Hanns Eisler - Ernste Gesänge; Lieder with piano (Matthias Goerne)

Information

Composer: Hanns Eisler

• Ernste Gesänge, für Instrumentalensemble & Bariton
• Lieder mit Klavier
• Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 1

Matthias Goerne, baritone

Ensemble Resonanz

Thomas Larcher, piano

Date: 2013

Label: harmonia mundi

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Review

Matthias Goerne has recorded songs by Hanns Eisler before. In 1998, near the start of his association with Decca, the baritone released a fine recording of the complete Hollywood Songbook, and he repeats 17 of those 50 settings here. But the real interest of the new disc is Goerne's performance, beautifully shaded and articulated, of Eisler's very last work, the Ernste Gesänge, for baritone and string orchestra.

These wonderful, sombre songs were begun in 1961 and completed the following year, a few weeks before Eisler's death. They were composed in the wake of the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist party, at which Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin and the atrocities under his regime. Those revelations had dealt the final shattering blow to Eisler's political idealism, and the songs, very much conceived as a final musical testament, are permeated with a sense of loss and regret. The texts come from a variety of poets, but, significantly, Brecht, who had supplied the words for so many of Eisler's songs, is not among them, and instead it is the poems of Hölderlin that figure most prominently. And while the vocal writing has the aching lyrical intensity that makes Eisler one of the 20th-century's greatest song composers, the accompaniments sometimes hark back to the expressionism of his earliest works, composed when he was studying with Schoenberg.

This is reinforced by the other work on this disc, the Piano Sonata that Eisler composed in 1922 and 1923, near the end of his studies with Schoenberg, and which he thought enough of to label as his Op 1. It is dedicated to his teacher, and some passages in it inhabit the same freely atonal world as Schoenberg's own Op 11 piano pieces, while other passages have a more ambiguous relationship to tonality, rather like early Berg. The sonata is played with careful attention to detail by Thomas Larcher, who also accompanies Goerne in the Hollywood songs. It is a fascinating and hugely rewarding disc.

— Andrew Clements

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Hanns Eisler (6 July 1898 – 6 September 1962) was a German-Austrian composer. He studied in Vienna under Arnold Schoenberg, to whom he dedicated his early Piano Sonata. After moving to Berlin in 1925, he wrote for workers' movements and began a long collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. Forced into exile in 1933, he lived across Europe before settling in the United States, where he composed chamber works, film scores and the Hollywood Songbook. Returning to Europe in 1948, he settled in East Berlin, and composed the national anthem of East Germany. The Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin is named after him.

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Matthias Goerne (born March 31, 1967 in Weimar) is a German baritone. He studied with Hans-Joachim Beyer in Leipzig, and with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Since his opera début at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, Matthias Goerne has appeared on opera stages worldwide with carefully chosen roles. He has recently completed the recording of a series of selected Schubert songs on 12 CDs for harmonia mundi (The Goerne/Schubert Edition) with eminent pianists. His latest recordings of Brahms songs with Christoph Eschenbach and of Mahler songs with the BBC Symphony have received rave reviews.

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