EISLER - LOST IN HOLLYWOOD
2/14/2025
at 8:00 PM
/ Dresden
The man and composer Hanns Eisler is at the center of the new production by Compagnie Freaks und Fremde: contradictory all around, 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, but in Hollywood there is no happy ending for him despite an Oscar nomination. During the Cold War, his dreams freeze. Eisler's life and work are shaped by the cultural upheavals of his time, by political struggle, by flight and exile, and by his own claim to create something useful, in the striving for an art that can recognize and change people. From the collage of selected songs and surprising scenic elements, animated video projections, and puppet theater emerges the portrait of an extraordinary composer.
Hanns Eisler's compositions are diverse, challenging, and extremely alive. He set poems and newspaper notes to music, wrote for theater, workers' choirs, and soloists, for amateur and professional instrumental ensembles. His music boomed from cinema speakers and resounded at street demonstrations. He filled concert halls and made people laugh in pubs.
Throughout his life, he engaged in theory and practice with music and its cultural function. He saw himself as a genius, but he was also always a doubter in his own case. 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 of the last century, which struggles through the trenches of the first world war leading into revolutions, economic crises, and dictatorships of terror, and ultimately, after the destruction of Nazi Germany, freezes in the great ideological fronts of the Cold War. As a young composer, he criticizes the established art industry 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 connects his musical work with the fight against war and social injustice, for a better, more peaceful world. His esteemed teacher Arnold Schönberg would have loved to spank him for that. But the workers enthusiastically embrace his - their - new revolutionary music, singing it worldwide on the streets, later also in the trenches of Spain. The National Socialists find the familiar melodies useful for their own propaganda. A reference under the new text is enough; one can save oneself the printing of the notes. The composer ends up on the blacklist. For Hanns Eisler, as for many of his contemporaries, an odyssey begins. After many stops and obstacles, he finally finds a place to live and work in the USA.
Eisler establishes himself - in contradiction to the fateful 'thrownness' of exile - musically literally at a different standpoint, pouring the old cultural roots into new earth. He writes against senselessness and emptiness, records snapshots of moods, memories, and experiences of the exiles and compositions for an unknown future.
The productive collaboration with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht continues here. In the 'Hollywood Elegies,' the two artists describe the confrontation with the phenomenon of Hollywood, where behind the facades of the dream factories, the abysses of the unvarnished capitalist film industry gape in the center of American culture.
Over time, his expertise is appreciated in America; film assignments secure 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 the "Karl Marx of music," and so Hanns Eisler is expelled from the country.
He settles in the GDR, where he gets 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 is scorched in the formalist cultural politics of hell, the composer of the national anthem is placed high on a pedestal.
The contradictory life of this man and his diverse work is a feast for Compagnie Freaks und Fremde and their critical engagement with the world. Eisler inspires a search for unsentimental poetry that hides in the tension between text and tone. In the best sense, 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. 90 minutes
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
