{"id":10325,"date":"2024-04-26T08:49:33","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T06:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/?p=10325"},"modified":"2024-04-26T12:36:32","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T10:36:32","slug":"eislertage-wien-2023-drei-unangepasste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/2024\/04\/26\/eislertage-wien-2023-drei-unangepasste\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"The 2023 Eisler Days in Vienna: Three \u201cNonconformists\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"On 4 and 5 December 2023, the mdw once again did justice to its reputation as a centre of research on Hanns Eisler. The predecessor to today\u2019s Department of Musical Acoustics had already held two Eisler symposia in 2003 and 2009 as well as presented the volume Hanns Eisler \u2013 Ein Komponist ohne Heimat?<\/i> [\u2026 \u2013 A Composer Without a Home?]. These efforts were followed in 2018 by the symposium Zwischen Welten \u2013 Hanns Eisler und die Umbruchjahre 1918\u201338\u201349\u201368 <\/i>[Between Worlds \u2013 Hanns Eisler and the Sea Changes of 1918\u201338\u201349\u201368] <\/i>at the mdw\u2019s Department of Musicology and Performance Studies. The same department went on this past December to host the Viennese edition of the \u201cEislerTage 2023\u201d in cooperation with the International Hanns Eisler Society, the Hanns and Steffy Eisler Foundation in Berlin, the Georg and Alice Eisler Fund for Visual Artists and Composers in Vienna, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Vienna, and the museums of the Viennese districts of Landstra\u00dfe and Wieden.<\/i><\/p>\n
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Hanns Eisler in Hollywood, 1943 \u00a9 Archiv J\u00fcrgen Schebera.de<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This symposium\u2019s title of \u201cThree \u2018Nonconformists\u2019\u201d also referred to the composer\u2019s son, painter Georg Eisler (1928\u20131988), as well as to Erwin Ratz (1898\u20131973), a fellow Sch\u00f6nberg pupil and mdw professor who taught theory of form. Exhibitions were devoted to both of these figures, a programme of music by Eisler presented by Ensemble Kontrapunkte witnessed the inauguration of the Georg and Alice Eisler Award for Composers, and the First Women\u2019s Chamber Orchestra of Austria took the stage together with Winnie B\u00f6we (voice) and Christoph Keller (piano) to perform works by Hanns Eisler, Gustav Mahler, Karl Heinz F\u00fcssl, and Wilhelm Zobl in the mdw\u2019s Fanny-Hensel-Saal. The central event of the EislerTage was the symposium itself, introduced by mdw Rector Ulrike Sych and opened by Executive City Councillor for Cultural Affairs and Science Veronika Kaup-Hasler, which enriched the general state of knowledge regarding the life and works of these three \u201cnonconformists\u201d by a copious array of new insights.<\/p>\n

Stefan Schmidl highlighted numerous aspects of Eisler\u2019s music composed for Viennese film productions during the 1950s, while Hannes Heher\u2019s study of the largely unknown Viennese archive of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) shed light on Eisler\u2019s brief presence there as well as on the long-running activities of Erwin Ratz. Philipp Maurer, who volunteers as director of the district museum of Wieden, applied his Wieden-related knowledge to full effect concerning Hanns Eisler and Wieden\u2019s Neues Theater in der Scala, <\/i>and Hartmut Krones revealed a number of new data points as well as insights into Eisler\u2019s anxieties and fears during his early East Berlin years gleaned from examination of the correspondence between Lou Eisler and Hilde Gl\u00fcck. Viola Gro\u00dfbach provided intriguing glimpses into the collaboration between Eisler and Bertolt Brecht in the context of Eisler\u2019s cantata Bilder aus der Kriegsfibel.<\/i> And finally, Peter Konopatsch documented the extremely intense musical collaboration between Eisler and Ratz in light of extant scores.<\/p>\n

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Erwin Ratz, 1920 \u00a9 Arnold Schoenberg Center Wien<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The visual output of painter Georg Eisler was introduced by Alice Hundsdorfer-Zhou, who placed special emphasis on the thematic areas of anxiety, war, and poverty. Marjana Uhde spoke about Georg Eisler\u2019s work diaries, conveying a precise impression of his creative process and international encounters. Hartmut Krones conversed with three of the painter\u2019s close acquaintances: Franz Hofbauer, who knew the artist since childhood and owns a great number of paintings by him; Manfred Wagner, who curated exhibitions together with Eisler as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to have him appointed to a professorship in art education; and Philipp Maurer, who worked together intensively with Eisler in connection with a 1992 exhibition at Vienna\u2019s kleine galerie. Erwin Ratz was given an initial introduction by Antonia Teibler, who has spent many years studying the materials to be found in his estate and was able to present numerous new finds relevant to his biography and activities. mdw Archive head Severin Matiasovits then spoke about Erwin Ratz and the Academy\/Hochschule of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and touched upon the \u201cheadwinds\u201d that the Sch\u00f6nberg student encountered here.<\/p>\n

Renate Stark-Voit shone a spotlight on Ratz\u2019s services to the International Gustav Mahler Society, which he founded, and on his contributions to the complete critical edition of Mahler\u2019s works. Hartmut Krones then spoke about Erwin Ratz as a member of Sch\u00f6nberg\u2019s circle: Ratz engaged in written correspondence with his teacher Sch\u00f6nberg until shortly before the latter\u2019s death, and he also exchanged letters with important figures including Egon Wellesz, Josef Trauneck, Hilda Steuermann, Rudolf Kolisch, and Max Deutsch. A round table discussion moderated by Christian Glanz, who teaches at the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies and heads the mdw\u2019s Center for Research on Gustav Mahler and Viennese Modernism, served to conclude the symposium. Statements by Zubin Mehta, Alfred Brendel, G\u00f6sta Neuwirth, HK Gruber, and Klaus-Peter Sattler were presented in recorded form or read aloud, while Friedrich C. Heller, Ren\u00e9 Staar, and Johannes Kretz (a grandnephew of Ratz) spoke in person and provided a lively impression of the personality of this \u201cnonconformist\u201d in all his likeability paired with unwavering commitment to his musical and humanist values.<\/p>\n

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On 4 and 5 December 2023, the mdw once again did justice to its reputation as a \ufeffcentre of research on Hanns Eisler. The same department went on this past December to host the Viennese edition of the \u201cEislerTage 2023\u201d in cooperation with the International Hanns Eisler Society, the Hanns and Steffy Eisler Foundation in Berlin, the Georg and Alice Eisler Fund for Visual Artists and Composers in Vienna, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Vienna, and the museums of the Viennese districts of Landstra\u00dfe and Wieden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":10328,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1484,1497,1498,1375],"class_list":["post-10325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-report","tag-2024-2","tag-eislertage","tag-erwinratz","tag-hannseisler"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/365"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10325"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10530,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10325\/revisions\/10530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}