Hanns Eisler – Hollywood Songbook (Lieder of the Exile) – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Hanns Eisler and his wife, Lou, spent the last five years of their exile in southern California, where he supported his family by composing film scores for RKO Studios—winning Oscar nominations in 1943 and 1944.
One of his most remarkable works—a cycle of art songs, or “lieder”, titled the “Hollywood Songbook”—was completed in this period. In a mixture of styles (twelve-tone, romantic, blues), the cycle is based on poems by Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare, Mörike and Hölderlin.
As a whole, they confirm Eisler’s reputation as one of the most able composers of lieder in the 20th century.
Like his other work, the songs are communicative and direct—some of them last no more than one or two minutes.

Free of sentimentality, they nevertheless express a concentrated emotional clarity. The German baritone Matthias Goerne offers this admiring assessment: “For me, this chance discovery of this huge body of work by a real 20th century composer was a revelation, in that here was an artist comparable, in my opinion, to Brahms. The integrity, the consciousness of the times is so very great in Eisler that I was inspired to combine his songs with those of Schubert…. [O]ne might say that the ‘Hollywood Liederbuch’ is the ‘Winterreise’ of our times.”

Here´s the interpretation of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Aribert Reimann on piano:

Hanns Eisler Hollywood Songbook (Lieder of the Exile)
(192 kbps, ca. 61 MB)