About Hanns Eisler

Hanns Eisler was born on July 6, 1898 in Leipzig. He grew up in Vienna and studied with Arnold Schönberg, who considered him one his most gifted students, alongside Berg and Webern. Though Eisler was an Austrian citizen, he spent most of his life in Berlin, having first moved there in 1925. Sympathetic to the tenets of socialism, he aligned himself with the workers’ movement and wrote groundbreaking choral pieces and songs for amateur choirs and the agitprop movement. His concerts with the actor and singer Ernst Busch were legendary. He wrote for a new public that lay beyond the worlds of chamber and commercial music. Until 1933, he was one of the most active and radical left-wing artists in Germany.

Being both a socialist and a Jew, Eisler was in an especially vulnerable position when Hitler assumed power. Thus, he went into exile, like many German artists, and moved through several European countries before settling in the USA.

Eisler returned to Berlin in 1949. He viewed the German Democratic Republic, which was founded in the same year, as a democratic alternative to the devastating development in Germany that had led to two devastating wars. In his final years, he nonetheless maintained a critical distance vis-à-vis the GDR. Hanns Eisler died on September 6, 1962 in Berlin. His grave is located in the city’s historic Dorotheenstädtische Graveyard near that of his friend Bertolt Brecht.

Biographical Sketch

Born on July 6 in Leipzig, the third child of Austrian Philosopher Rudolf Eisler and Ida Maria née Fischer, daughter of a Leipzig butcher

Eisler family moves to Vienna; first attempts at composing in grammar school

Studies at the New Vienna Conservatory (with Karl Weigl);
private instruction with Arnold Schönberg, also with Anton Webern in 1922

Piano Sonata, op. 1

Awarded the City of Vienna’s Künstlerpreis (Artist’s Prize); moves to Berlin

Collaboration with the Agitprop group “Das Rote Sprachrohr” (The Red Megaphone);
first film and stage music, music critic for the communist daily Die Rote Fahne (The Red Banner)

Birth of son Georg

Beginning of collaboration with Bertolt Brecht with music for the poet’s Lehrstück (“learning play”) Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken) op. 20; first trip to the Soviet Union

“Red Wedding” (Erich Weinert), “Solidarity Song” (Brecht); music for the films Niemandsland (No Man’s Land), directed by Viktor Trivas, and Kuhle Wampe, directed by Slatan Dudow with a screenplay and songs by Brecht

Stage music for Die Mutter (The Mother), Brecht’s adaptation of Maxim Gorki’s novel of the same name; committee member of the International Music Bureau in Moscow (chair from 1935)

Eisler’s exile begins (Vienna, Paris, London, Denmark and elsewhere)

Stage music for The Round Heads and Pointed Heads (Brecht); “Song of the United Front” (Brecht)

First trip to the USA; teaching post at the New School for Social Research in New York; involvement in the “Workers and Song Olympiad” in Straßburg, where the “Song of the United Front” is premiered by a chorus of 5,000 worker-singers

Visits Spain during the Civil War; resumes work with Brecht during an eight-month stay in Denmark; Lenin Requiem and Chamber Cantatas (Brecht)

Moves to the USA, professor of composition and counterpoint at New York’s New School for Social Research

The German Symphony (Brecht); guest professor at the Mexico City Conservatory of Music

Chamber Symphony, Five Orchestra Pieces

Eisler moves to Los Angeles, resumes collaboration with Brecht (Hollywood Elegies) and Adorno (Film Music Project at the Rockefeller-Foundation); music for the Fritz Lang film Hangmen Also Die

Continues work on the Hollywood Song Book (Hölderlin fragments)

Stage music for Galileo (Brecht); hearings in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)

Deportation from the USA and return to Europe; stay in Vienna; participation in the International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague, speech on the “Gesellschaftliche Grundlagen der Neuen Musik” (Social Questions of Contemporary Music)

Eisler moves to East Berlin, Rhapsody for Large Orchestra with Soprano Solo (Goethe)

Member of the Academy of the Arts and professor at the Conservatory of Music in East Berlin; National Prize of the GDR, First Class; New German Folksongs (Johannes R. Becher)

Johann Faustus, the libretto to his planned opera, is published; attends International Peace Congress in Vienna

“Faustus Debate” at the Academy of the Arts, Eisler gives up on the opera project and departs for Vienna

Eisler returns to Berlin; stage music for Johannes R. Becher’s tragic play Winterschlacht (Winter Battle); Eisler gives a talk on Schönberg in honor of his late teacher's 80th birthday at the Academy of the Arts

Scores music for the Alain Resnais Holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog); Lieder und Kantaten (Songs and Cantatas), 10 Volumes (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel)

Completes stage music for Schweik in the Second World War (Brecht)

Composes music for “The Carpet Weavers of Kujan-Bulak,” cantata for soprano and orchestra (Brecht); “Left March” (Majakowski)

Tapes interviews with Hans Bunge and Nathan Nothowicz

National Prize of the GDR, First Class; Tucholsky songs

first heart attack

Serious Songs for baritone and string orchestra; President of the GDR’s Music Council; Hanns Eisler dies on September 6 in Berlin