Publisher's Synopsis
Performers and scholars alike will welcome the publication of the more than 40 songs that Hanns Eisler wrote between the ages of 19 and 23, since many of these are being published for the first time, and one of them, the setting of Klabund's "Der müde Soldat, " is the very first transmitted work of Eisler's. The young composer was a "seeker, " which clearly emerges from the very different styles of piano writing he used. Sometimes it sounds orchestral and even contains instrumentation markings, even though Eisler would never have undertaken an orchestration. The Textual sources also widely vary, and what makes them so distinctive is Eisler's fine sense of literary value and the nonchalance with which he altered poems for his own purposes. Among the young composer's preferred authors are Rabindranath Tagore, Georg Trakl and Christian Morgenstern, whose "Galgenlieder" presented in this volume constitute Eisler's only multipartite cycle.
