[78-L] Eislers and Brecht

[David Lewis]

Reading further back into the thread (sorry I didn't do that first, gang):

> When they both were in the U.S., did Hans and Brecht do any collaborations? > Recording?

They worked on the 1943 film Hangman Also Die!, directed by Fritz Lang. Eisler wrote the music and Brecht wrote the screenplay along with Lang and John Wexley. Eisler wrote three film scores in Hollywood and was Oscar nominated for two of them.

> How did Hans come to link up with Charles Laughton for the Decca Christmas 
> Pickwick Papers album?  Was this also performed on radio?

Don't know about radio, but Brecht was very close with Laughton. Brecht wrote the play "Galileo" for Laughton in 1938 and they made a short German-language film version of it in 1947 for which Eisler supplied the music.

> I don't know if he connected with Schoenberg in Hollywod, but just about 
> every other composer did. 

Eisler did reconnect with Schoenberg in the early 1940s in Hollywood. They worked out their differences; Eisler had broken with the Schoenberg school rather violently in 1926 when Eisler took up the cudgel of communism and openly accused his former teacher of being a bourgeois elitist.

Here is a sampler I put together some time ago of some of Eisler's early film soundtrack music. These are not original recordings, but ones made in the 1970s as part of the East German label Eterna's attempt to record all of Eisler's music -- these were among the last things recorded as part of that project, which lasted from 1963 to 1979. 

http://www.box.net/shared/jyjimdgpna

Uncle Dave Lewis
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