Come into the Open Friend! Or: Against Idiocy in Music

(Komm! Ins Offene Freund! Oder gegen die Dummheit in der Musik)

GDR, 1989, 23 min, b&w
In German; English subtitles
Credits:

Synopsis

Music students rehearse Hanns Eisler’s Ernste Gesänge (Serious Songs), the 7-part song cycle that the composer wrote four weeks before his death in 1962. In his Serious Songs—which incorporate lyrics by Friedrich Hölderlin and others—Eisler reflects on his experiences in exile during the Nazi years and his expectations upon settling in East Germany after the war.

 

Although he was one of the GDR’s most renowned composers, he had difficulties with the country’s cultural policies; his 1952 opera libretto Johann, for example, was banned when officials found the work to be “pessimistic, alien, hopeless and anti-national.” This documentary also includes excerpts from a rare historical recording of a conversation between Hanns Eisler and Hans Bunge, author and assistant dramaturg and director at the Berliner Ensemble.

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