The same poem, one more song (II)

Last week, I started a series of short posts called "The same poem, one more song." As the title suggests, our goal is to listen to a song (in principle, little known) that sets into music a poem that we have already heard on Liederabend in another version  (in principle, best known)

This week's poem begins with the verse “Aus der Heimat hinten den Blitzen rot” [From the direction of home, behind the red flashes of lightning], by Joseph von Eichendorff. We're familiar with it thanks to a Lied by Robert Schumann, In der Fremde, which opens his Liederkreis, Op. 39. It is a purely romantic poem, like the whole cycle: the feeling of belonging nowhere, the threat of a storm, and death... An scenario that is drawn from a fiction work, the novel Viel Lärmen um nichts [Much Ado About Nothing].

For Hanns Eisler, who was not a romantic at all, Eichendorff's verses meant something elHe had left Germany in 1933 to escape Nazism. For five years he had moved through Europe, also driven by the threat; in 1938 he arrived in New York and in 1942 in Hollywood. While he enjoyed respect, a good job, and a good income, that world was too foreign to him, and he was overcome with concern for his country. That is what the songs he wrote there convey, a collection entitled Hollywooder Liederbuch. More than half of them have a poem by his friend Bertolt Brecht, whom he had met again in California. But one, only one, No. 36, has verses by Eichendorff: the first stanza of our poem.

With his usual concision, and music far from Schumann's melancholy, Eisler, who has been away from home for ten years, writes a song called Erinnerungen an Eichendorff und Schumann [Memories of Eichendorff and Schumann] which begins with the words “Aus der Heimat hinten den Blitzen rot”. And, given his circumstances, the stanza takes a new meaning. Our version is that of Wolfgang Holzmair and Peter Stamm.