Against "Collective Caruso": Male Vulnerability in Hanns Eisler's Early Choruses.

Composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, engaged with the German Männerchor tradition in complex ways in 1925. Having broken with his teacher Schoenberg and in the process of moving from Vienna to Berlin, Eisler fragmented and set three political poems by Heinrich Heine for male voices. These choruses satirize the nationalist bombast of right‐wing choirs in Weimar Germany (in forced male voices Eisler criticized as "collective Caruso"). At the same time, this music voices masculine vulnerability in a period of still only partly processed post‐World‐War‐I trauma. Particularly in the first chorus, "Tendenz," extremes of vocal range combined with musical tropes such as the Baroque "step of sorrow" result in music that push the male voice to its limits and encode more collective mourning than ideological zeal. Where Eisler cuts Heine's more explicitly critical lines of text, the musical score voices what the words do not: rather than what Helmut Lethen has called the Weimar‐era culture of "coolness," a collective voice emerges, both parodic and pained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]