The Measures Taken

brecht, weill, eisler and songs to those born later



'Brecht's rejection of certain sorts of music was so extreme that he invented another variety of music making, which he called 'misuc'. Misuc he regarded as a way of music making basically differing from music, since it is misuc and not music.
Brecht's efforts in this field were really based upon his dislike of Beethoven's symphonies- 'his music always reminds me of battles'.
For a musician, it is difficult to describe misuc. Above all it is not decadent and formalist, but extremely close to the people. It recalls, perhaps, the singing of washing women in a back courtyard on Sunday afternoons.Brecht's dislike of music ceremoniously produced in large concert halls by painstaking gentlemen in tails also forms a constituent of misuc. In misuc nobody may wear tails and nothing may be ceremonious. Misuc aims at being a branch of the arts which avoids something frequently produced by symphony concerts and operas- emotional confusion. Brecht was never ready to hand in his brain at the cloakroom. He regarded the use of reason as one of the best recreations'
Hanns Eisler

At this year's South Bank smugfest, Meltdown, there was a night dedicated to the musical work of one of the 20th century's more unfashionable playwrights. Being rather prohibitively priced, I can't comment first-hand on its contents- thankfully though, Wire editor Chris Bohn was on hand to tell us what to think. In an editorial, he takes it to task for that darkest of Wire-sins- populism, principally in priveleging Kurt Weill over Hanns Eisler. This is an old argument- put bluntly, Weill ends up writing schmaltz and standards like 'September Song' and suffers the indignity of endless nightclub drawls through 'Mack the Knife', while Eisler writes a book with Adorno, composes the east german national anthem and receives the honour of being investigated for deviations both by the DDR and the USA. The Wire diatribe features a classic gripe in the line '(In 1929), Weill's use of popular or street music elements...was no doubt considered revolutionary'. Unlike now, presumably. This dichotomy is a little dubious. In fact it could just as well be mapped onto Woebot's beatnik/avant-lumpen dialectic- Eisler is constructive, conscious (and usually set the more didactic works), while Weill is more fierce, more bitterly cynical- in keeping with the cheerful amorality of 'the Threepenny Opera'- and more open to syncopation, dancing, irrationality. So, I feel provoked enough to run through a few favourites here (not to damn Eisler, as those who know will guess from the title of this blog)by both composers, to show them as two sides of the same dialectical coin...

the bulging pocket makes the easy life

'they tell you that the best in life is mental
just to starve yourself and do a lot of reading
up in some garret where the rats are breeding
if you survive, it's purely accidental'



The Threepenny Opera (Weill, 1927)
Die Massnahme (Eisler, 1929)
Or, 'what keeps mankind alive' vs 'the necessary murder'. The former is the scabrous musical that would be ripped off in Cabaret, which made Brecht and Weill famous- the bourgeoisie being told that they were disgusting, and applauding, as Gershon Scholem put it. The latter is an odd, dislocated series of tone(less) poems, 'plot'- some young agitators (sample song- 'In Praise of the Party') kill one of their number for backsliding. These two plays show the two composers at their best- Eisler's songs swing derisively or scythe discordantly, meshing with savagely didactic songs like 'Supply and Demand'(a stock market swing, in which said agitators argue with a rice magnate) while Weill's 'threepenny' songs anticpate the tuetonic anti-funk of the likes of A Certain Ratio and DAF, in that they bleed jazz of its flesh and flash, leaving a jarring rictus of forced jollility. This, of course is where showbiz tale of casual murder, rape and general gangstaism 'Mack the Knife' comes from.

A Short Course in Realism From the Perspective of the Police



The Threepenny Opera (GW Pabst, 1930)
Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow, 1932)
For someone who spent several years in Hollywood, Brecht didn't have a fun time in his few attempts at film making. Much of his time there was spent trying to pitch a film called 'Bread', about the production and distribution thereof. Pabst (fresh from WeimarGoth classic 'Pandora's Box') fell out with the makers of the play- Brecht wrote a stunningly forbidding Marxist analysis of the ensuing lawsuit. The resultant film commits every Brechtian sin in the book- audience identification, illusionism, realism- though is still a murky, guiltily compelling work, dreamlike and sinister- Lotte Lenya especially is amazing, snarling through the still startlingly angry class-warfare fantasy 'Pirate Jenny'.



Soon after, 'Kuhle Wampe' was made as a collective with Eisler and agitprop director Dudow- and accordingly is cut-up, sharply edited, Eisensteinian- a series of agitational shocks arranged round a working class family's tribulations. It's actually the more entertaining film- funny, brutal and unlike just about anything before or since. Most famously, a seemingly central character commits suicide in the first 10 minutes- a scene which led to the banning of the film, the censor objecting that 'the actor does (this scene) as if he were showing how to peel cucumbers'

Paradise and Hellfire are the same Cities

Happy End (Weill, 1929-31)
The Hollywood Songbook (Eisler, 1941-56)
'Happy End' was Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann's follow-up to 'Threepenny'; and the first production caused a riot when Helene Weigel broke cover and shouted extracts from 'The Communist Manifesto' at the audience. It's even more bitter than its predecessor, full of tumbling breakneck spits of disgust like 'Lily of Hell' and 'Mandelay Song'- whorehouses, syphilis, sailors, the mafia and caricature Amerikanismus. In fitting dialectical style, it also features achingly beautiful ballads of sexual indiscretion like 'Surabaya Johnny' in amongst all the horror. Both this play (also 'Mahogonny') and Eisler's lieder collection centre on the USA, the forbidden Other to the committed Communist- first as picaresque fantasy and capitalist apothesis, then as lived reality.



The songbook is very impressive, witty, sad and surprising, but recognisable as Mitteleuropa art-musik. 'Happy End', meanwhile, suggests a dialogue with popculture, ransacking its forms and placing them in the service of critique.

I was rather shocked once, watching a DVD of 'Mahogonny', to see the audience- topped, tailed, smug and ostentatiously moneyed- like nothing had changed 70 years later. However the best Brecht & Weill material filters its way through to pop's entryist strain- it refuses to blandly condemn mass culture- instead it starts an argument with it.


(btw, there's a couple of tapes of these things which i made recently for matt woebot, feel free to pester me if you want one...)