Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler (July 6, 1898 - September 6, 1962) was a German and Austrian composer.
Eisler was born in Leipzig. He was initially self-taught in music, and after serving in the Hungarian army in World War I, worked as a proof-reader for the music publishers Universal Edition. From 1919 to 1923 he studied under Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna, and from 1925 taught music in Berlin.
In Berlin, Eisler identified with the radical Communist Party of Germany although he never joined. His music became increasingly oriented towards political themes and, to the dismay of his teacher, Schoenberg, more "popular" in style with influences drawn from jazz and cabaret. At the same time, he drew closer to Bertolt Brecht, whose own turn towards Marxism happened at about the same time. The collaboration between the two artists lasted for the rest of Brecht's life: Eisler wrote the music for several Brecht plays, including The Measures Taken (1930), The Mother (1931) and "Schweik in the Second World War" (1944). One of the themes--radical for the 1920s--taken up by Brecht and Eisler was women's rights: their "Ballad on Paragraph 218" was the first song protesting abortion laws. Their largest-scale collaboration was the choral Deutsche Sinfonie (1935-57) and their "Hollywood Songbook" is rated by critics as one of the outstanding cycles of German art songs in the 20th century.
After 1933, Eisler's works were banned by the Nazi Party and Eisler joined the generation of leftist and Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the United States of America. In New York City, he taught composition at the New School and wrote experimental chamber and documentary music. Settling shortly before World War II in Los Angeles, he composed several Hollywood film scores, two of which--Hangmen Also Die and None but the Lonely Heart--were nominated for Oscars. He also returned to the twelve-tone style of his former teacher, Schoenberg, who acknowledged him again as one of his greatest students. In 1947 he wrote the book Composing for the Films with Theodor Adorno.
Eisler's promising career in the U.S. was interrupted by the Cold War. He was the first Hollywood artist "blacklisted" by the Hollywood movie industry after two interrogations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities where he was accused of being "the Karl Marx of music" and the chief Soviet agent in Hollywood. Eisler's supporters--including Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein--organized benefit concerts to raise money for his defense fund, but the composer was deported early in 1948. He returned to Germany and settled in East Berlin. There, Eisler composed the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic, a cycle of cabaret-style songs to satirical poems by Kurt Tucholsky, and incidental music for theater, films and television. His most ambitious project of the period, a modern opera on the Faust theme, was attacked by Communist censors in East Germany and never completed. Although he continued to work as a composer and and to teach at the East Berlin conservatory, the gap between Eisler and the cultural functionaries of East Germany grew wider in the last decade of his life. Eisler never recovered completely from Brecht's death in 1956 and his remaining years were marred by declining health. He died in East Berlin in 1962.