Hanns Eisler - The Hollywood Songbook (Matthias Goerne)

Information

Composer: Hanns Eisler

1. Wenn sie nachts lag und dachte (Der Sohn I)
2. Mein junger Sohn fragt mich (Der Sohn II)
3. And den kleinen Radioapparat
4. In den Weiden
5. Frühling
6. Speisekammer 1942
7. Auf der Flucht
8. Über den Selbstmord
9. Die Flucht
10. Gendenktafel für 4000 Soldaten
11. Epitaph auf einen in der Flandernschlacht Gefallenen
12. Spruch
13. Ostersonntag
14. Der Kirschdieb
15. Hotelzimmer 1942
16. Die Maske des Bösen
17. Despite these miseries
18. The only thing which consoles us
19. Die letzte Elegie
20. Winterspruch
21. Unter den grünen Pfefferbäumen (Fünf Elegien)
22. Die Stadt ist nach den Engeln genannt (Fünf Elegien)
23. Jeden Morgen, mein Brot zu verdienen (Fünf Elegien)
24. Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt (Fünf Elegien)
25. In den Hügeln wird Gold gefunden (Fünf Elegien)
26. Nightmare
27. Hollywood-Elegie Nr. 7
28. Der Schatzgräber
29. Panzerschlacht
30. L'Automne californien
31. Geselligkeit betreffend (Anakreontische Fragmente)
32. Dir auch wurde Sehnsucht... (Anakreontische Fragmente)
33. Die Unwürde des Alterns (Anakreontische Fragmente)
34. Später Triumph (Anakreontische Fragmente)
35. In der Frühe (Anakreontische Fragmente)
36. Erinnerung an Eichendorff und Schumann
37. An die Hoffnung (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
38. Andenken (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
39. Elegie 1943 (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
40. Die Heimat (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
41. An eine Stadt (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
42. Erinnerung (Hölderlin-Fragmente)
43. Der Mensch
44. Vom Sprengen des Gartens
45. Die Heimkehr
46. Die Landschaft des Exils

Matthias Goerne, baritone

Eric Schneider, piano

Date: 1998

Label: Decca

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Review

An issue of major importance, hugely impressive. Goerne has obviously been smitten by these wonderful, neglected songs: he calls them ‘the 20th century Winterreise’, and in performances as gripping as these it is hard to contradict him. They are Eisler’s songs of exile, written in Hollywood while the Germany for which he felt both passionate revulsion and deep nostalgia sank into the abyss. Most of the 46 short songs are settings of poems by Brecht, some written specifically for Eisler, but they also incorporate ‘mini-cycles’ to texts by Morike and Eichendorff, two poems by Blaise Pascal (set in English) and one or two others including a single poem by Eisler himself.

The songs are not here sung in the order in which Eisler eventually published them, but the sequence chosen makes poignant dramatic sense, chronicling Brecht’s and Eisler’s horror at what was happening in Germany, their flight and exile, their reaction to the alien world of Hollywood and meditations on Germany’s vanished past, hideous present and uncertain future. As performed here, the cycle ends with a loving homage to Schubert, ‘On Watering the Garden’, followed by the haunting and moving ‘Homecoming’, a vision of Berlin obliterated by bombardment, and by the intense and characteristically Eislerian lyricism of ‘Landscape of Exile’ (‘The ravines of California at evening … did not leave the messenger of misfortune unmoved’). These were Eisler’s first Lieder since his student days, and to convey his epic theme in a sequence of miniatures he ranged across all the styles available to him, from a terse, Schoenberg-derived angularity via Berlin cabaret towards, more and more as the sequence proceeds, deliberate evocation of Schubert, Schumann and Mahler.

They demand a prodigious expressive range from any singer who undertakes them. Goerne can sing ‘On Suicide’ with a mere thread of sound without ever losing the quality of his voice but can then swell in an instant to a formidable fff for the last syllable of the terrifying final line (‘People just throw their unbearable lives away’). The sheer beauty of his voice is just what those many homages to the Lied tradition need. His English is pretty good, his diction immaculate, and he makes a memorably sinister thing of the seventh Hollywood Elegy (set in English; Brecht’s German original is lost), that horrifying image of a man sinking in a swamp with a ‘ghastly, blissful smile’. Goerne has done nothing better; this is a masterly and profoundly moving achievement. His pianist is first-class, the recording admirable.

— Michael Oliver

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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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