Eislermaterial

NEW YORK TIMES, 15.07.2003
Portrait Painted in Song, With Words by Brecht
Ensemble Modern performs "Eislermaterial," a United States premier.
Eisler, Hannshe exigencies of scheduling meant that the artistic directors of the Lincoln Center Festival, striving to bring as much variety to this 19-day event as possible, could present only one performance of "Eislermaterial," the one-hour portrait in song of the German composer Hanns Eisler, in its United States premier.
It's too bad. Judging by the ecstatic reaction of the audience that packed the La Guardia High School concert hall on Sunday night, "Eislermaterial," an affecting and eclectic work assembled by Heiner Goebbels, the composer and director, and performed by the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, could have sold out a week's worth of performances. "Eislermaterial" may be gone from the scene for now, but thankfully there is a recording of this Ensemble Modern presentation on the ECM label taken from a live 1998 performance in Berlin.
Of the 12 songs in this work, 11 are settings of texts by Bertolt Brecht. The composer best known by far for his collaborations with Brecht was Kurt Weill, but from 1930 until Brecht's death in 1956, Eisler was his intimate colleague. Together they produced dozens of songs, cantatas, incidental music for plays and all manner of works charged with the leftist politics they espoused.
For a period in his youth Eisler was a prized student of Schoenberg, and despite his eventual rejection of his teacher's 12-tone system, Eisler's immersion in the aesthetic had lingering effects. Mr. Goebbels interspersed excerpts from some Eisler chamber and orchestral works, and the gnarly atonal harmonic writing and fitful caterwauling is something you seldom hear in Weill.
The more crucial difference comes in Eisler's attitude toward older genres. There is usually a subtext of irony in Weill's musical evocations. Eisler is not afraid to convey nostalgia. Yet there is something bittersweet in his affection and such subtle intelligence in his melodies and harmonies that Eisler's nostalgia never turns treacly.
For example "Children's Anthem," which opened the evening, had the quality of an ambling folk song. It was first played just on the harmonium, evoking the endearing sound of some tubby-toned rural church organ. Then one by one the musicians of Ensemble Modern joined in, until finally many of them stopped playing and sang the song in German. (English supertitles were projected.) Since they are instrumentalists and not choristers, their singing had a childlike innocence, which turned the text, a pledge to build a decent German nation, eerily resonant in lines by Brecht like, "Neither over nor yet under/other peoples will we be."
Then the vocalist Josef Bierbichler took over. Primarily an actor, Mr. Bierbichler has a small, crackly voice that beautifully conveyed the sadness and wisdom of Eisler works. In "Four Lullabies for Working Mothers," he proved himself the Lotte Lenya of Hanns Eisler. These bleakly moving texts are the words of downtrodden mothers whose only hope is that their children will join the struggle for equality.
"Don't think I brought you into the world so painfully," one text says, "to lie down under it and merely ask for more." Mr. Bierbichler's exquisitely understated performance enhanced the steely determination in Eisler's deceptively simple settings.
In interviews Mr. Goebbels tends to play down the significance of his work in arranging the Eisler songs for the Ensemble Modern. Still, the instrumental writing is clear, varied and subtly sophisticated. His directorial concept could not be simpler: the musicians sit in rows on three sides of the stage with a statue of Eisler, about 12 inches tall, in the middle, his back to the audience.
Two taped audio dramas that quote from interviews Eisler recorded are woven into the work, and they effectively convey the composer's political passion, wry charm and dry-eyed perceptiveness about his own struggles as an exile from the Nazi regime and a victim of McCarthyism in the United States. The raucousness of some interludes of improvisation also give a sense of the hellish times Eisler lived through.
(Anthony Tommasini)