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i

Tyranny and Music

Tyranny and Music
Edited by
Joseph E. Morgan and Gregory N. Reish
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books
“Blood Diamonds” by Chosan. Lyrics used with permission from Chosan. Copyright
owned by artist.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-4985-4681-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4985-4682-9 (electronic)
∞ ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America

v
Acknowledgmentsvii
Introductionix
Joseph E. Morgan
1 Resisting Tyranny with Song: Hanns Eisler’s “Nightmare” 1
James E. Parsons
2 Memory as Resistance: Viktor Ullmann’s Terezín Settings
of Friedrich Hölderlin 21
Brent Wetters
3 “The Desert Ain’t Vietnam”: Voices from the 1991 Persian
Gulf War 35
Jessica Loranger
4 Anti-Inquisition Propaganda in Music at the Outbreak of the
Dutch Revolt: Noé Faignient’s Chansons, madrigales et motetz 55
Sienna M. Wood
5 For God and Country: Scriptural Exegesis and Politics in
the First New England School Anthems 75
Molly Williams
6 Vilification or Problematization?: John Wilkes Booth in
Popular Songs and Musicals 93
Thomas J. Kernan
Contents

vi Contents
7 “I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung”: An Analysis of the
Representation of Tyranny in John Adams’s Nixon in China
(Act II, Scene 2) 111
Max Noubel
8 Battling the Typhoon: The Zheng’s Revolutionary
Voice in Maoist China 125
Mei Han
9 Memories Don’t Burn: Soviet Censorship and the
Azerbaijani Ashiq Bard 141
Anna Oldfield
10 Minḥibbuk (ya Baṭa): Musical Rhetoric and Bashar
al-Asad on Syrian Radio during the Civil War 161
Beau Bothwell
11 Massive Scar Era, Heavy Metal, and Two Tyrannies 183
Daniel Guberman
12 “You Can Take Our Diamonds, But You Can Never
Take Our Spirit”: Chosan’s Analysis of Blood Diamonds
and the Sierra Leonean Civil War 199
Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis
13 Popular Music and the Impending Tyranny of Donald Trump 217
Joseph E. Morgan
Index253
About the Editors and Contributors 259

vii
The acknowledgements page is perhaps the hardest part of this process as it
is nearly impossible to fairly express in words the contributions of so many
people into a single project. First and foremost, I am indebted to the con-
tributing authors whose initial creative ideas, assiduous research, and timely
revisions are the first sine qua non of this book.
Another necessary element of this project was the erudite, initial selec-
tion committee, which consisted of Andrea Bohlman (University of North
Carolina), Ellen Exner (New England Conservatory), Phil Gentry (Univer-
sity of Delaware), Richard King (University of Maryland), Jon McCollum
(Washington College), Brandi Neal (Coastal Carolina University), Doug
Shadle (Vanderbilt University), and my colleague, Stephen Shearon, here at
Middle Tennessee State University. The intellectual and professional way
that they accomplished their work helped to insure that from the very begin-
ning this document would be of the highest quality.
A huge thank you also goes to my co-editor Greg Reish, professor and
director of the Center for Popular Music at MTSU, whose diverse experi-
ence and remarkable editorial skills have made this work many times more
concise, interesting, and reader friendly than it otherwise would have been.
I am also grateful to my other colleagues at the MTSU School of Music
for their continued support of my work, including Director Mike Parkinson,
an amazing leader who recognizes the value of music research and both
Claudette Northcutt and Tim Musselman for their uncanny ability to get
otherwise impossible things done. Also at MTSU I would like to thank the
Faculty Research and Creative Activities Committee for the initial funding
that allowed this whole project to get off the ground in the first place, also,
Meghan O’Connor for the amazing cover design. Finally, I am grateful to
Lindsey Porambo at Lexington for her help at many stages along the way,
from the initial planning to the acquisition of permissions and even the topic
of the final essay. Grazie e bravo tutti!
Acknowledgments

ix
Introduction
Joseph E. Morgan
It’s funny how quickly things change. When I first started this project I
was more than halfway through a biography of Carl Maria von Weber and
wanted to get something new into my research pipeline.
1
Of particular inter-
est to me at that time was Weber’s relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte
and the huge effect that the life of this tyrant had on Weber’s career and
development, despite the fact that the French ruler probably never knew the
composer. Because my research focus was limited to Weber and his context,
I recognized the powerful influence Napoleon had on the music of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, some of the impacts that
Napoleon had on Weber were quite severe and helped to define his character
as a composer and more specifically a German composer.
For instance, In 1797 Napoleon’s campaign in Europe had prevented the
Weber family, then part of an itinerant theater troupe, from leaving Salzburg
and providing the young composer the stability required to take composition
lessons from his first important teacher, Michael Haydn. Later, it was at least
partially due to Napoleon’s campaign that Weber was forced to move on from
Breslau where he had run his first opera company and Karlsruhe where he
had composed his symphonies, his first major concerti, and had essentially
obtained his adult compositional voice. Indeed, his first existing singspiel,
Peter Schmoll und Seine Nachbarn, written in 1802 when Weber was only
15 years old, was likely chosen for the way it relayed a tale of refugees from
the French Revolution who, due to circumstances, fell out of touch only to
reunite in a happy ending—this is an experience the young Weber could
certainly relate to.
The fact that Weber, for a large measure of his youth, enacted the romantic
trope of the wanderer, moving from place to place in response to the move-
ments of Napoleon’s army, was not the only way that the French ruler would

x Introduction
directly impact the young German composer’s career. Weber’s initial popular-
ity as a nationalist composer was a result of his setting of the poetry of Ger-
man intellectual and nationalist martyr Theodor Körner, collected under the
title Lyre und Schwerdt (1814). This collection of short, strophic songs were
sung by students and soldiers in the emerging German nationalist movement.
Weber’s Kampf und Sieg Cantata (1816), written to commemorate the “vic-
tory of the allies at Waterloo,” cemented his position as a German nationalist
composer almost six years before the premiere of Der Freischütz. Finally, as a
metaphor for the German Nationalist movement, the ending of Der Freischütz,
in which the lead couple Max and Agathe are forced to wait a year before they
marry (an echo of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio from Mozart’s opera Don
Giovanni) could be interpreted as a parallel with the long wait that the Prussian
state had to endure before expelling their French conquerors during the Napo-
leonic conflict. Weber’s life, art, and career were all determined to some extent
by the acts of the French tyrant. And this is just the story of one composer.
2

While the impact of Napoleon was felt by nearly every composer of the
era, each responded in their own way. The most famous document of Ludwig
van Beethoven’s heroic style, his Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, was famously
first dedicated to the French ruler before Beethoven angrily withdrew the
dedication when Napoleon had himself declared Emperor.
3
Luigi Cherubini
managed to maintain a career in music despite the Emperor’s stated dislike
of his music. Cherubini, in particular, showed a great administrative genius
as a teaching inspector at the newly created Conservatoire Nationale de
Musique in Paris under Napoleon. He also organized performances at the
Emperor’s command.
4
The image of Napoleon as an enlightened ruler is
clearly the inspiration behind E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The Poet and
the Composer, which articulates the idea that a composer would likely be the
best librettist for an individual opera, a concept that would find its realiza-
tion in the works of Richard Wagner. Hoffmann’s espousal of the doctrine of
absolute music in his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is also
partially a result of his political context and anti-French stance during the
Napoleonic Wars.
5
Further, the ruler and ideals of the revolution also had a
direct impact on the works of the era, particularly the Opéra Comique. In the
repertory, Royalist works disappeared and those that contained aristocratic
topics were often subject to revision while references, direct or by analogy,
to recent political or social events became common. For example, Gaspare
Spontini’s opera Fernand Cortez (1809) was originally intended as political
propaganda to support Napoleon’s conquest of Spain in 1808.
6
These are
only the most famous examples. While each composer’s career was impacted
differently and each composer responded to Napoleon differently, one might
convincingly argue that Napoleon Buonaparte was the person, musician or
not, who carried the most influence on European music in the first half of

