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Reviewed by:
  • Hanns Eisler Briefe 1907-1943
  • Sabine Feisst
Hanns Eisler Briefe 1907-1943. Edited by Jürgen Schebera and Maren Köster. (Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe, edited by the Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft, ser. 9, vol. 4.1.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2010. [xxvii, 532 p. ISBN 9783765103483. €39.80.] Music examples, facsimiles, index.

Edited by Jürgen Schebera and Maren Köster, Hanns Eisler Briefe 1907-1943 is the first of four planned correspondence volumes and the second of thirteen projected volumes of writings in the Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe. Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Schriften 1921-1935 (ser. 9, vol. 1.1) already appeared in 2007. Three volumes of music editions have been issued as well. Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), one of Arnold Schoenberg's most brilliant students and a gifted and prolific composer, whose reputation as the "Karl Marx of Music" had long tainted the reception of his fascinating oeuvre (especially in the United States), has received renewed attention from musicians and scholars in recent years. Directed by Thomas Phleps and Georg Witte, the post-Cold War Gesamtausgabe replaces the former GDR-based and much more limited Gesammelte Werke begun in 1968, and feeds into the reappraisal of Eisler's music.

The current volume features 360 out of a total of almost 1,700 extant letters, postcards, telegrams and other types of communication. The chronologically organized and thoroughly annotated correspondence spans his youth, European career, and American exile until 1943. The volume is multilingual, presenting the letters in their original languages: German, English (76 letters) and French (1 letter). Letters to Eisler are not included but addressed in the annotations and sometimes quoted to illuminate context.

Unlike Schoenberg, Eisler was never an avid or regular correspondent and did not preserve copies of his letters for posterity. Thus little correspondence from his youth, Berlin years, and early exile survives. Nonetheless this compilation gathers randomly extant batches of letters discovered in a variety of archives and provides important insight into Eisler's private life and professional relationships with musicians, writers, important figures in theater, filmmakers, publishers, and the New School for Social Research. The correspondence also illuminates Eisler's eloquence in both German and in English and his great sense of humor.

Eisler's correspondence from the 1920s—including letters to Alban Berg, Rudolf Kolisch, Karl Rankl, Erwin Ratz, [End Page 366] Josef Schmid, Schoenberg, and Edward Steuermann—documents his studies with Schoenberg and interactions with Schoenberg's circle. Among the highlights are a detailed report to Schoenberg about activities of the Society for Private Musical Performances in November 1920, and two 1926 letters to Schoenberg, shedding light on Eisler's infamous disagreement with his teacher (prompted by a focus on leftwing-motivated politically engaged art). On March 9, 1926, he boldly announced to Schoenberg: "Mich langweilt moderne Musik, sie interessiert mich nicht, manches hasse u. verachte ich sogar" (I am bored with modern music, I am not interested in it, I even hate and despite some of it, p. 41). Having already composed dodecaphonic works, Eisler claimed: "Auch verstehe ich nichts (bis auf Äußer lich keiten) von der 12 Ton Technik u. Musik. Aber ich bin von ihren 12 Ton Werken (z. B. die Klaviersuite) begeistert u. habe sie aufs genaueste studiert" (I also don't understand the twelve-tone technique and music, apart from superficial aspects. But I am enthusiastic about your twelve-tone works, for instance the Piano Suite, and I studied them in great detail, p. 41). Although this and a similarly tense letter of March 11, 1926 were previously published (Die Musikforschung 29, no. 4 [October-December 1976]: 445-47), it is invaluable to study them and their annotations in the context of Eisler's fourteen other letters to Schoenberg written in the 1920s. It is intriguing how, after his break with Schoen berg, he maintained good relations with Schoenberg's circle, especially Berg, Kolisch, Ratz and Steuermann; how he gradually repaired his relations with Schoenberg from the mid-1930s on; and how he regularly referenced his teacher, always in positive terms, in letters to relatives, friends, and colleagues.

Similarly fascinating is a group of thirty-five letters Eisler wrote between 1932 and 1936 to the...

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