Musical Threnodies for Brecht

Summary

Kurt Weill May be the most famous of Brecht’s musical collaborators, but Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau were the two composers with whom Brecht enjoyed his most enduring and most prolific artistic relationships. This essay focuses on their literary and musical responses to his death on 14 August 1956. At that time Eisler was perhaps Brecht’s oldest close friend; their partnership had been forged in Weimar-era Berlin, had weathered European and American exile, and continued in East Germany. When Eisler’s Johann Faustus libretto drew fire from the SED in 1953 Brecht was his staunchest defender, and Eisler is said to be the composer with whom the author was most compatible artistically and personally. Dessau began working with Brecht in 1943 and became a valued collaborator in California and the GDR; his music is the definitive sound of Brecht’s late works. Together they staged ten premieres and withstood the 1951 controversy over their Lukullus opera, and Brecht held Dessau in high enough esteem to negotiate performance rights on his behalf for Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan, 1941), and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1944) in Switzerland, Austria, and West Germany. When Brecht died, both composers marked his passing by returning to texts he had written in the 1930s, but their treatments differ considerably. Karen Leeder has shown in her survey of fifty years of poetry about Brecht’s death that initial poetic responses tended to be traditionally mournful while later responses were more variegated, and these composers’ works bear that out. Eisler, disillusioned and wounded by East German cultural politics, responded with despair and nostalgia. Dessau’s response, however, represents a strand of modernist elegy that, beginning in the 1950s, says Leeder, “permitted a much more robust reckoning with the deceased” and is “not solace as traditionally understood.” In the words of Jahan Ramazani, quoted by Leeder, modernist elegies offer “not answers but memorable puzzlings.” This essay investigates the composers’ responses as representative of each end of that spectrum.