EISLER - LOST IN HOLLYWOOD - Live-Audiodeskription mit Kopfhörern
11/27/2026
at 8:00 PM
/ Dresden
The man and composer Hanns Eisler is at the center of the new production by the Compagnie Freaks und Fremde: contradictory, witty, combative, and full of longing - a terribly small man in a grotesquely large world. His songs are sung on all the streets of the world, yet in Hollywood, there is no happy ending for him despite an Oscar nomination. In the Cold War, his dreams freeze. Eisler's life and work are shaped by the cultural upheavals of his time, by political struggle, flight, and exile, and by his own ambition to create something useful, in the fight for an art that can recognize and change people. From the collage of selected songs and surprising scenic elements, animated video projections, and puppetry emerges the portrait of an extraordinary composer.
Hanns Eisler's compositions are multifaceted, challenging, and extremely lively. He set poems and newspaper articles to music, wrote for theater, workers' choirs, and soloists, for amateur and professional instrumental ensembles. His music thundered from cinema speakers and resonated at street demonstrations. He filled concert halls and made people laugh in pubs.
Throughout his life, he engaged in both theory and practice regarding music and its cultural function. He saw himself as a genius but was also always a doubter of his own claims. A man who loved and lived contradictions and became one of the most controversial artists of the 20th century. His life and work document the history of Europe in the last century, struggling through the trenches of the First World War into revolutions, economic crises, and the terror of dictatorships, ultimately freezing in the great ideological fronts of the Cold War after the defeat of Nazi Germany. As a young composer, he criticizes the established art scene and its performance practices, questions the role of the artist and art in society, and demands nothing less than a revolution in music.
He wants to create "useful" things as an artist, putting individual ambitions aside and linking his musical work with the fight against war and social injustice, for a better, more peaceful world. His esteemed teacher Arnold Schönberg would prefer to spank him for that. However, workers enthusiastically embrace his - their - new revolutionary music, singing it worldwide in the streets, and later even in the trenches of Spain. The National Socialists like the familiar melodies for their own propaganda. A mere reference under the new text suffices, and one can skip printing the scores. The composer lands on the blacklist. For Hanns Eisler, like for many of his contemporaries, an odyssey begins. He ultimately finds a place in the USA where he can live and work after many stations and obstacles.
Eisler roots himself - in contradiction to the fateful 'thrown-ness' of exile - musically anchors himself literally at a different standpoint, pours the old cultural roots into new soil. He writes against the senselessness and emptiness, noting snapshots of moods, memories, and experiences of exiles and compositions for an unknown future.
The productive collaboration with poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht continues here. The two artists describe in the 'Hollywood Elegies' the confrontation with the phenomenon of Hollywood, where behind the facades of the dream factories the abysses of the unvarnished capitalist film industry clash at the center of American culture.
Over time in America, his expertise is appreciated, securing film commissions to support his livelihood, and two of his film scores are even nominated for an Oscar. However, he cannot stay here either. Just two years after the end of World War II, the growing anti-communist paranoia in America announces the Cold War: he is dubbed the "Karl Marx of music" and thus Hanns Eisler is expelled from the country.
He settles in the GDR, where he receives a professorship, can work on the complete edition of his works, and collaborate with Brecht. While his avant-garde works are hardly performed and Hanns Eisler's Faust scorches in the formalistic cultural policy, the composer of the national anthem is placed high on a pedestal.
The contradictory life of this man and his diverse work is a rich source for the Compagnie Freaks und Fremde and their critical engagement with the world. Eisler inspires a search for unsentimental poetry, hidden in the tension between text and sound. In the best sense, it is good entertainment: thought-provoking and perhaps a little uncomfortable.
Artistic direction, scenography, performance: Sabine Köhler, Heiki Ikkola | Musical direction, live music: Frieder Zimmermann | Special guest: Tobias Herzz Hallbauer | Video editing, projections: Beate Oxenfart | Technical direction, lighting design: Josia Werth | Assistant direction, dramaturgy: Jörg Lehmann | Camera, pre-production: Eckart Reichl | Guest musicians studio production: Anna Schumann, Anna Zepnick | Voice studio production: Boris Schwiebert
Duration: approx. 85 minutes
For blind and visually impaired audience members, we offer live audio description during the performances on November 27 and 28, 2026, and a tactile stage tour at 7:00 PM (meeting point foyer). Please indicate when purchasing tickets or making reservations if you would like to take advantage of this offer. Assistance dogs are welcome!
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
