Eisler Zeitungausschnitte, Op. 11 Eisler Piano sonata No, 1, Op. 1 Eisler Tagebuch, Op. 9 Nicole Tibbels, Teresa Shaw, Mary King, Richard Edgar-Wilson, Clio Gould (violin), John Constable (piano) Eisler Kleine Symphonie, Op. 29 Eisler Kleine Hoellenangst: Overture to a comedy & four songs Eisler Die Mutter Gruber Zeitstimmung Maria Friedman, Omar Ebrahim, H.K.Gruber (also Conductor) London Symphonietta, members of the CYM and NatWest Choirs If Hanns Eisler weren't thoroughly documented, you might think he'd been invented. Born in Vienna in 1898, he studied with Schoenberg, wrote serial but lyrical chamber music (like Berg), collaborated with Brecht in music theatre and wrote cabaret songs and anthems (like Weill), fled to the United States in 1938 (like everyone who hadn't left earlier), wrote film music with facility within the studio system (like Korngold, but for RKO, so he never got nearly such grand films), appeared before HUAC (like everyone who didn't crawl to Ronald Reagan) and returned to the GDR (like Brecht). Eisler wrote the national anthem for the GDR, but found himself before an inquisition as absurd as HUAC over the libretto he wrote for a new version of Faust. He became a depressive drunk, on one occasion passing out in west Berlin and having to be delivered to Checkpoint Charlie in a police car. He married a sympathetic Viennese woman, but probably died in resigned despair, his idealistic hopes for socialism completely destroyed by emerging truth about Stalin and the realities of life in the GDR. The GDR gave him a state funeral, which is presumably the reason he has subsequently disappeared from the musical record. This day on the South Bank demonstrated conclusively that Eisler's music is worth promoting in itself. Although he felt himself excluded from the musical establishment in Vienna for being too accessible, the works in this program were stimulating and often challenging as well as enjoyable. The afternoon session consisted of works from the 1920s and a discussion betwen Natalie Wheen, H.K. Gruber, and David Blake. Gruber (quintessentially Viennese, great accent) has been an advocate of Eisler since the early 1960s, when he found himself in a similar position regarding the Second Viennese School as Eisler had with Schoenberg's entourage in the 1920s. The piano sonata was definitely after Schoenberg, though it has a kind of charm. Tagebuch was quite remarkable, subjective settings of impressionistic texts that comes close to evoking the stream of consciousness. The themes are being alone, water (rain, in the bath), calm and depression. Also trains, with which Eisler seemed to be obsessed, possibly as a result of falling out with Schoenberg after a chance remark to Zemlinsky on a train from Venice to Vienna. (I missed the first piece, a setting of textes trouves as a song-cycle.) The film Solidarity Song: The Hans Eisler Story (1996, dir. Larry Weinstein) was shown between the concerts. It includes some fascinating interviews, among them a moment when Georg Knepler breaks down while trying to explain what the GDR musical establishment was doing hounding Eisler. Two choirs associated with the ENO's Bayliss programme young singers, The Knack and The Works, performed "worker's choruses", toe-tapping stuff which had a six-year-old boy who'd been fidgetting furiously moments before totally engrossed. The evening session included music from the 1930s, one post-war work and a newish work by Gruber. The Kleine Symphonie consists of four sharply contrasted movements, the outer two aggressive reinterpretations (and parodies) of classical idioms, using twelve-tone technique, the inner two contrasting dramatic gestures, again probably parodies. I was reminded a bit of Stravinsky's reinventions in both Puchinella and the Rake, but Eisler is much more ironic and bumptious at the same time. I found Hoellenangst, which Eisler wrote in Vienna soon after leaving America, the most purely entertaining work of the day, a delightfully comic overture and settings of satirical songs in Viennese dialect by Johannes Nestroy. (The songs, especially the words, were not a million miles from those of the great Flanders and Swann in manner and content.) Die Mutter, a didactic piece that Eisler wrote in 1932 about the political education of a Russian woman after the 1905 Russian education, could have been totally tedious, and I found it hard work at times. The performers seemed to have no difficulty buying into it, which suggests that there's something there. My problem, which recurred throughout the day, was with the words, of course, the reiterations of the Marxist dialectic, essentially a statement that if you disagree with it you are wrong. Eisler never ironizes the party line, and I think it's fair to say that his music expressing the human cost of the struggle, and opposition to fascism, and general social satire, is also better music. But then I suffer from unreconstructed false consciousness. It was amusing hearing the choir of NatWest (one of the main high-street banks) slagging off capitalists and their works.