Der Gesang als Asyl

This book is not about a coherent and well-rounded song cycle, but rather about a project that was dropped: a collection of over fifty piano songs that Hanns Eisler collected in 1942/43 in exile in California in a folder labeled Hollywood-Liederbuch, without later putting them into a binding cyclical order. This study first describes the biographical and aesthetic prerequisites of the songbook project, whose starting point is formed by 'diary-like' settings of poems from Brecht's Steffin collection, in order to then approach its subject from various analytical perspectives. The peculiarity of the songbook, which is characterized by an astonishing stylistic heterogeneity and compositional diversity, corresponds to a kind of collage order of presentation.
The guiding principle is to understand Eisler consistently from the perspective of Schönberg and his music theory.

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