Introduction xi
the nineteenth century. It was with these facts in mind, and in the interests of
continued exploration of the relationship between the musical arts and politi-
cal oppression that I first began this work.
What quickly became clear, however, was that the same way that politi-
cal resistances are idiosyncratic to the composer (Beethoven, Hoffmann,
Weber, Spontini, Cherubini, and others all resisted Napoleon in their own
way), resistances are also idiosyncratic to the ruling system, and Napoleon
was only one example of a long history of tyranny in human history. This is
one of the primary ideas that make this collection of essays unique. The rules
under which the oppressed had to exist and around which they had to resist,
differ from regime to regime, time to time, and place to place. Related to this,
however, from the broadest scholarly perspective of the (quite problematic)
standard trichotomic division of music into the categories of classical, tradi-
tional and popular, or the seemingly parallel distinctions between musicologi-
cal approaches (historical, ethnomusicological, theoretical) the differences
and similarities of tyrannical rule tend to cut across these distinctions freely
without regard to the parameters we try to place upon them ex post facto.
The tyrant and his power, by definition, knows no bounds. Indeed it is this
basic inability to be enclosed within boundaries or categories that Friederich
Hölderlin refers in his Fragment Buonaparte from 1797:
Heilige Gefäße sind die Dichter,
Worin des Lebens Wein, der Geist
Der Helden, sich aufbewahrt,
Aber der Geist dieses Jünglings,
Der schnelle, müßt’ er es nicht zersprengen,
Wo es ihn fassen wollte, das Gefäß?
Der Dichter laß ihn unberührt wie den Geist der Natur,
An solchem Stoffe wird zum Knaben der Meister.
Er kann im Gedichte nicht leben und bleiben,
Er lebt und bleibt in der Welt.
[Sacred Vessels are the poets, in which the wine of life, the spirit of the Hero
is preserved. Instead the spirit of this youth, the quick, would it not shatter the
vessel that sought to contain him? The poet should leave him be, like the spirit
of nature, in such stuff the boy becomes the master. In the poem he cannot live
and remain, he lives and remains in the world.]
As a tyrant, the impact of Napoleon suffered no apparent boundaries.
It is for this reason that I did not seek a more specific theme for this essay
collection, whether it be musical, geographic, chronological, or even sur-
rounding one specific tyrant. Tyranny, almost by definition, is not confined
to any boundaries and the tyrants that are discussed herein, universally, abhor

xii Introduction
boundaries. Thus, as an organizing topic for this collection, the general vector
“Tyranny, Resistance and Music” freed the investigations in order to achieve
the widest and most diverse perspectives—this breadth, I believe, is what
makes this text unique and further, provides a wonderful cross section of
some of the ways that the various schools of musicology are doing important,
interesting, and remarkably relevant work.
THE CHAPTERS
As a definition of Tyranny, the Oxford Dictionary of Music connects the idea
to the rule of an absolute prince or despotic government and more abstractly
as an “Arbitrary or oppressive exercise of power; unjustly severe use of
one’s authority; despotic treatment or influence; harsh, severe, or unmerciful
action; with a and pl., an instance of this, a tyrannical act or proceeding.”
7

The current work takes both of these definitions as its starting point. As
such, the first essay deals not with a ruler of a specific country, but instead
a bureaucratic committee designed to administer Tyranny. James Parsons’s
“Resisting Tyranny with Song: Hanns Eisler’s ‘Nightmare’” investigates
Eisler’s lied and its documentation of his confrontation with Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s House on Un-American Activities Committee. Specifically,
Parsons looks at Eisler’s work as an example of American “assembly line
cunning,” a process that Eisler proposed in his famous Film Music Study
as “whatever passes through the machinery bears its mark, is predigested,
neutralized [and] leveled down.”
8
Analytically, Parsons brings to bear
Eisler’s dialectic method of “constructive conflict” to interpret Eisler’s
musical resistance. In these terms, the collection is no longer understood as
a cry of despair, as is commonly assumed, but instead as a sonic sword and
shield. This interpretation is contingent on the reception, on the performers
and listeners actively accepting the composer’s challenge to consider “the
question from every angle.” An inverse of the idea that the Tyrant cannot be
constrained by their context, Parson shows that in resistance the context of
those resisting plays an even greater role in defining and determining their
artistic experience.
This aspect is found to be particularly true in our second chapter, Brent
Wetters’s “Memory as Resistance: Viktor Ullmann’s Terezin Settings of
Friedrich Hölderlin.” Wetters studies Ullmann’s settings as a kind of “double
protest” against his Nazi oppressors. The work is understood to be protesting
the concentration camp where he was imprisoned and also in protest of the
Nazi’s use of the German culture they (the Jews) prized to oppress them. In
his reading of the work, Wetters offers up two plausible and opposing possi-
ble interpretations of a reading of Hölderlin’s poetry, that of a German soldier

Introduction xiii
and a concentration camp inmate. The diversity of perspectives in these
readings is facilitated by an inherent ambiguity in the poetry, an intentional
ambiguity that tends to be lost in translation. Building on this, Wetters then
demonstrates how Ullmann’s Hölderlin setting stakes a claim on the Ger-
manic musical tradition and compellingly argues that Germany had betrayed
not only its Jewish citizenry, but also its own cultural heritage.
The idea that musical resistance is contextually defined, particularly from
the vantage point of a soldier, is perhaps most broadly made in our third
chapter, Jessica Loranger’s “‘The Desert Ain’t Vietnam’: Voices from the
1991 Persian Gulf War.” In a rare study of the responses to the 1991 war,
Loranger consults a virtually unknown Persian Gulf War Song Collection
at the Library of Congress which contains more than 140 unpublished or
self-published recordings. The chapter situates these songs as both an act of
remembering and a reaction to World War II and the Vietnam War examin-
ing their expression and insight into the ways some Americans processed the
United States involvement in the Gulf War. Her work reveals that there was a
widespread urge for solidarity, whether for or against the war, and that song-
writers confronted the nation’s past with memories that support and at times
test the dominant mainstream narratives and the political propaganda offered
by the United States Government during the war.
In the Fourth Chapter, Sienna Wood’s “Anti-Inquisition Propaganda in
Music at the Outbreak of the Dutch Revolt: Noé Faignient’s Chansons, mad-
rigals et motetz,” music and/as propaganda finds itself at the center of the
investigation. Wood’s work reveals how the rebelling Protestant and Catho-
lics of the Low Countries united against the Spanish Inquisition, resulting in
propaganda that downplayed religious divisions and instead condemned the
activities of the Inquisition as tyrannical violations of liberties expected for
all people of the Low Countries. She then looks at the underlying political
agenda of Faignient’s collection, and analyzes his works as pro-rebellion
polyphony. In particular, the Liedekens (Dutch-texted songs) in the collection
are understood as expressions of nationalism and patriotism with noted allu-
sions to contemporary political events involving Margaret of Parma, an early
figurehead for the resistance, and the Duke of Alva—the “Iron Duke”—who
was sent to the Low Countries in 1567 with 10,000 troops and the directive
to extinguish Protestantism in the region.
Another example of resistance in the pre-modern era is given in the Fifth
Chapter, Molly Williams’s “‘For God and Country’ Scriptural Exegesis and
Politics in the First New England School Anthems.” Williams breaks new
ground exploring the presence of political meaning and expression in the
works of the First New England School of composers. While patriotism is
readily recognized in Billing’s Hymns, Williams studies his Anthems and
those of his contemporaries as they relate to common Revolutionary and

