Hanns Eisler on the Move: Tracing Mobility in the 'Reisesonate'

Abstract

FROM 1929, HANNS EISLER spent much of his time journeying. Film projects brought him to the Soviet Union, and he travelled with his music to concerts in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. When Hitler was named German chancellor in January 1933, Eisler was already on the move. The composer followed Bertolt Brecht to Denmark, wrote music in Paris, travelled across Europe to concerts, and planned multiple trips, often via London, to the United States, where connections through New York's New School of Social Research ushered him across North America. Engaged in the artistic multitasking characteristic of his entire career, Eisler was collaborating, composing, conducting, and coordinating the international workers' music movement, and the exilic networking and travel from 1933 paved the way for his migration to the United States in 1938. In the profoundest sense, Eisler's displacement has fashioned, obscured, and faded his portrait as a composer. A recent collection of essays on the composer, edited by Hartmut Krones, asks a question with its title, as it expresses the authors' difficulty locating and emplacing their subject: Hanns Eisler: Ein Komponist ohne Heimat? 2 Across studies of his 'exile', the composer's itinerancy protrudes. 'Just when he'd arrived, suddenly he wasn't there', Hans Christian NÖrregaard remarked on Eisler's 'presence' in the German exile community around Bertolt Brecht in Svendborg, Denmark. 3 There he never stayed long enough to request a residence permit, and NÖrregaard based his study of the composer's whereabouts on anecdotes extrapolated from letters