2 - To Those Who Come After

Summary

Agitation and Estrangement in Berlin

AS EARLY AS 1923, in his opus 1 Piano Sonata, composed while he was Schoenberg's student, Eisler showed a penchant for “ferocious rhythmic energy” and for the “Überraschung und … Sprung” (“surprise and … spring”) that Theodor Adorno would later note as not mere caprice but as a deeply intentional aspect of the composer's work. This early sonata also includes a citation of the “Internationale” and Eisler's already-signature “lamento” passacaglia, showing his confidence in treating existing musical material as citation. Several years later, testing new activist ground in Berlin, Eisler adopted Soviet-style march music in minor keys, Tin Pan-alley verse/refrain form, and jazz-inflected syncopation to add recognizable popular elements to his Kampflieder (workers’ fighting songs). For all his distrust of what Frankfurt School thinkers called the “culture industry,” Eisler recognized that bourgeois art forms were part of the dialectics of historical change. At the same time, he did critique traditional concert and popular music for its narcotic potential, as he drew on the energizing aspect of military music for workers’ choruses and Brecht's didactic theater. Eisler's 1932 essay “Neue Methoden der Kampfmusik” claims that music in the bourgeois tradition

… spielt eine passive Rolle. Ausnehmen davon müssen wir die Militärmusik, die z.B. das Marschieren organisiert, also eine aktive Bedeutung hat … Die Musik der Lehrstücke und Chöre wird eine scharfe, kalte Grundhaltung haben müssen.

[… plays a passive role. We must exclude military music, which for example incites marching and therefore has an active meaning … The music of the Lehrstücke and choruses will need to have a sharp, cold basic attitude.]

Percussive, marchlike rhythms certainly dominate Eisler's choral music of the 1920s, as they do his early film music, from Walter Ruttmann's abstract animated short opus III to the Brecht-Eisler collaboration Kuhle Wampe in 1932.