Music: Left Face

Composer Hanns Eisler earns his living by writing music for the movies. He dislikes both his work and his employers. According to him, “. . . No serious composer writes for the motion pictures for any other than money reasons.” Last week Left-Winger Eisler blamed Hollywood’s “moguls” for the sad state of film music. “They are afraid of their own shadows, which they mistakenly think is public taste. … I realize my remarks are a little risky, but I like risky remarks.”

Eisler is riskier still in a new book, Composing for the Films (Oxford University Press; $3), just out. In it, he tees off not only on the producers but on the public: “The practitioners of commercial music … have had to deal with an illiterate, intolerant, and uncritical public taste, and they have had to bow to it if they wanted to remain true to their dubious maxim: give the public nothing but what the public wants. . . . The alleged will of the public is manifested only indirectly, through the box-office receipts. . . .”

Trash on High. Eisler denies that there is any such thing as a “history” of film music: “The person who around 1910 first conceived the repulsive idea of using the Bridal March from Lohengrin as an accompaniment is no more of a historical figure than any other secondhand dealer.” Neither does he think that movie music is getting much better: “Progress has become perverted into calculating the audience’s reactions, and the result is a combination of third-rate entertainment, maudlin sentimentality. … It consists only in the fact that trash was taken out of its humble hiding place and set up as an official institution.”

As a student of famed Atonalist Arnold Schonberg, Eisler won Vienna’s Academy of Music prize for composition in 1924. Among his U.S. film scores: The Woman on the Beach, Rain. He was exiled from Germany in 1933, is scheduled to testify about himself this week before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Brother Gerhart, identified as one of the top Communists in the U.S., rushed to Hanns’s defense last week. Hanns is being persecuted, he said, “only because he is my brother and loves me as I love him.* … [His] whole life is only connected with art.” Gerhart did not tell the whole truth: on a visit to Moscow in 1935, Hanns was made head of the International Music Bureau. He composed the Communist battle song Komintern.

* Sister Ruth apparently loves neither one and is loved by neither. Onetime leader of Germany’s Communists, she was tossed out of the party in 1926 and now edits an anti-Stalinist newsletter in the U.S. Gerhart she has described as “the perfect terrorist type,” Hanns “a Communist in every philosophical sense of the word.” Hanns in turn calls her his “former sister” and Gerhart refers to her as a member of a “rogue and rat gallery.”