xiv Introduction
Federal themes, such as the transition from a monarchy to a republic, millen-
nial issues, or calls to violence. Her essay, above all, demonstrates how these
composers, like Thomas Paine and other preachers and writers of the period,
employed a Hebrew Republican model in their political discourse, creatively
employing Biblical texts to address political concerns in their music.
Our Sixth Chapter, Thomas J. Kernan’s “Vilification or Problematization?:
John Wilkes Booth in Popular Songs and Musicals,” demonstrates the way
that composers of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century popular songs
and musicals have tended to address Booth (and not his victim, Lincoln) in
their attempts to examine complex social problems, allowing them to shift
away from heroic narratives with easy solutions to problems that require
nuanced consideration of their intricate challenges. In his investigation of
the character Booth’s function in a number of song and musical narratives,
including bluesman David Vidal’s “John Wilkes Booth,” the hard rock band
Clutch’s “I have the Body of John Wilkes Booth,” and Stephen Sondheim and
John Weidman’s Assassins, Kernan addresses the protagonists and antago-
nists, tyrants and victims, insiders and outsiders, as well as the musical and
textual treatment of each.
Shifting from the theatrical and musical stage to the operatic, our Seventh
Chapter, Max Noubel’s “‘I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-Tung’ An Analysis
of the Representation of Tyranny in John Adams’s Nixon in China (Act II,
Scene 2),” investigates John Adams, and Alice Goodman’s, employment of
the Shakespearean device of embedding a scene within the opera as a kind
of expression of embedded tyranny. The scene is based on an actual perfor-
mance of the famous revolutionary and social realist ballet The Red Detach-
ment of Women which was created under the strict control of Mao’s fourth
wife Chiang Ch’ing during the Cultural Revolution, and which was given in
performance for then President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat Nixon during
their visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1962. Noubel’s work shows
how the characters in Nixon in China are archetypical of historical depic-
tions of the tyrant in the history of opera, and how Adam’s skillful blending
of musical genres allows him to create an ironic distance from the tyranny
in order to enable a new interpretation of these complex human characters.
Chapter Eight, Mei Han’s “Battling the Typhoon: The Zheng’s Revolu-
tionary Voice in Maoist China” addresses the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s
wife Chiang Ch’ing, directly, discussing the evolution of the Chinese zheng
(a 21-string long zither) as a result of its political context, as exemplified by
composer Wang Changyuan’s programmatic composition for solo zheng,
titled Battling the Typhoon. The political context of Changyuan’s composi-
tion, which gained great attention from Ch’ing because of its depiction of
heroism in the working class, is discussed as well as how its composer navi-
gated her artistic integrity while conforming to the Communist ideology as a
social and artistic mandate.

Introduction xv
The Chinese government’s relationship with the folk arts of its people dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution was somewhat mirrored by the support the United
Soviet Socialist Republic gave to its folk music, particularly in rural areas.
However, to those resisting, folk music could often be understood as pander-
ing to the state. Chapter 9, Anna Oldfield’s “Memories Don’t Burn: Soviet
Censorship and the Azerbaijani Ashiq Bard” discusses how the bardic arts of
Azerbaijan were targeted as people’s culture and forced to comply with the
dictum “national in form, socialist in content,” and yet managed to preserve
non-Soviet histories and cultures through musical performance, ambiguity,
and memory while supporting ongoing discussions about nationalism, reli-
gion, and cultural repression throughout the Soviet era. Oldfield analyzes
the Azerbaijani musical resistance to tyranny not as overt agitation, but a
more nuanced “dance with the state.” The artists and genres she investigates
include epics such as Koroglu, singer Ashiq Nabat’s famous Stalin era song
“Danishaq” and the late twentieth-century artist and critic of the Soviet state,
Ashiqu Mikhail Azafli, who, despite being imprisoned more than once, main-
tained a position as hero to his community in the Glasnost era.
The establishment of a historical and cultural memory concerning the idea
of a nation provides the central investigated element to Chapter 10, Beau
Bothwell’s “Minḥibbuk (ya Baṭa): Musical Rhetoric and Bashar al-Asad on
Syrian Radio during the Civil War.” Bothwell’s chapter uncovers the musi-
cal and sonic invocations of al-Asad by state, loyalist, and opposition radio
stations as tools not just for demonstrating political affiliation, but also for
describing and instantiating competing visions of a Syrian nation. Relying
on fieldwork conducted in Syria in 2009 and 2010 and internet broadcasts
of radio stations since Bothwell tracks the shifting image of leadership, from
Hafiz al-Asad’s (Bashar’s father) image as infallible father/leader to his
son’s image as “Syria’s mild-mannered ophthalmologist in chief.” The shift
is presented within the context of the broader Syrian economic shift from
Ba’thist Socialism to neo-liberal democracy. Finally, Bothwell outlines three
techniques that current Syrian stations are using to create alternative versions
of the Syrian nation, in opposition to the Asad regime.
Focusing on a different shore of the Mediterranean Sea, Chapter 11, Daniel
Guberman’s “Massive Scar Era, Heavy Metal, and Two Tyrannies” examines
how this genre’s music, image, and messages, which at first catered to primar-
ily white working-class musicians and fans, are being adapted by performers
to address new global issues and struggles. He traces the employment of heavy
metal in Latin America in the early 1980s and the anti-church movement in
Norway in the 1990s before conducting a more extensive case study on the
music of the Egyptian band Massive Scar Era and the experiences of that
band’s singer and songwriter Cherine Amr. Specifically, Guberman investi-
gates how Amr’s juxtaposition of clean singing with the non-gendered growls
of death metal provides a unique space for empowerment in a society where

xvi Introduction
women are often unheard, even while the genre’s audiences and musicians
will attack Amr with their own forms of gender-based critique and objectifica-
tion—leading her to, at times, conflate the Muslim Brotherhood with metal
scene members. Thus, despite its seemingly progressive globalization, Guber-
man locates a continuing form of patriarchal tyranny in the Heavy Metal scene.
Chapter 12, Abimbola Cole Kai-Lewis’s “‘You Can Take Our Diamonds,
But You Can Never Take Our Spirit’: Chosan’s Analysis of Blood Diamonds
and the Sierra Leonean Civil War” investigates Sierra Leonean emcee Cho-
san’s analysis of the diamond trade during the Civil War as orchestrated by
the Liberian leader Charles Taylor and spanning the years 1991 to 2002.
Largely funded by the Diamond Trade, Taylor’s was convicted of war crimes
and crimes against humanity by an international criminal court at The Hague
in 2012 where it was shown that his actions resulted in mass amputations,
killings, and rapes. Kai-Lewis investigates Chosan’s commentaries both in
a narrative featured in Kanye West’s video for the song “Diamonds from
Sierra Leone” and his own track “Blood Diamonds.” She employs survivors’
accounts and memoirs to chronicle how Taylor’s actions impacted Sierra
Leonans and how Chosan’s music rebukes those crimes.
This brings us to the final chapter and back to my amazement at how
quickly things can change. As I said, when this project began as far back as
2012–2013, I was interested in it for purely academic reasons. But as things
proceeded, I watched my own government, which was then being led by
Barack Obama, a Nobel Prize winning, neo-liberal, African American who
was respected by liberal and progressive governments the world over, slowly
come under an overt threat of an impending tyranny from the campaign
of Donald J. Trump. When the proposal for the collection was approved,
our Acquisition Editor at Lexington suggested that the collection could be
expanded with a chapter covering the “pop music responses to the current
U.S. presidential election cycle.” It soon became apparent that the primary
responses were written in reaction to the proposed policies of Candidate
Trump and thus our thirteenth chapter, “Popular Music and the Impending
Tyranny of Donald Trump” is the result.
In this chapter I trace the development of Donald Trump’s campaign and
persona from tycoon to candidate and finally his inauguration as President
and his ingenius ability to manipulate popular music and the mainstream
media along the way in order to ensure his continuing coverage in that
media. This manipulation, as I demonstrate, was achieved through a number
of bizarre controversies, beginning with his continuing assertions that his
predecessor, President Obama was not a United States citizen and therefore
unqualified to serve as President. Other controversies discussed include the
wall on the border with Mexico, his provocation of the Black Lives Matter
movement and his attacks on a woman’s reproductive rights in this country.

