Early Years and Bertolt Brecht
During World War I, Hanns Eisler served as a front-line soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army and was wounded several times in combat. Returning to Vienna after Austria's defeat, he studied from 1919 to 1923 under Arnold Schoenberg. Eisler was the first of Schoenberg's disciples to compose in the twelve-tone or serial technique. He married Charlotte Demant in 1920; they separated in 1934. In 1925, he moved to Berlin—then a hothouse of experimentation in music, theater, film, art and politics. There he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany and became involved with the November Group. In 1928, he taught at the Marxist Worker's School in Berlin and his son Georg Eisler, who would grow up to become an important painter, was born. His music became increasingly oriented towards political themes and, to Schoenberg's dismay, more "popular" in style with influences drawn from jazz and cabaret. At the same time, he drew close to Bertolt Brecht, whose own turn towards Marxism happened at about the same time. The collaboration between the two artists lasted for the rest of Brecht's life.
In 1929, Eisler composed the song cycle Zeitungsausschnitte, Op. 11. The piece is dedicated to Margot Hinnenberg-Lefebre. Though not written in the twelve-tone technique, the piece was perhaps the forerunner of a musical art style later known as "News Items" – musical compositions that parodied a newspaper's content and style, or that included lyrics lifted directly from newspapers, leaflets, magazines, and other written media of the day. Eisler's piece parodies a newspaper's layout and content, with songs in the cycle given titles similar to headlines. The piece offers evidence of Eisler's socialist leanings, as its lyrics indicate the struggles of ordinary Germans who, after World War I, encountered hardship.
Eisler wrote music for several Brecht plays, including The Decision (Die Maßnahme) (1930), The Mother (1932) and Schweik in the Second World War (1957). They also collaborated on protest songs that intervened in the political turmoil of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. Their Solidarity Song became a popular militant anthem sung in street protests and public meetings throughout Europe, and their Ballad of Paragraph 218 was the world's first song protesting laws against abortion. Brecht-Eisler songs of this period tended to look at life from "below"—from the perspective of prostitutes, hustlers, the unemployed and the working poor. He worked with Brecht and the director Slatan Dudow on the film Kuhle Wampe which was banned by the Nazis in 1933.
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