Hanns Eisler

The reputation of Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) in his native Germany is remarkably different from his reputation in the United States, where he lived from 1937 until 1948.  After his American sojourn Eisler settled in East Berlin, where he was promptly elected to the German Academy of Arts and for twelve years served as an esteemed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik.  After his death, the school was renamed the Eisler Conservatory in his honor, and in 1994 the reunified Germany officially supported both the founding of an International Hanns Eisler Society and the launch of a critical edition of Eisler's collected works.

In contrast, Eisler in the United States remains known primarily as a once-upon-a-time modernist who withdrew from serious critical consideration when in the mid-1920s he boldly espoused the idea that music is useless if it is directed only toward sophisticated ears; he is known as well for composing scores for a handful of largely mediocre Hollywood films and for having co-authored, with Theodor Adorno, a densely theoretical book on film music. The most enduring aspect of Eisler's fame in the United States, however, has to do not with music but with politics. Eisler was suspected of being an "enemy of the American people" and thus subjected to six years of intense scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; although no incriminating evidence was found, Eisler in 1947 nevertheless was subjected to prolonged and harsh public questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his exit from the United States was spurred by an official order for deportation.

American attitudes toward Eisler's music are changing for the positive, but only slowly. As British musicologist David Blake wrote in his entries on Eisler for both the 1980 and the 2000 editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, probably "no composer has suffered more from the post-1945 cultural cold war."