Hanns Eisler - Chöre - Choral Music - Choers

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) was a German composer, pupil of Arnold Schoenberg . In 1926, he joined the German Communist party, thereafter producing protest songs and other music expressive of left-wing ideals, and began a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht.

He fled Naziism for the United States in 1933, settled in Los Angeles, created scores for a variety of films, and became musical assistant to Charlie Chaplin (1942-47). Called before the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and castigated as a Communist, he left the United States in 1948, living first in Vienna and then in East Berlin, where he wrote music for 17 films and numerous plays as well as a large number of songs in cabaret style. During his career, he also wrote symphonies, choral compositions, chamber music, and art songs. His music is rigorously crafted, witty, and expressive. Eisler also wrote the book "Composing for the Films" (1947). He died in East Berlin and is buried near Brecht in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery.

Eisler was striving in the later years of the Weimar Republic to develop a communicative style of political song. The recordings on this CD testify to Hanns Eisler´s change of position since 1925/26: away from the largely Schoenberg-oriented chamber music of the bourgeois concert hall toward critical qualification of the worker´s music movement and the new stoff of "battle music". These choruses were written to be sung by Communist choral societies in the "Agitprop" (Agitation-Propaganda) movement. Most of Eisler's best-known political choruses are on this album, including "Coal for Mike," a Brecht song based on Sherwood Anderson's story about a railroad worker's widow in Ohio.

Hanns Eisler - Chöre - Choral Music - Choers (192 kbps)