Johannes C. Gall. Hanns Eisler Goes Hollywood. Das Buch “Komposition für den Film” und die Filmmusik zu “Hangmen Also Die.” Reihe: Eisler-Studien—Beiträge zu einer kritischen Musikwissenschaft. Bd. 5. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2015. 314 pages.

Summary

In exile from Nazi Germany, the modernist composer Hanns Eisler spent six years working in Hollywood (1942–48), and this exhaustively researched book analyzes two of his most important achievements in those years: his collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno beginning in 1942 on the book that we know today as Komposition für den Film, and his work in 1942/43 as the composer for the anti-Nazi film directed by Fritz Lang, Hangmen Also Die, which had a screenplay cowritten by his friend Bertolt Brecht. Gall provides a detailed history of the complicated publication history of the book, which was first published in the United States in 1947 as Composing for the Films and then published in German as Komposition für den Film in 1949 by the Henschel Verlag in East Berlin. A third version was published by Adorno in West Germany in 1969 using the original typed manuscript in German that Eisler and Adorno had produced in 1944. Gall then examines the main theses of the book in order to understand the specific contributions of each coauthor but also to evaluate the book as primarily the result of a (somewhat tense) compromise between the two men. In the same way, after providing the history of the making of Hangmen Also Die—including the story of Brecht's disappointment and anger about the final film Lang made (and about the way he was not given a credit for the screenplay)—Gall provides a detailed analysis of Eisler's music as it interacts with various scenes of the film. This is an especially original contribution to the Eisler scholarship, in that it had long been (incorrectly) asserted that Eisler's score was entirely lost or that only fragments had survived, but in fact all of it is available in the Hanns Eisler Archive. In his conclusion Gall attempts to compare what Eisler was able to do with this film score—the first of the eight film scores he would compose in Hollywood—with the positions taken in the book with Adorno on composing for film, a book clearly influenced by Eisler's experience on Lang's film.

Eisler was an Austrian who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna in the early 1920s, moving to Berlin in 1925, where he became involved with other avant-garde musicians and artists and also with leftist politics.