Framing Two Accompaniments to Brecht, Music and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge

Summary

In 1954, while working as one of Bertolt Brecht's assistants at the Berliner Ensemble, Hans Bunge began recording Brecht in rehearsal. Thanks to these recordings, we have today a unique, firsthand source of information on the way in which Brecht worked. As well as recording rehearsals, Bunge also interviewed many of Brecht's friends and colleagues and asked them about their experiences of their artistic association with Brecht, the nature of their collaboration, and their thoughts about the Brechtian theater. Among those he interviewed was the composer Hanns Eisler, one of Brecht's professional collaborators and his closest friend.

The conversations, although part of the German edition of Eisler's complete works (published in the GDR in 1975 under the title Hanns Eisler Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht), have never been fully translated into English. Fifty-three years after Eisler's death and fifty-nine after Brecht's, these fascinating conversations are now available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Sabine Berendse (Hans Bunge's daughter) and Paul Clements translated and edited the German original. It was published in October 2014 by Bloomsbury under the title: Brecht, Music and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge.

The two texts that follow connect with that volume but are not found in its pages. The first is one of the introductions for the 1975 edition, by the renowned Marxist musicologist, conductor, and pianist Georg Knepler. For reasons of space, the English translation of Knepler's text was not included in the Bloomsbury volume. I am pleased that it can appear here because it gives a detailed and informative overview of the Eisler-Bunge conversations and establishes the book's rightful place in history.

The second text, written by Manfred Bierwisch, the internationally acclaimed German linguist and Hans Bunge's close friend, was originally a memorial address on the occasion of Bunge's ninetieth birthday and the opening of his personal archive to the public at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The article provides a sensitive and fascinating view of Bunge's remarkable life, a life, furthermore, that was formed through World War II, by his decision to settle in the socialist GDR and that was immensely influenced by Bertolt Brecht and his work.