Introduction xvii
My investigation finds that, although many artists were indeed attempting
to resist Trump’s movement, by constantly attacking him publicly the end
result actually helped him to achieve his goals in that the constant controversy
tended to create more earned media (media for which he did not have to pay)
for him and extend his press coverage beyond the typical life of a news cycle.
As such, those running against him, whether they be one of the many Repub-
lican primary candidates, or his Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, could
not compete with his presence in the media.
As one of the concluding emphasized of this forward, it should be noted
that many of the chapters in this book, particularly those addressing more
recent topics, are giving narratives that have not found resolution. Bashar
al-Asad’s regime remains in power in Syria and his continuing presence has
created tensions between two of the world’s most powerful “strong-man”
rulers: President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. This tension has
been exacerbated by continuing investigations of Putin’s involvement in
candidate Trump’s campaign, an involvement only partially indicated by the
protest music covered in my essay. Also, despite Charles Taylor’s conviction,
the sale and distribution of Blood Diamonds, or Conflict Diamonds and the
tyranny of greed and quest for power that drives the market for them contin-
ues and is even expanding.
9
Finally, this book, like any other, is in no way comprehensive, nor does it
seek to be. One hopes that it will spark discussion and debate about the role of
music in protest and resistance, and what might be learned from its historical
precedence. As long as political leaders strive for limitless power and their
populations suffer from the corruption that comes with that power, musicians
will react, resist, or simply find a way forward. This is just one document of
that ongoing struggle.
NOTES
1. Joseph E. Morgan, Experiencing Weber: A Listener’s Companion, Maryland:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.
2. For a discussion of Weber and the emerging nationalist identity in Germany see
Stephen Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera, Bloom-
ington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003.
3. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero, New York: Princeton University Press, 1996.
4. William J. Miller, “Napoelon and Cherubini: A Discordant Relationship,”
Consortium on Revolutinoary Europe 1750–1850. Proceedings 1990 Vol. 20, pp.
260–269.
5. Stephen C. Rumph, “A Kingdom Not of This World: The Political Context of
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism.” 19th Century Music, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp.
50–67.

xviii Introduction
6. Arnold Jacobshagen, “Les malendtendus du romantisme: Cherubini et Spontiini
entre la France, l’Italie et l’Allemagne” Généalogies du romantisme musical français.
Series: Musicologies. Paris, France: J. Vrin, 2012.
7. “tyranny, n.” OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. Accessed
online: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/208424?rskey=RTws5G&result=1&isAdvan
ced=false
8. Hans Eisler, Composing for the Films, New York: Oxford University Press,
1947.
9. Aryn Baker, “Blood Diamonds” Time, August 27, 2015 Accessed online: http://
time.com/blood-diamonds/
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Aryn. “Blood Diamonds.” Time, August 27, 2015. Accessed online: http://
time.com/blood-diamonds/
Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. New York: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Eisler, Hans. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Jacobshagen, Arnold. “Les malendtendus du romantisme: Cherubini et Spontiini
entre la France, l’Italie et l’Allemagne” Généalogies du romantisme musical fran-
çais. Series: Musicologies. Paris, France: J. Vrin, 2012.
Meyer, Stephen. Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera. Bloom-
ington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2003.
Miller, William J. “Napoelon and cherubini: A Discordant Relationship.” Consortium
on Revolutinoary Europe 1750–1850. Proceedings 1990 Vol. 20, 260–269.
Morgan, Joseph E. Experiencing Weber: A Listener’s Companion. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.
Rumph, Stephen C. “A Kingdom Not of This World: The Political Context of E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s Beethoven Criticism.” 19th Century Music, vol. 19, No. 1, 50–67.
“tyranny, n.” OED Online. March 2017. Oxford University Press. Accessed online:
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/208424?rskey=RTws5G&result=1&isAdvanced
=false

1
Chapter 1
Resisting Tyranny with Song
Hanns Eisler’s “Nightmare”
James E. Parsons
Much is obscured by the often-made assertion that Austrian-German com-
poser Hanns Eisler expresses an exile’s longing for safe haven in his Hol-
lywooder Liederbuch.
1
While it would have been impossible for Eisler to
communicate what he does without the union of music and words, one cannot
help but wonder why he was drawn to the Lied, or German art song, in 1940s
Hollywood during and immediately after World War II.
2
Before the Hol-
lywood Songbook he had not composed Lieder since 1926, and by 1942 had
made a name for himself as Bertolt Brecht’s most frequent musical collabo-
rator, the two having joined forces for plays and films in Weimar Republic
Germany.
3
One of Eisler’s chief California occupations was the study of film
music for a book project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, published in
1947.
4
Moreover, in Hollywood he derived much of his livelihood compos-
ing movie music. Therefore, asking why Eisler wrote Lieder in Hollywood
is worthwhile, especially since at the same time his close friend and famous
southern California fellow émigré, Thomas Mann, similarly turned his
thoughts to the Lied, lauding it in 1945 as a “miracle,” a “nationally unique
and incomparable product.”
5
Mann’s encomium and Eisler’s sustained dedication to German song while
the two were living in sunny California is intriguing. Though the genre had
considerable prestige appeal, German culture at this time was at its nadir.
In addition, the Lied no longer enjoyed its nineteenth-century preeminence.
Equally intriguing is that Eisler composed the Songbook not in Germany but
in a place anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker in 1950 named a “factory”
devoted to the “mass production of prefabricated dreams.”
6
It is difficult
to envision an artistic milieu further removed from Schubert’s Winterreise
(1828) or Schumann’s Dichterliebe (1840), to name two nineteenth-century
Liederkreis or German song cycle, for example. Eisler was well aware of

2 James E. Parsons
the gulf dividing Hollywood and the qualities Mann associates with the
Lied, “the musicality of the German soul, that which we call its inwardness,
its subjectivity.”
7
As Eisler puts it in his seminal film music study, Holly-
wood motion pictures leave the “consumer” with “only apparent freedom of
choice.” Just as the automobile emerges from the shop floor, so too does the
celluloid commodity: “whatever passes through the machinery bears its mark,
is predigested, neutralized, leveled down.”
8
The story I tell in this study is
how Eisler experienced another example of American assembly-line cunning,
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), one that, as the title
of his Lied examined here makes clear, was inspired not by any Hollywood
fantasy dream but instead by his real-life encounter with protracted tyranny
and which sparked his artful resistance.
Even though I eschew exile as a condition that invariably leads to victim-
ization, that topic cannot be completely discounted given that it is one of the
considerable gradation. How better to treat the loss of home and the assault
on selfhood—the home of one’s self—than with a body of music with deep
ties to home, one expressing the soul’s musicality as Mann insists? Eisler
engages with both concepts yet keeps them at arm’s length. And there is no
doubt that what he folds into the Songbook can be extraordinarily subtle. In
measures 8–10 of No. 7, “Über den Selbstmord” (On Suicide), at the line
“Und die ganze Winterzeit dazu, das ist gefährlich” (and the whole of win-
tertime, that, too, is dangerous), Eisler quotes the opening of “Gute Nacht”
(Good Night), the first song of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter’s Journey).
9

In Schubert’s Lied the musical motive begins the first and second phrases,
and so in the song’s strophic context is heard six times. The paraphrase
prompts the engagement of memory, the remembrance of Germany’s past
and affirms, like Schubert’s Winterreise, that Eisler’s Liederbuch is a voyage
of words and music. The first text line of “Gute Nacht” in conjunction with
the insistent eighth-note tread establishes that a journey is in progress: “A
stranger I arrived, a stranger I depart.”
10
Eisler finesses the quotation in such
a way that it is not immediately apparent. To grasp it one must search for it.
Doing so, multiple layers of meaning present themselves, for in alluding to
the first song of Winterreise, Eisler refers to the wellspring of German song,
Schubert the acknowledged “Prince of Song.”
11
There also is the array of
references pervading Wilhelm Müller’s text (the poet of Winterreise) and the
past more generally. Eisler’s journey is one in which memory shapes the pres-
ent. As Richard Terdiman has written, reminiscence always involves a “then”
and “now,” and “the recession of that past, the disappearance of [a] felt or
securely remembered connection with it” frequently leaves individuals in
the present with “a kind of depthless enigma.”
12
However fleetingly, Eisler
consolidates 1940s Hollywood with his own past and in so doing looks to the
future. Grappling with a world gone mad, he endeavors to restore his own

