| About | |
| Contact Us | |
| Articles | |
| Topic Index | |
| Reports | |
| Quotes | |
| On the Web | |
| Links | |
| TW Tracker | |
| Support | |
Times Watch for
July 11, 2003
“Lost”
Communist Composer’s “Politics of Emancipation”?
Music writer Jeremy Eichler used the occasion of an Eisler revival of sorts during the Lincoln Center Festival to demand some due for this “progressive” cultural avatar, whose “music seems to be perpetually on the brink of a revival that never arrives.” The unfortunately named German composer Heiner Goebbels makes sure a small Eisler statue stands at center stage for each performance, Hanns-up: “This pint-size musical revolutionary stands with his clenched fists raised.” Goose-stepping is not required by the orchestra.
Eichler complained: “If, more than 50 years after his death, his work is little remembered today, it is largely because he spent his career prostrate to the faltering God of socialism, seeking an elusive wedding of progressive music and progressive politics and ultimately lending his formidable gifts to history's losing side.” Why, in this day and age, is Soviet-style communism still being described as “progressive”?
While millions died in the concentration camps and Berlin Wall guards shot escapees in the back, Eichler can only complain about loyal communist musicians: “Indeed, Eisler deserves more than the strange purgatory into which he has been consigned: the composer in residence of a failed utopia, the author of the national anthem for a country that no longer exists. He did not always succeed in his goals, but they were often worthy ones…Eisler's dream of finding an advanced music of bright originality and real communicative power speaks as loudly now as it did in his own deeply troubled time.” Perhaps only in the New York Times will you find the concept of “bright originality” and East Germany in the same paragraph.
Eisler’s heartfelt communist beliefs were apparently caused by some mysterious virus, for he was “drawn to the tumult of Weimar Berlin, where he could not resist the call of revolution. He joined the German Communist Party and began writing agitprop music in a simple and direct style.” His teacher, composer Arnold Schoenberg, disapproved of his student's didactic work: “He could handle the ‘emancipation of dissonance,’ his phrase for his 12-tone technique, but he had no patience for his student's politics of emancipation.”
Eichler’s icon of emancipation was “notoriously” brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and “accused of being ‘the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical field.’ Eisler, who joined the German Communist Party in 1926, responded, ‘I would be flattered.’” Eisler had written some film scores in Hollywood, but was deported in 1948. (Remember that when they tell you there were no communists in Hollywood. You read it in the Times.) Eichler also touted Eisler’s Marxist prose essays, written with a “keen dialectical mind” that protested how “music functions as a sort of opiate that placates the workers and forestalls their struggle for justice.”
Now that the Soviet super-state has been discredited, Eichler concluded: “it is impossible to judge Eisler's musical or political choices divorced from their time and place,” but that his vision of art loyally wedded to totalitarian Marxism had so much promise: “After a century whose convulsions shook music to its core, Eisler's dreams still resonate.” It’s hard to imagine the Times touting the German composers loyal to the Nazi regime and lyrically concluding their “dreams still resonate.”
There’s something you didn’t think you’d see in the 21st century: Erich Honecker chic. It also invaded the front section, where the “Berlin Journal” by reporter Richard Bernstein plays the violin for the “tacky Marxist edifice” called the Palace of the Republic in the former East Berlin, where 57-year-old musician Udo Lindenborg remembered how he had once had the joy “to sing with Harry Belafonte at a peace concert in 1985.”
For the complete Jeremy Eichler appreciation, click here.
For the Richard Bernstein story, click here.
John M. Broder’s Thursday story on the California recall doesn’t find any liberals in the “pro-Davis forces” trying to prevent a recall election of Gov. Gray Davis, but it does note Rep. Darrell Issa is a “conservative Republican” and was “twice arrested (but not convicted) on charges of car theft more than two decades ago.”
Describing the whole recall process as a bender with a potentially “throbbing political hangover,” Broder refers to “pro-Davis forces,” “Davis supporters,” and the “pro-Davis camp,” but never described the coalition of anti-gun groups, unions, environmental groups, and other supporting Davis as “liberal.”
But Davis critics do get the label, and then some. Broder reported: “So far, only two people have officially declared their candidacy for governor — Darrell Issa, a conservative Republican member of Congress from San Diego County who failed in a 1998 Senate primary bid, and Peter Camejo, who ran for governor last fall on the Green Party ticket without leaving a deep impression on the electorate. The Davis forces are already reminding voters that Mr. Issa, who made an estimated $100 million in a car-alarm business, was twice arrested (but not convicted) on charges of car theft more than two decades ago and lost his business to a suspicious fire.”
Not even the Green Party candidate gets a left-wing label, but Issa was conservative and suspicious. Broder hurled the opposition-research from Issa’s opponents, but did not produce any remarks from him on these matters, although he’s been responding to some of them since Democrats used them to foil Issa in a 1998 Senate run. Liberals often believe in innocence until guilt is proven, just not in campaign stories on conservatives.
For the complete Broder story, click here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org