Eisler, Brahms, BartókFalko Steinbach, piano
From the Liner Notes:The central piece of this CD is undoubtedly the first recording of Hanns Eisler’s Third Sonata. It was crucial in choosing the whole program, in which we want to rediscover Eisler’s work and place it in a meaningful context. The composer Hanns Eisler The name Hanns Eisler is well known. He wrote the music to J.R. Bechers lyrics in what was to become the national anthem of the GDR and as a proletarian composer in the States he scored countless movie soundtracks. Furthermore, through cooperation with B. Brecht he was bestowed with artistic immortality. Eisler was born on July 6, 1898 in Leipzig. His father, the austrian philosopher, Rudolf Eisler, could provide his family with only a meager livelihood. After their move to Vienna (19010 the young Eisler had only very limited means at his disposal to develop his interest in music. There was no money for lessons and a piano was out of the question. The artistically bright boy had to make up his first compositions in his head, mentally explore his first scores. At the beginning of the First World War the sixteen year old wrote an oratorio, Against War; after his military service he went to counterpoint school in the conservatory. But his autodidactic endeavors weren’t enough: he needed a strong teacher. That he found in Arnold Schoenberg, who admitted him to his composition class in 1919. “Schoenberg didn’t allow ‘modern’ composing,” Eisler remembers. “Counterpointand exercises in composition had to be learned classically. Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms were held up as examples of how one had to master his craft.” And, as if he had learned a trade, Eisler remarked: “At the end of 1923 I finished my apprenticeship .” His journeyman’s piece provides us with the First Sonata, op. 1, for which the Schoenberg student was awarded the Artistic Price of the City of Vienna in 1924. In the same year his chamber music was played at the music festivals in Venice and Donaueschingen, and in autumn he was drawn to Arthur Schnabel in Berlin. The dedicated musician said of this period, “I made a living as a composer and teacher, but it was the workers movement that I felt attracted to.” That was the direction his work took. In 1924 he wrote theater music for Ernst Busch. In 1929 began his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, whom he didn’t see again until 1934 in Denmark, after a turbulent journey in exile through Holland, Belgium, and France. A year later, on concert tour, he traveled through America, where he lived in exile after the occupation of Austria in the year 1938. Here he taught at the University of Southern California and advanced to a first-class, much sought-after film composer. His composition of the Third Sonata in the year 1943 falls right in the middle of his American period of activity, The Third Sonata As early as 1941 Eisler used the twelve-tone technique again in his Fourteen Ways to describe the Rain. And in his paper, Composition for Film, written in the same period, he reflects on this Schoenberg-Heritage: “There are dangers in the procedure of new music that even experienced composers must be aware of: over-complicating details, the obsession to make each moment of the musical accompaniment as interesting as possible, pedantry, formalistic games. A thoughtless asoption of the twelve-tone technique deserves a special warning, because it can degenerate into an exercise in industriousness, in which arithmetically derived melodies substitute for genuine musical themes…” What Eisler as a practitioner of the twelve-tone technique appreciates about Schoenberg’s compositions, especially about those of his middle period, was expressed by the composer at a lecture in Prague: “In these works from Schoenberg’s middle period, which I consider to be his most important, it is no longer the predominance of dissonances, that is most characteristic, but rather the dissolution of the traditional language: the assymetrical, the lack of theme, the rapid contrasts and the colorfulness of the musical forms.” That Eisler and Schoenberg had a falling out—an unfortunate misunderstanding—never influenced their mutual artistic respect for one another. Eisler, in this third sonata, clearly turns to his former teacher, especially because during the time this piece was coming into being, the father-teacher and student enjoyed a renewal of their friendly relationship. This first clearly formulated theme of the first movement—provided we consider the first bars as an introduction—names Schoenberg’s initials, A, E-flat (in German: A, Es) in a descending tritone. Eisler makes use of all of the above-quoted merits of Schoenberg’s theory of composition in this sonata; the piece only resists using the classical sonata form and a strict dodecaphonism. Eisler insists on a harmonic dualism, declares his support of tonality, strives for late-romantic expressionism, and speaks a stylized counterpoint language, which is particularly striking in the variations of the middle movement. Track List: Dritte Klaviersonate (Ersteinspielung), Hanns Eisler Fantasien op. 116, Johannes Brahms Sonate (1926), Béla Bartók Recording Information:Recorded October 6—8, 1990, in the Concerthall of Siemensvilla and Berlin Lankwitz Digital Recording DDD |
| Last updated on Thursday, November 8, 2007 9:13 PM |