Resisting Tyranny with Song 3
self-unity as well as those of others thereby involving all who would experi-
ence his Hollywooder Liederbuch, a course of action with ample precedence.
As Marcel Proust insists in his Remembrance of Things Past, “every reader
is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.”
13
The inclusion of the word Liederbuch in the work’s title leads one to
expect German-only texts, but that is not so. Of the forty-seven songs, one
sets a French text, four English, forty-two German. Simultaneously embrac-
ing and avoiding the poetic coherence thought to typify the Liederkreis,
Eisler symbolizes an existence formerly in possession of stability yet lacking
that in the present of the 1940s. Acknowledging yet flouting the conventions
of the German song cycle, constructive conflict is the cornerstone of Eisler’s
Songbook. Indeed, the composer builds that struggle into the Liederbuch on
a number of levels. The title Liederbuch puts one in mind of the venerable
heritage of nineteenth-century German art song cycles, such as Beethoven’s
An die ferne Geliebte (1816) or Schumann’s Opus 39 Liederkreis (1840).
And yet whereas those two cycles set poems by a single poet—Alois Isidor
Jeitteles for Beethoven, Joseph Eichendorff for Schumann—Eisler in his
Songbook draws on eleven poets or textual sources: the Bible, Bertolt Brecht,
Eichendorff, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Blaise Pascal, Arthur Rimbaud,
Berthold Viertel, Eisler himself, and five Anacreontic fragments by way of
Eduard Mörike (I count the Anacreontic fragments twice given that Mörike
translates them into German). And, as I discuss at the end of this article,
Eisler himself, many years after composing the work, had no clear recollec-
tion as to whether the Liederbuch should be thought of as a coherent whole.
On the surface a hodgepodge of verse and words, it is only when one works
through each song’s text and Eisler’s music that a larger narrative comes into
view, the details of which I describe below.
A SWORD AND SHIELD IN SONG
Not a refuge from the world, the Songbook is Eisler’s sword and shield in
his resistance against tyranny. Situating that struggle against the backdrop of
Nazism, he never explicitly mentions the Third Reich or its leaders. Whereas
not mentioning individual Nationalsozialismus leaders by name gives the
impression of keeping reality at a distance, closer inquiry reveals the oppo-
site to be the case. Yes, there are poems ranging from whether educating the
young has relevance in a world at war (No. 1, II) to the mechanized violence
of Panzer tanks (No. 12). What is most important, however, is that Eisler has
no compunction in changing a poem’s title or removing details that would
bind it too closely to a specific event. In No. 13, for instance, Eisler redacts
Brecht’s title “Spring 1938,” opting instead for the comparatively more

4 James E. Parsons
open-ended “Easter Sunday.” Shunning specific references to World War II
draws one’s attention to those very realities, just as they leave open the util-
ity of the Songbook as a means by which to resist tyranny at any later time.
Never capricious, Eisler’s textual liberties facilitate spirited dialecticism.
In the eighth of fourteen conversations he had with Hans Bunge from 1958
until 1962, Eisler observes that the first step in song composition is the selec-
tion of a poem. After that, “I shorten it—I only use fragments.” To this, he
recalls a comment Brecht made during their Hollywood years. “It’s really
astonishing ‘the way you knock the plaster off’” “a poet’s text,” in the case
at hand one by Hölderlin. “You choose some lines, set them and afterwards
it somehow works.”
14
Brecht
was partly horrified because he thought it an act of vandalism and partly pleased
because some of Hölderlin’s poems are four pages long. My friend Arnold
Zweig felt the same. So I chose eight lines from the poem, and it worked. Well,
it would have been impossible if some writer or a great poet like Brecht or
Arnold Zweig had said to me: “Eisler you’re criticizing Hölderlin!” I couldn’t
possibly have accepted it, because I wasn’t criticizing Hölderlin, simply quoting
him. That’s a big difference.
15
Not only is the selection of a text important, “but also what you do” with it.
Were I to identify myself completely with the text, empathize with it, cling to
it, that would be absolutely terrible; a composer has to challenge a text. . . . I
like to look on the bright side of the tragic. . . . I resist the obvious content of a
poem and interpret it in my own way. . . . If I’m praised one day, then it will be
for having resisted the text.
16
Eisler likewise expects performers and listeners to dislodge the plaster, a point
Bunge confirms when he said to the composer, “You make huge demands on
the audience with regard to their understanding of dialectics,” by which he
means Eisler’s method of challenging a text, what above I called constructive
conflict. Eisler’s answer: “Yes, my demands . . . are enormous.”
17
With forty-five of the forty-seven Liederbuch songs composed between
1942 and 1943, “Nightmare” is a late addition. While the four-year gap for
“Nightmare” (1947) and five for “Hollywood-Elegie No. 7” (1948), No. 32,
may at first lead one to suppose they have little in common with the larger
collection, they nonetheless do, for both treat the subject of loss. Living
through the events that yielded “Nightmare”—originally called “The Hear-
ing”—the composer had to have known his HUAC entanglement might lead
to a prison sentence or deportation, so loss of home and personal liberty
very much are key features. The subject in “Hollywood-Elegie No. 7” is the
self-displacement of Peter Lorre, Eisler’s and Brecht’s friend. Although the

Resisting Tyranny with Song 5
actor’s name is never mentioned, both poem and song portray an individual
debilitated by stardom success and drug abuse. Brecht’s verse in part reads,
“I saw many friends and the friend I loved the most / among them helplessly
sink into the swamp / . . . . And the drowning was not over in a single morn-
ing.”
18
For Lorre the self-loss concerns his descent into morphine addiction,
one the poem likens to sinking into a swamp but which takes place only
gradually. As we will see, in Eisler’s case the loss was the life he had estab-
lished in California, a forfeiture not of his own choosing and which extended
over a surely excruciating, extended period of time, a metaphorical drowning
that “was not over in a single morning.”
THE BACKGROUND OF “NIGHTMARE”
The succession of events that yielded “Nightmare,” the only Liederbuch
song for which Eisler wrote both words and music (the former in English),
came to a head in mid-October 1946 when front-page newspaper accounts
reported that the composer’s older brother, Gerhart, was the top agent of the
Communist World Party (CP) in the United States. The story has a back-
ground, one starting in the 1920s when Gerhart’s and Hanns’s older sister,
Ruth Fischer—her nom de guerre (she was born Elfriede Eisler)
19
—criticized
Joseph Stalin’s move to control the CP and transform Lenin’s Bolshevism in
the Soviet Union into a dictatorship controlled solely by him.
20
Vehemently
disagreeing with Stalin, she challenged his Party domination in Russia with
Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky, and in Germany with Arkadij Maslow,
a move Stalin viewed as a betrayal. Thus, only eight years after she had
helped form the Austrian Communist Party she found herself expelled from
the CP.
21
During the first year of the Moscow show trials in 1936 she and
Maslow were condemned in absentia and sentenced to death. The charge,
allegedly on Trotsky’s orders, was orchestrating the 1933 attempted murder
of Stalin.
22
Sorting out victims from perpetrators is not my concern in recounting the
tale of Eisler’s “Nightmare.” What is of interest is the intersection of facts,
half-truths, and lies that collided with rival political ideologies and the vari-
ability of personal loyalties, all of which converged on a trio of siblings at
the dawn of a new age of international relations. What we now call the Cold
War, for the Eislers was anything but chilly.
23
Salka Viertel, another Califor-
nia émigré, neatly summarized the two reasons for Hanns’s short-lived stay
in the United States after World War II. His “worst misfortune was to be the
brother of Gerhard [sic] Eisler and to have a monster as a sister.”
24
Hanns’s
friend Charlie Chaplin forecast the gathering storm this way: “In your family
things happen as in Shakespeare.”
25

