Sour Notes: Hanns Eisler and the FBI

Abstract

To judge from the waves of scholarship and performances that marked the 1998 centennial of his birth, in his native Germany the composer Hanns Eisler is fast attaining the status of national hero. But in the United States, where he lived from 1937 until 1948, Eisler remains largely an enigma. Musicological treatment of Eisler throughout the West amounts to a brush-off. When interest in Eisler has been expressed, typically it has centered on the scores he wrote for Hollywood films and a theoretical book about film music that he coauthored with Theodor Adorno.¹ Beyond that, the standard “read” on Eisler is that he was once upon a time an adventurous musical modernist but then consigned himself to the sidelines when, in the mid-1920s, he espoused the idea that music is purposeless if it is directed only toward sophisticated ears. As rapidly as Eisler’s music gained in aural simplicity, so it lost status in the minds of Western critics. More than a quarter-century ago, British musicologist David Blake concluded his Grove Dictionary article on Eisler with what amounts to an exhortation: “No composer has suffered more from the post-1945 cultural cold war. As the cross-currents between Eastern Europe and the west increase, a proper international assessment of his achievement must be made.”² Blake’s revised article for the 2000 Grove refers to the founding in 1994 of the International Hanns Eisler Society and the launching, in the same year, of a critical edition of Eisler’s collected works. But these German projects, Blake writes, are simply “cause for optimism that a proper international assessment of his significance can be made.”³