I had a slight familiarity with some of Eisler's music but knew very little about his life. This doc covered a lot of ground showing footage, interviews, and staged excepts from the scores.

I'd heard his song Supply and Demand before as recorded by Dagmar Krause. And I'd seen the 1932 Marxist film Kuhle Wampe with its' Eisler score and songs. And I'd seen a few of his Hollywood films which I'll go into in a bit.

Eisler's story is sad ultimately. Already debating Socialism and composing music as a teen, he felt his music should support Revolutionary struggle. He studied under Arnold Schoenberg but thought AS wasn't Leftist enough! He wrote a number of pro-Left anthems that became famous the world over (the doc mentions how Mao's men sung them on the Long March), but despite writing anti-Hitler songs, the Nazis took over and Eisler high-tailed it for France, NY, and then Hollywood.

He considered the US "run by gangsters' and Hollywood as "disgusting," but he thrived there, settling in with all the other Hollywood Reds, throwing parties, hanging with celebrities, and scoring films. The documentary mentions 3 films: None But The Lonely Heart, The Spanish Main, and So Well Remembered.

He was friends with Paul Henreid who starred in The Spanish Main but he called the film, 'ridiculous schlock I did for the money.' I've never seen So Well Remembered but the clip from it in the documentary had a great cue.

The list of films and friends he worked with in Hollywood reads like a HUAC hit list: Charles Chaplin, Edward Dmytryk, Clifford Odets, Joseph Losey, etc. The list of films he worked on is brief but interesting, among others are: Lang's Hangman Also Die, Clurman's Deadline at Dawn, Renoir's Woman on the Beach, and Sirk's A Scandal in Paris. An interesting unfinished project had Eisler writing a new score for a proposed re-release of Chaplin's The Circus. I don't know how much of this score exists if any.

Eisler's brother was a leader in the US Communist Party and so Hanns was an easy target. There is footage of Hanns' HUAC trial where he tries to downplay a 1926 application he made to the German Communist Party. But he's also pretty mad at HUAC and can't contain saying that the Reds had done a lot to improve conditions for people. He concludes by saying, "I'm not a hero, just a composer."

Well, he gets deported. If not, he still would have been blacklisted. There is newsreel footage of him leaving the country saying goodbye to his brother "who also awaits deportation."

He goes to the newly-created East German Republic, writes their National Anthem, and teaches at the State Conservatory, but conditions are nothing as good as he had before and soon it's clear that the Soviets are against his kind of music and he's suppressed. Stalin dies, the 20th Soviet Congress reveals what a horror the Revolution has been, and Eisler falls into deep depression and alcoholism. Although the doc doesn't mention this, he scores one last major film, Resnais' Night and Fog. He does write some amazing final works like the 1958 Deutsche Symphony (which the documentary provides an excerpt of); but, ultimately, he dies a broken man just after the Berlin Wall goes up, and is hypocritically given a huge State funeral.

The tale is full of ironies. Ultimately it's the story of backing the wrong horse, of believing in Red ideals that were opposed throughout the century, first by Nazis, then by the US Right, and finally by the totalitarian Communists themselves. On the other hand, if he'd gone capitalist and tried to become James Horner, he might never have had the inspiration and died just as sadly. Who knows.

In any case, the documentary awoke my interest and soon I'm going to watch and re-watch a few of these films to hear their scores.

Eisler's Hollywood film music sounds like the perfect choice for a Marco Polo CD, so if John Morgan is out there........you might want to take a look at some of these films yourself.

I always felt for a man who so intelligently understood film music and wrote about it could write such old-fashioned type film music. One of his later films had a very insistent score for the time. But his music was always well crafted.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
CBC in Canada aired this 1996 German documentary about the life of Hanns Eisler last week as part of their prime-time music program, Opening Night.

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Well, there's always arTV to air a rerun one of these days...

Having already recorded obscure titles, as well as music by other emigre composers like Salter and Dessau, a project like this seemed to have Marco Polo written all over it.