6 James E. Parsons
That they did, beginning October 13, 1946, when Louis Budenz, onetime
managing editor of the New York City Communist newspaper The Daily
Worker, now an anti-Communist activist, gave a Detroit radio talk in which
he stated that a “shadowy figure, unknown even to him, was the head of Com-
munism in America.”
26
Five days later, on October 18, 1946, The Washington
Post ran a page-one story entitled “Austrian Leads Reds in U. S., Budenz
Says.” Whereas in his radio address Budenz spoke of a “shadowy figure,” the
Post credited him as having revealed that individual to be “Hans Berger, an
Austrian.” Going further, the Post cited an article published in the New York
Journal-American newspaper in which it was stated “Berger’s real name is
Gerhard Eisler and that he is the brother of Hans [sic] Eisler, ‘Hollywood
composer who in 1935 was under investigation on charges that he came here
[to the USA] from Germany to preach revolution through his songs.’” The
author of the New York Journal-American newspaper article, all told a series
of six, was none other than Fischer. But on at least one point the Post was
incorrect; Fischer first outed Gerhart in 1944 in a mimeographed anti-Stalinist
bulletin she oversaw and for which she wrote The Network.
27
As the Post
article continues, “Berger, or Eisler, was described by his sister as ‘head of
the German Communists in the Western Hemisphere’” and “‘one of the key
agents of the Communist machine here and . . . in the American Communist
Party.’”
28
On November 22, Budenz appeared before the HUAC at which
time he confirmed Gerhart to be the shadowy figure, his assignment under-
mining “the peace and safety of the United States of America.”
29
Although why Fischer turned on her brothers likely will never be com-
pletely clear, at least one possibility presents itself. In 1920 she became
politically and romantically involved with fellow Communist Ukrainian-born
Arkadij Maslow, and, until the latter’s death, his common-law wife. With
the Nazi rise to power, Fischer was one of many the Third Reich stripped
of German citizenship, so she and Maslow hurriedly left Germany on an
American-made Harley-Davidson motorcycle, living briefly in Prague and,
beginning October 1934, in Paris. Following the invasion of France on May
10, 1940, they managed to leave Paris three days before the German army
occupied the city, fleeing first to Marseilles, next crossing the Spanish border
to Lisbon. Whereas Fischer was able to secure a US visa, arriving in New
York April 21, 1941, Maslow was not as fortunate, having to settle instead
for Cuba where he died in Havana November 21, 1941.
30
The cause was given
as a heart attack, one Fischer rejected given her history with Stalin which led
her to believe his secret police had murdered Maslow.
31
The idea ought not
to be rejected out of hand, for Leon Trotsky had been assassinated in Mexico
the year before and, according to FBI agent Guenther Reinhardt, who had
helped Fischer with her US visa, it was reported to him that Maslow had died
after a hit-and-run accident involving a truck.
32
Fischer viewed Gerhart as

Resisting Tyranny with Song 7
unconditionally pro-Stalin and, by 1944, in a letter to Hanns and, Louise, the
composer’s wife, she accused her brothers of conspiring in Maslow’s death.
33

Reinhardt met with Fischer in New York July 1943 and, as he recalled,
Fischer “snapped out . . . with the most terrible hate imaginable, and for one
of the most terrible reasons imaginable.” Fearing now for her own life, Ruth,
according to Reinhardt, stated:
The whole control commission of the party . . . are worried sick about how it’s going
to be done. They know it will create a furor. . . . They have their orders directly
from a Soviet representative—their goddam [sic] Comintern commissar . . .
Gerhart Eisler. He directs the American party. . . . He is my brother. He had a
hand in Maslow’s death. My own fine brother Gerhart . . . I only learned that
several months after Maslow’s death. It took me almost a year to get the proof.
But I know it. I know it.
34
Once the press reported that Hans Berger was Gerhart Eisler, life for Hanns
became extraordinarily difficult. On October 21, an article from The New
York World-Telegram was republished the next day on page one of the Los
Angeles Times with the title “Movie Composer Named Communist Song
Writer.”
35
Fischer continued to heat things up in November 1946 when she
brought out her six articles in the Hearst press condemning Gerhart as a “ter-
rorist” and claiming her brothers had brought Communism to Hollywood. In
contrast to Gerhart and Hanns’s HUAC experiences, Budenz was allowed
to speak at length and without interruption. He introduced his remarks by
stating he had “no animus against any particular member of the Communist
Party,” but believed it to be time “to raise the little iron curtain in the United
States.” That remark was calculated, for it followed by some seven months
Winston Churchill’s famous March 5, 1946, Fulton, Missouri, Westminster
College speech in which he exposed the “danger which threatens the cottage
home and ordinary people—namely tyranny.” Churchill, saw it as his duty to
inform the world that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an
iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” the motivation for which
he believed was the Communist desire “to obtain totalitarian control.”
36

Seeking to thwart that authoritarianism, Budenz mentioned the “refusal in
many quarters to permit a frank discussion of what the Communist Party
actually is. Anyone who endeavors to tell the truth . . . is greeted with shouts
of ‘witch hunt,’ ‘red baiter.’”
37
Thirty-two pages later Budenz, although he
had mentioned the name before, declared the CP “power behind the throne”
to be Gerhart Eisler.
38
It does not surprise that the FBI had been interested in both Eisler brothers
well before 1946. Hanns attracted J. Edgar Hoover’s attention beginning Feb-
ruary 27, 1942, when the latter asked agents if the composer had ever been

8 James E. Parsons
employed by the Works Progress Administration or any other federal agency.
According to the Freedom of Information website, this is the first item in a
file totaling 686 pages and which documents illegal wiretaps, break-ins, and
other covert surveillance.
39
Close watch on Gerhart began as early as 1941
and continued until 1968, the year of his death, and therefore after his 1949
return to then East Germany.
40
The tipping point came on February 6, 1947,
when Ruth and Gerhart testified before the House Committee at which time,
since he was not allowed to read a prepared statement, Gerhart refused to
take the oath and was held in contempt.
41
Unlike Gerhart, and subsequently
Hanns, the HUAC allowed Ruth to read a prepared statement in which she
described Gerhart as “the perfect terrorist type, most dangerous for the people
of both America and Germany.” Furthermore, “he has used the sympathy of
the American people for the suffering and tortured victims of nazism [sic] to
mask his dirty work.” Naming those she believed he had ordered murdered,
she cautioned the Committee not to allow Gerhart to return to Germany, for
he “will help to build up another Nazi system which will differ from the old
one only by the fact that the Fuehrer’s name will be Stalin.”
42
An indication of
how the US press responded to such accusations may be gauged from the first
page of a Life Magazine article published ten days later bearing the headline,
“The Career of Gerhart Eisler as a Comintern Agent. Prototype of the profes-
sional, Moscow-schooled revolutionary, he is now charged with conspiracy
against the government of the U.S.”
43
On May 6, 1958, eleven years after Hanns Eisler left the United States—
a voluntary departure to avoid deportation—Bunge, in another interview,
broached the composer’s Committee clash. Eisler first mentions Bertolt
Brecht, longtime friend and literary collaborator, poet of twenty-eight Hol-
lywood Songbook poems, who, like Eisler, appeared before the HUAC.
Brecht spoke in such an intelligent manner. Not even the biggest idiot
could catch him out. So he got away with it.
Like Brecht, I’m no politician or conspirator. But, as you know, I do have a
remarkable brother, and I put my head on the block for him, or rather the ideas
he stands for. Had it not been for my brother Gerhart, I never would have had
such problems—I want to be quite clear about that from the outset so I don’t
appear a political martyr, which is something I’m definitely not.
44
Eisler was subpoenaed on two occasions, first in Los Angeles May 12, 1947,
before a HUAC subcommittee.
45
The second encounter took place in Wash-
ington, D. C. September 24, 25, and 26, with Eisler testifying only on the first
day. He was sworn in, asked if he wished legal representation—to which he
answered affirmatively (Herman Greenberg and Joseph Forer)—after which
a great deal of rankling ensued as to whether Eisler’s attorneys could speak

