Against "Collective Caruso": Male Vulnerability in Hanns Eisler's Early Choruses. (14th November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hart, Heidi
• Other Names: Kita Caroline guestEditor.; Markx Francien guestEditor.; Niekerk Carl guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: German quarterly. Volume 91:Number 4(2018)
• Page Start: 436
• Page End: 446
• Publication Date: 2018-11-14
• Subjects: Hanns Eisler -- vocal music -- Weimar Germany -- right‐wing politics -- masculinity; German language -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Duits; Allemand (Langue) -- Étude et enseignement -- Périodiques; Littérature allemande -- Histoire et critique -- Périodiques; Enseignement; Allemand (Langue); Culture allemande; Littérature allemande; Périodique électronique (Descripteur de forme); Ressource Internet (Descripteur de forme); 430.7
• DOI: 10.1111/gequ.12086
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-8831

Abstract

Abstract : Composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, engaged with the German Männerchor tradition in complex ways in 1925. Having broken with his teacher Schoenberg and in the process of moving from Vienna to Berlin, Eisler fragmented and set three political poems by Heinrich Heine for male voices. These choruses satirize the nationalist bombast of right‐wing choirs in Weimar Germany (in forced male voices Eisler criticized as "collective Caruso"). At the same time, this music voices masculine vulnerability in a period of still only partly processed post‐World‐War‐I trauma. Particularly in the first chorus, "Tendenz, " extremes of vocal range combined with musical tropes such as the Baroque "step of sorrow" result in music that push the male voice to its limits and encode more collective mourning than ideological zeal. Where Eisler cuts Heine's more explicitly critical lines of text, the musical score voices what the words do not: rather than what Helmut Lethen has called the Weimar‐era culture of "coolness, " a collective voice emerges, both parodic and pained.