relative stability of his early years in Hollywood. They are mostly brief (counting individual numbers from short cycles and cantatas there are 83 songs here) but very few are short-breathed or merely epigrammatic: listening to Auf der Flucht, as a quite characteristic example, it is hard to believe that so much eloquence and invention has been packed into as short a space as 1'13''.
Eisler’s songs are very responsive to their texts, many of them by his close friend Bertolt Brecht, but they have the true song-composer’s knack of at the same time not being merely submissive to the words. Eisler’s lyrical gift was sharpened by exile: again and again he obliquely or directly refers to the masters of the Lied, and thus to the Germany that he must have thought was being destroyed for ever. The first of the Elegien is, so to speak, latter-day Mahler, by a pupil (albeit a rebelliously individual one) of Schoenberg, but in his setting of Goethe’s Der Schatzgraber he writes a folk-like ballad that would not be out of place in Mahler’s own Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and elsewhere there are delightful, sometimes moving tributes to Schubert and to Hugo Wolf.
The chamber cantatas, all with a small instrumental ensemble, are rather more spare in style, but no less vivid; all are written in what one might call Eisler’s ‘tonal serial’ manner. One of them, the Zuchthauskantate (the “Prison Cantata”, about a young black union leader jailed for 20 years in America in the 1930s) movingly switches from German to English for a beautiful melody which sounds very like a spiritual: it’s a pity that I could not pick out the words. But that brings me to the first of the two frustrations that almost but not quite cancel out the excellence of this important and hugely rewarding collection.
Firstly no texts are provided, “for legal reasons”. I presume this means copyright difficulties with Brecht’s estate, but there are texts here by Morike, Eichendorff, Rimbaud (in French) and others where there can be no such problem, and at least half the pleasure of any fine song lies in understanding the text and realizing what the composer has done with it. Secondly, all the songs are sung by the same artist. Roswitha Trexler has a lightish voice and something of the gift of a diseuse: imagine a disciplined, trained soprano Lotte Lenya. Her manner is ideally intimate and her use of words highly intelligent. But her lower register is weak, and in the upper voice or under pressure her intonation is often flawed. That Eisler’s genius as a song-writer (not too strong a word, I think) clearly emerges despite all this is a remarkable tribute to him. The recordings are satisfactory.'