His ‘Hollywood Songbook’ reflected his physical and spiritual exile, but he wrote music beautiful and melodic, for ‘someone who is actually listening.’
Hanns Eisler stood on the beach in front of his Malibu house looking at the Pacific Ocean and pronounced ‘Nature is boring!’ This, from a man who escaped Hitler’s purge, who enjoyed the comfort of success in Hollywood, but who never abandoned his alignment with the common man, and who was ultimately deported, a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eisler, who was one of the most able composers of art songs of the 20th century, yet he remains almost unknown in the United States. Hoping to rectify that oversight, Villa Aurora and the St. Chamber orchestra are dedicating a weekend to this prodigious composer of both classical and film music on March 26 and 27 in Pacific Palisades. Members of St. Mahew’s orchestra will contextualize Mahler’s ‘Songs of a Wayfarer’ by fellow exile Arnold Schoenberg, and ‘Appalachian Spring’ by American composer Aaron Copeland, who fought to prevent Eisler’s deportation. Also featured on the March 26 program will be Eisler’s satirical song, ‘Sputnik,’ that he composed while living in the former East Germany following his deportation in 1948. Villa Aurora will then host a Saturday afternoon roundtable on Eisler’s Hollywood years, which spanned 1942 to 1948. His musical diary ‘Hollywood Songbook’ and his investigation by the HUAC, will be the subject of a discussion moderated by Villa Aurora Director Imogen von Tannenberg. She will be joined by Johannes Gall, who edited Eisler’s study of film music for the Rockefeller Foundation; John McCumber, who has published on the effect of the McCarthy hearings. Saturday evening, mezzo-soprano Kristina Driskil and pianist Mark Robson will perform pieces from the ‘Hollywood Songbook.’ Eisler was born in Leipzig in 1898 and studied in Vienna. After two years fighting in World War I, he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in the late teens and early 20s. At this time Eisler and fellow students, including Weber and Berg, and music lovers coalesced around their teacher, who had formed the Society for Private Musical Performance, a group devoted to private, critic-free performances of new music. At that time, when the Vennese economy was recovering after the war, there was little support for large orchestral programs. ‘Schoenberg and several of his students made arrangements of orchestral music for smaller ensembles,’ St. Matthew’s Music Director Tom Neenan explains. ‘Among the works for chamber ensemble to come out of the society’s activities was Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s ‘Songs of a Wayfarer,’ which will be performed Friday night with baritone Edward Levy.’ Fortunately, Eisler was in Vienna when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Bertolt Brecht, with whom he had forged both a personal and creative partnership in the 1920s, managed to escape Germany and joined Eisler and many other anti-fascist Germans in exile. The two men continued to collaborate, Eisler writing protest songs and music for Brecht’s plays. Soon, the composer began to incorporate Schoenberg’s 12-tone style, but eschewed his teacher’s ‘pure’ music, emphasizing instead texts that were more popular and focused on social reality. Eisler spent the last five years of his exile in Los Angeles, from 1942 to 1948, supporting his family by composing film scores for RKO Studios. Settling at the beach with his wife Lou, he wrote music for eight motion pictures, and received Oscar nominations in 1943 (‘Hangmen Also Die,’ directed by Fritz Lang) and 1944 (‘None But the Lonely Heart,’ directed by Clifford Odets). ‘I first met Hanns in New York in 1940, where I was starring with Dorothy McGuire in ‘Medicine Show,” recalls veteran actor, producer/director Harold Lloyd. ‘Hanns was doing the music. A few years later, I came out to L.A. to work when I was under contract with Metro, and a friend of ours knew of a house on the beach that had been owned by Myrna Loy and Gene Markey. It was in the Malibu Colony, but on the north end. We took the house and Hanns and Lou were our neighbors, so we had a nice reunion. He was a wonderful person, the wittiest man I have ever met. In a given room of great stars, he got the laughs, and he was the most perceptive. ’I remember he had a big accident on Pacific Coast Highway, and he was recuperating in the hospital,’ Lloyd continues. ‘Chaplin and Charles Laughton came to visit and got into an argument, across Hanns. Hanns was outraged: ‘There you are discussing high-minded things over my body.” Lloyd, a Pacific Palisades resident, whose own career has spanned seven decades, credits Eisler for his own acquaintance and collaboration with Brecht. ‘Hanns used to have these salons on Sunday afternoons at his house. And since his house was smaller than ours, Lou would often come and ask us if we would host the events, so naturally we were invited. I met Brecht on one of these occasions. I learned that he had a play called ‘Galileo’ that various people, including Kazan and Welles, had backed away from. I read it, and to me it seemed like a major work. John Houseman read it too and we decided to produce it at our theater, the Colony, on La Cienega. Hanns wrote the music for the play, which ran for four weeks, during which time Stravinsky must have come more than half of the run. He came for the music.’ Lloyd, who has worked with many a composer over his career, regards Eisner as not only a gifted film composer but also a superb scholar. ‘He was exceedingly modern in his musical approach,’ he says, noting that he added a rich melodic line to the 12-tone system. ‘His music had enormous energy; even in the Hollywood songs you will hear such a beautiful melody of sorrowful and melodic nature.’ The ‘Hollywood Songbook’ is a cycle of art songs (lieder) written in a mixture of styles’12-tone, romantic, blues’and based on poems by Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare and others. Despite the great support from friends including Stravinsky, Copland and Leonard Bernstein (all of whom organized benefit concerts to raise money for Eisler’s defense), Eisler’s position as a leftist and certainly pro-Communist artist of foreign birth was vulnerable, and he was deported in 1948. ‘I think that the House Un-American Activities Committee simply felt that because his brother Gerhart was accused of being a Communist agent, Hanns must be contaminated,’ Lloyd says. ‘His music was certainly of a left- wing persuasion, and in his songs he identified with the working man. So pile that all together and the committee said ‘We don’t want him in the country.” Eisler returned to Europe, initially to Vienna and Prague and ultimately to East Berlin, where he continued to compose, writing the music for the National Anthem of the GDR, which is said to be the most beautiful anthem in the world. He died in 1962. Upon his deportation in 1948, Eisler said, ‘I feel heart-broken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way….It is terrible to think what will come of American art if this committee can judge which art is American and which un-American. Hitler and Mussolini attempted just that. They had no success, and the committee to fight un-American activity will also not succeed.’ Hanns Eisler Weekend Friday, March 26: Concert, 8 p.m. at St. Matthew’s, 1031 Bienveneda Ave. Admission is $35 at the door or visit: MusicGuildOnline. Saturday, March 27: Eisler roundtable, 3 p.m. at Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar. ‘Hollywood Songbook’ concert, 7 p.m. Admission: All Saturday events, $35; Friday concert and all Saturday events, $60; Saturday concert, $20. For reservations, leave name and contact information at 310-573-3603 or email invite@villa-aurora.org. Shuttle service for Villa Aurora is available from Los Liones Drive, between 2 and 9 p.m.
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