Nijmegen, 26 – 28 November 1999
| The Internationale
Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft, musician Frank van Merwijk and the European Foundation
Joris Ivens will organise several activities around the German composer
Hanns Eisler and filmmaker Joris Ivens, both born in 1898. Hanns Eisler
and Joris Ivens met in the cultural Mecca of the twenties: Berlin. After
avant-garde formal experiments the two men brought their art into action
against fascism and in favour of the communist labour movement in the thirties.
Their professional co-operation began in Magnitogorsk in 1932. It resulted
in the Suite für Orchester Nr 4 opus 30 (Die Jugend hat das
wort) accompanying the film Pesn O gerojach (Komsomol, Song of Heroes).
For the film New earth(1933) Eisler arranged the film music of Kuhle
Wampe. The sequence of the closure of the Wieringermeer dike has become
a classic: in it the photographic and techniological editing qualities of
Ivens and Helen van Dongen are linked to the compositional power of Hanns
Eisler’s music. In 1936 Ivens travelled to the United States. Eisler
arrived there in 1938, banned from his own country. In that year Ivens made
The 400 Million and he asked his friend to write the misucusic for
it; the first time that the twelve-tone system of music is incorporated
in a documentary film. In 1941 the roles are reversed: Eisler asks Ivens
if he can use the silent film Rain for his ‘Film Music Project’
which he lead at the New School of Social Research in New York. Afterwards
Eisler considered the quintet Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben
(Fourteen ways of describing the rain) as his best chamber music. He dedicated it to the 70-year-old Schönberg. After he was exiled from America Eisler meets Ivens again in Prague in 1948 where they lived together with Marion Michelle and Catherine Duncan for some months. The artistically interesting co-operation of these two kindred spirits and pioneers in their speciality is offered in films, concerts and lectures. |
