When the composer Hanns Eisler and his friend Bertolt Brecht were staying in Abbey Road, NW8 in 1936, they played a nasty trick on the notoriously rich and prodigiously successful writer Stefan Zweig, whom they referred to as a ‘literary industrialist’ and ‘stock-exchange humanist’. Someone unwise had brought Zweig along, and he was promptly treated to a performance of the sharply satirical ‘Song on the enlivening effect of money’ (words by Brecht, music by Eisler). He was not amused. It was a somewhat cruel thing to do to a fellow émigré, but Eisler tells it with relish in this book of his conversations – sometimes gossip – (held between 1958 and 1962) with Hans Bunge, the first Director of the then new Brecht Archive in East Berlin. Brecht had died aged 58 in 1956.

The title of the German original of this book (translated by Bunge’s daughter) was Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht (‘Ask me more about Brecht’). However, Eisler’s ebullience, not to say vanity, suggest that a more accurate title would have been ‘Ask me more about me’, because a question about a work of Brecht’s often elicits an answer about the music Eisler composed for it. Much as he admires Brecht, Eisler cannot help pushing himself forward. It may have been his Viennese nature, but he also has a complacent way of talking about ‘we Marxists’, and labelling people bourgeois or petty bourgeois. As the son of a bourgeois family (his father a professor of philosophy in Vienna), this may be a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much’. Brecht also came from a bourgeois family (his father owned a paper factory), but he was not ebullient or vain, but reserved and often described as ‘courteous’.

Bunge tells in his introduction how, at Eisler’s suggestion, he originally planned a volume of ‘Conversations about Brecht’, and how this was changed to a book of ‘Eisler conversations’. Hence the main subject of this book is a composer, still sadly little known in the UK, except among Brecht readers who know Eisler’s wonderfully moving settings of Brecht’s works, especially poems, not often performed. Eisler was devoted to Brecht and talks gladly and generously about him, but still cannot help superimposing himself.

Eisler speaks pithily – he likes to say dialectically – but also provocatively (admirers of Richard Strauss beware!) about musicians and the history of music from Monteverdi to Schoenberg. Especially Schoenberg, because Eisler had been his pupil since 1919, when Eisler was twenty. He deplored what he called Schoenberg’s ‘petty-bourgeois politics’, but believed him to be a musical and theoretical genius.

If Schoenberg was Eisler’s maestro, Brecht was his ‘cherished old friend’, comrade and collaborator. The account here of how Eisler got the two together in Californian exile is unique, instructive and enjoyable, including Eisler’s nervousness about how Brecht would behave towards his own revered teacher.

Too much of the material records Eisler’s stream of consciousness wherever it takes him, including his own compositions, music in general, and his First World War experiences. The book is also a work of the old German Democratic Republic preserved in aspic, with fulsome compliments to Lenin and GDR cultural policy, and retaining many of the original footnotes, filially translated.

However, there are unusually detailed discussions about Brecht’s relations with the German Communist Party, of which he was never a member. Eisler calls him a Bolshevik outside the party, but discusses in detail Brecht’s hostility to the Popular Front in 1935. Brecht insisted on upholding the property question (i.e. the struggle against capitalism) in the fight against fascism, rather than support Communist coalition with other anti-fascists. There are also interesting comments on Brecht’s admiring attitude to the collageist John Heartfield (who has a blue plaque in Downshire Hill, NW3), and Brecht’s work with Charles Laughton on perhaps Brecht’s greatest play, Galileo.

At one moment, Eisler refers to Brecht as ‘this strange Bavarian puritan’. Brecht was born in Bavaria, and Eisler’s words seem a concise way of describing the mixture in Brecht of physical (Bavarian) delight in people and things (expressed in his poetry and plays), his work discipline, and a certain restraint and abstemiousness dictated by his bad health.

Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements (editors), Brecht, music and culture: Hanns Eisler in conversation with Hans Bunge, London: Bloomsbury, 2014

[ Camden New Journal, 2014 ]