Eisler - Piano Sonata No. 3; II Adagio

Second movement from Piano Sonata No. 3 (1943)

For cziffra1988

According to Günter Mayer:

"In his early creative period Hanns Eisler saw the piano as virtually the focus of his compositional identity, the place where it was shaped and transformed. He was unable to begin his education as a composer until after the First World War—at the age of 20. At first he studied with Karl Weigl at the New Vienna Conservatory, but soon found him too conventional and straightforward. He went to Arnold Schoenberg, the best teacher of his day, and spent four years with him—until 1922/23—learning to 'really think musically'. He owed Schoenberg his 'honesty' and 'responsibility' in music and 'the lack of any kind of posturing'. The subject of his strict training was not his teacher's works but those of the classical masters. Arnold Schoenberg himself recognized Eisler's special talent at an early stage and did much to encourage him—despite the unbridgeable philosophical and social gulf between the socialist convictions of the pupil (who directed 2 Viennese workers' choirs during his studies) and the politically conservative attitudes of his teacher, who was and remained out of sympathy with the aims of the workers' movement.

This sonata is an exceptional work. It is among Eisler's most ambitious pieces of chamber music—full of passion, with vast dissonant conglomerations of sound in the outer movements and many lovely fragments of melody too, recalling the 'Viennese spirit' and the countless art songs written during those years. The overall structure is not determined here by serial technique. And yet the different levels are meaningfully related to one another by strict motivic elaboration or—as in the slow middle movement—by the use of double counterpoint. Here too the overall form emerges from awareness of extreme contradiction.

Christopher Keller—whose theoretical and performing knowledge of Eisler's piano music and more besides are second to none—remarked in this connection: 'Hectic development sections in the first movement spring straight from themes marked by friendly wisdom, turning their commentating distance into the immediacy of despairing gesticulation. This swing from level-headedness to despair in the first movement, the lament of the second movement and utterly joyless 'end of the party' in the third movement—they are all witness to the oppressive time in which Eisler wrote this sonata. It was the period of the Red Army's grim struggle against the fascist troops, which had regrouped at Kursk in July 1943 after their defeat at Stalingrad in January and February of that year and were attempting to regain the strategic initiative, something which was ultimately prevented after great losses on the Soviet side."

Category:

Music

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• hanns
• eisler
• schoenberg
• berg
• webern

[galas06]

thank you!

[3cplantin]

Thanks for posting Eisler's sonata, Hexameron! Beautiful to hear it (and follow the score, too)!