Resisting Tyranny with Song 9
before the Committee. When this was rejected Eisler made two requests:
that his hearing be adjourned until those of others from the Hollywood film
industry and that his counsel might cross-examine witnesses who presented
testimony about him. As Eisler explained:
For a long time now this committee has smeared me and done everything
possible to prevent me from earning a living. I think I am now entitled to the
elementary protection of the cross-examination of witnesses. Should the com-
mittee deny me this basic privilege I request permission to submit questions to
the chairman to put to the witnesses. This privilege was recently granted to Mr.
Howard Hughes, and the late Mr. Wendell Willkie propounded questions to the
chairman of this committee for interrogation of witnesses.
46
When both requests were denied, Eisler inquired if he could read a prepared
statement. Republican Committee Chair J. Parnell Thomas asked to see it after
which this request also was disallowed.
47
Chief HUAC investigator Robert R.
Stripling then posed questions interspersed with readings from a number of
lengthy articles about or by Eisler to which the latter protested because “articles
of this kind, old articles from a different time . . . can only create a kind of hys-
teria against me.” With this Thomas asked, “Mr. Stripling, what is the purpose
of your reading these excerpts?” Stripling remarkably replied: “the purpose is
to show that Mr. Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field
and he is well aware of it.” Eisler’s response was equally remarkable, “I would
be flattered.” Unfortunately, feeling flattered is not how he left the US capital.
48
EISLER’S POEM FOR “NIGHTMARE”
“Nightmare,” the only Liederbuch song for which Eisler wrote both words
and music (the former in English), offers an instructive example of the
demands he makes on performers and listeners. To be sure, what at first
seems simplistic on closer inspection reveals it is anything but.
Example 1. English-language text, Eisler, “Nightmare.”
The rat men accused me of not liking stench, A
Of not liking garbage, of not liking their squeals,
Of not liking to eat dirt.
For days they argued, considering the question from every angle, B
Finally they condemned me.
You don’t like stench, A'

10 James E. Parsons
You don’t like garbage, you don’t like our squeals,
You don’t like to eat dirt.
49
The opening line’s polylingual pun “rat men” is particularly resourceful, “rat”
in English connoting a disease-carrying rodent and contemptible person, and,
in German, the noun “der rat” meaning legislative body. The poem’s circular
organization likewise is noteworthy, the eight lines divided into three sec-
tions of unequal length: two three-line outer sections, A and A', and a central
two-line B section. Comparing the outer sections reveals both expressive
similarity and narrative transformation. The first three lines initiate a dramatic
interchange between “the rat men” and their target. Never explicitly naming
himself or his HUAC imbroglio allows Eisler to universalize his experience.
Omitting what he does, he shifts attention to smell, hearing, and taste, each
of which, given its context, is degrading, for although never directly stated,
stench, squeals, and eating dirt make plain that the hallowed halls of govern-
ment are a pigsty.
Knocking the plaster off is a key Songbook strategy, a good example
of which is “Erinnerung an Eichendorff und Schumann” (Recollections of
Eichendorff and Schumann), No. 23. Eisler sets the opening quatrain of an
eight-line poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, “In der Fremde” (In Far-off
Places), a poem, in its entirety to which Robert Schumann turned to start
his famous Opus 39 Liederkreis (1840). Whereas in many of the Hollywood
songs Eisler alludes to past music, he does not here. His title naming both
Eichendorff and Schumann leads one to expect that, yet that is the very thing
he withholds, and so the past is and is not present, a symbol of the exile’s
fractured link with what has come before. All that Eichendorff considers he
does with specificity and distancing ambiguity. “Heimat,” or home, is a cen-
tral element, yet the poet refuses to name its location. He mentions a father
and mother only to reveal they “are long since dead.”
Example 2. Text, Eichendorff, “In der Fremde.” Eisler excludes the second strophe
Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen roth The clouds approach,
Da kommen die Wolken her, From home beyond the red lightning
Aber Vater und Mutter sind lange todt, But father and mother are long dead,
Es kennt mich dort Keiner mehr. Nobody knows me there anymore.
Wie bald, wie bald kommt die stille Zeit, How soon, how soon will come the
peaceful time,
Da ruhe ich auch, und über mir When I also rest, and over me
Rauschet die schöne Waldeinsamkeit Rustles the beautiful solitude of the
woods
Und keiner mehr kennt mich auch hier. And no one knows me here anymore,
either.
50

Resisting Tyranny with Song 11
Given the time and place when Eisler composed the song, the suppression
of the poem’s second half is understandable, for it is there that Eichendorff
envisions peace, something not foreseeable in 1943. Excluding the poem’s
second half, the title Eisler gives the song, in conjunction with the fame of
Schumann’s earlier setting, inspires one to salvage those severed lines. I argue
this is intentional, the means by which Eisler provokes listeners to grapple
with what is and is not present and so enlarge a song’s expressive potential.
The challenge of “Nightmare” is the struggle of opposites, starting with the
similar-dissimilar A-A' sections. One difference is mode of address. In the A
and B sections the protagonist employs the personal pronoun “me.” In the
last three lines the pronoun changes to “you,” indicating the central character
no longer is responding to others. Instead, those others address the protago-
nist and so move the poem from accusation to condemnation. The B section
is arguably the most impressive. One sentence long, its two clauses collide
in energetic combat. The line reads “For days they argued, considering the
question from every angle.” The second phrase, “considering the question
from every angle,” sums up in six words Hegel’s dialectic, Hegel a lifelong
favored philosopher for the composer, the inspiration for which came in part
from his philosopher father. Here the constructive conflict is of course that
Eisler’s HUAC examiners had no interest in contemplating questions from
any angle but their own.
EISLER’S MUSIC FOR “NIGHTMARE”
Eisler’s music follows his text’s ABA' form (see Figure 1.1). The brisk
opening section is raucously percussive, the piano propelling the song with
four and a half measures of repeated eighth-note F-G major seconds in an
ear-assailing high range in the right hand to which the left counters with D-E
major seconds. The entrance of the voice, deploying rapid-fire rhythms, goads
the piano into obsessive overdrive, both hands pummeling the D-E dyad in
octaves for five measures in advance of three measures of B-C minor seconds.
Cacophony reigns over all. What follows in measure 14 is extraordinary, for
yapping discord suddenly yields to the piano’s widely-spaced, mostly conso-
nant block chords above which the voice lyrically soars. Not allowed to read
his prepared text in Washington, D.C., Eisler now sings his peace. With an
ever-changing variety of syncopated rhythmic patterns, the voice defies the
piano’s lockstep duple meter, a constructive conflict one may view as the
musical resistance to tyranny and intimidation. In the central B section Eisler,
like a sculpture carving in relief, places the words “considering the question
from every angle.” What is sustained the longest is “angle,” an appropriate
response given that questions should be subjected to multiple perspectives,
the very thing not in evidence when Eisler’s HUAC interviewers questioned

12 James E. Parsons
Figure 1.1 Hanns Eisler, “Nightmare,” Hollywooder Liederbuch (Leipzig: Deutscher
Verlag für Musik, 2008). Copyright by Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig.

Resisting Tyranny with Song 13
Figure 1.1 (Continued).

