A private pupil of Schoenberg, who described him as one of his most gifted students, Hanns Eisler stands as one of the most fascinating composers of the 20th century – a composer whose left-wing political affiliations saw him forced into exile with the rise of the Nazis, who subsequently settled in the USA and was denounced first by his sister to the FBI and then by Nixon himself as ‘the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field’ (to which Eisler retorted that he was ‘very flattered’ by the comparison), leading to deportation back to Europe in 1948. He was one of Bertolt Brecht’s chief collaborators in political songs, films and stage works (the two resumed contact in Hollywood after Eisler’s move to the US), also working with other notable types such as the singer Ernst Busch and writing politico-intellectual subject matter. After his return to Germany, where he settled in Stalinist East Berlin, he became enormously influential in re-stimulating musical life, teaching at the Berlin College of Music that now bears his name and taking the composition masterclass at the Academy of Arts.

This 10CD box is a tribute to the composer, revealing the enormous amount of music he wrote in a vast variety of styles, from tuneful mass songs to Schoenberg’s 12-note method. Believing as he did in the functionality of music, Eisler employed whatever idiom was appropriate to the task in hand, including drawing inspiration from jazz and popular songs and distortions of military music. Though he wrote some very large works (such as the Deutsche Sinfonie – part symphony, part cantata, part ‘German Requiem’), he was especially a master of small forms, as we see for instance in his Kleine Sinfonie, largely derived from his film music of 1930–2 (and which adheres to his credo that music can offer a new utilisation when it forges links with other artistic forms of expression). Many of his works are of course political-based, but what becomes apparent throughout listening to his oeuvre is that, while rejecting all the rhetoric of Romanticism, Eisler never lost faith in firm technique and the value of solid contrapuntal work. A wealth of talent is assembled for this album, from the first-rate German ensembles Staatskapelle Dresden and Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester to lauded artists such as the character actress Gisela May and the soprano Irmgard Arnold, who can be heard in rehearsal with the composer himself.