14 James E. Parsons
him. Emphasizing the word “angle” and its Hegelian dialectic within the clat-
ter of the A sections framing it, Eisler triumphs over the vexations of 1947.
He wields song as a vessel of resistance.
“NIGHTMARE” IN CONTEXT
If “Nightmare” and the Songbook as a whole are not places of refuge, then
how should one interpret them? Throughout the anthology Eisler poses
numerous questions, yet the process of working them out is never easy. He
intensifies the difficulty both by his lack of consistency as to what to call the
Songbook and the uncertainty as to whether the Liederbuch forms a collec-
tion at all. In another conversation with Bunge, Eisler states: “I really wrote a
‘Hollywood Songbook,’ a title that I subsequently dropped. I had a big folder
and wrote on the cover: ‘Hollywood Songbook’ or ‘Hollywood Diary’—I
don’t remember which. I know how important such song cycles are in the his-
tory of music and what a momentous role they can play. Looking back, I have
to say it is a very strange and inspiring work” [eine sehr seltsame und gelun-
gene Arbeit].
51
Eleven years after composing “Nightmare,” Eisler had no
clear recollection of the anthology’s title. He employs the designation song
cycle—his German is Liederzyklus—in acknowledging the genre’s cultural
importance, but beyond that what is most arresting are the words “strange”
and “inspiring.” Eisler passes on that strangeness to performers and listeners.
Part of the oddness stems from the fact that after leaving the United States
and eventually settling in East Berlin he dismantled the Songbook. Publishing
the songs in the German Democratic Republic, Eisler scattered—one could
say exiled—them across three volumes of his Lieder und Kantaten, volume
1 in 1956, volume 2 in 1957, and volume 6 in 1962. Only in 1976 were all
forty-seven songs published in a single volume, with the first complete per-
formance taking place in 1982, twenty years after the composer’s death.
52
That performers, listeners, and scholars have restored Eisler’s Hollywooder
Liederbuch is both paradoxical and fitting. Eisler describes something similar
in the film music book written while he was creating the Songbook. Coher-
ence and continuity take place only when conceptual opposites meet in
dynamic interaction. Discussing montage in the film music study, Eisler
(and Adorno) stress that individual components “never coincide per se. If the
concept . . . has any justification, it is to be found in the relation between”
constituent elements. That association “is not one of similarity, but . . . of
question and answer, affirmation and negation, appearance and essence.”
“Montage makes the best of the aesthetically accidental . . . by transforming
an entirely extraneous relation into a virtual element of expression.” In film,
music ought to create “a stimulus of motion, not a reduplication of motion.

Resisting Tyranny with Song 15
The relation between music and film is antithetic at the very moment when
the deepest unity is achieved.”
53
Constructive conflict is the glue of the Liederbuch. That Eisler composed
these songs in Hollywood and thereafter dismantled them offers a striking
demonstration of his process of “question and answer, affirmation and nega-
tion, appearance and essence.” What Eisler includes and leaves out of “Rec-
ollections of Schumann and Eichendorff” yields another. The first two songs
of the Liederbuch offer two more. Both bear the title “Der Sohn” (The Son).
Both are settings of poems by Brecht, but beyond that and their evocations
of exile there are no further similarities. Unified by their titles, their content
is antithetical. In “Nightmare,” the words are in English, the language of the
composer’s HUAC interrogators. Using not his native tongue but that of his
cross-examiners, the pelting verbal rain of garbage and stench, the very things
Eisler is accused of promulgating, pours down not on him. He redirects that
melee against those who with squeals would drown him out. But it is not
yowling dissonances and lashing rhythms that linger in the memory. What
does is the calm at the eye of the storm, the song’s eleven-measure middle
section during which mob hysteria gives way to the consideration of ques-
tions from every angle.
In “Nightmare,” even though Eisler never states the question, true to his
method of constructive conflict, he offers an answer. And that response is
an empathic not to tyranny, a sounding declaration that a single Lied from
an anthology that may or may not be a song cycle “can play” a “momentous
role.” That possibility ever awaits us.
NOTES
1. While a complete listing of Songbook investigations according to these terms
exceeds this study’s scope, a partial inventory includes Claudia Albert, “Das schwi-
erige Handwerk des Hoffens”: Hanns Eislers “Hollywooder Liederbuch” (1942/43)
(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1991), Markus Roth, Der Gesang
als Asyl: analytische Studien zu Hanns Eislers “Hollywood-Liederbuch” (Hofheim:
Wolke, 2006), and Horst Weber, I am not a Hero, I am a Composer: Hanns Eisler in
Hollywood (Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag, 2012).
2. Eisler’s political activism together with his Jewish ancestry forced him into
exile following the Nazi rise to power.
3. Born July 6, 1898, Eisler died September 6, 1962. For a life-works study, see
Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler: Musik einer Zeit, die sich eben bildet (Munich: edition
text + kritik, 1976), translated into English by Bill Hopkins, Hanns Eisler: Political
Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The 1926 songs, pub-
lished 1929, are Eisler’s Zeitungsausschnitte. Whether they should be considered
“art songs” is open to question, as the texts are not poetry but, as the collection’s

16 James E. Parsons
title indicates, newspaper cuttings. Nor do the songs call for typical Lieder vocal
delivery. See further, David Blake, “The Early Music,” in Hanns Eisler: A Miscel-
lany, compiled and ed. David Blake (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1995), 54.
4. A pioneering examination of film music, Eisler’s Composing for the Films
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), experienced an arduous entry into the
world of letters given his political difficulties at the time of publication, including
the suppression of the book’s joint author, Theodore W. Adorno. See further James
Parsons, “The exile’s intellectual mission”: Adorno and Eisler’s Composing for the
Films,” Telos (2009) 149, 52–68, and Sally Bick, “The Politics of Collaboration:
Composing for the Films and Its Publication History,” German Studies Review 33/1
(2010) 141–162. Although the New York Times February 23, 1940 reports the Rocke-
feller grant was $20,000, Sally Bick, in her meticulous “Eisler’s Notes on Hollywood
and the Film Music Project, 1935–42,” Current Musicology 86 (2008): 14, gives the
figure as $20,160.
5. Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger,
and Other Writings, ed. Frederick A. Lubich (New York: Continuum, 1999), 314. The
essay began as a Library of Congress address, May 29, 1945.
6. Powdermaker embeds the phrase in the title of her book, Hollywood, the
Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1950). Quoted here from 39.
7. “Germany and the Germans,” 314.
8. Composing for the Films, ix.
9. For the complete contents see Hanns Eisler, Hollywooder Liederbuch, cor-
rected reprint of the first ed. with annotations by Oliver Dahin and Peter Deeg
(Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 2008). My references to individual numbers
from the Songbook correspond to those given in the Dahin and Deeg edition. Sug-
gested recording: Matthais Goerne, baritone, and pianist Eric Schneider: Hollywooder
Liederbuch, London Records, 289 460 582-2, compact disc.
10. Trans. in Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 120.
11. Schubert was so described after his death by his friend Albert Stadler in 1853;
quoted from Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, trans. Rosa-
mond Ley and John Nowell (London: Black, 1958), 215.
12. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 299.
13. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and
Terrence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1981.), 3:949.
14. Hanns Eisler and Hans Bunge, Brecht, Music and Culture, ed. and trans.
Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 174. Originally
issued in German as Hanns Eisler Gespräche mit Hans Bunge. Fragen Sie mehr
über Brecht (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1970). Eisler composed six
Hölderlin Lieder for the Songbook.
15. Brecht, Music and Culture, 174.
16. Brecht, Music and Culture, 174.
17. Brecht, Music and Culture, 177.

Resisting Tyranny with Song 17
18. Long suspected to be the case, the publication of James K. Lyon’s Bertolt
Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 213–214, confirms
that Brecht’s poem and Eisler’s setting refer to Peter Lorre. As Lyon reports, while
Brecht’s original German version of the poem, “Der Sumpf” (The Swamp), was lost
for some thirty years—existing only in an English translation made by Naomi Replan-
sky—the German text was discovered in 1977 among Lorre’s papers.
19. Ruth Fischer was the name she adopted when, during the period 1918–20, she
took up the cause of radical Marxism and helped to form the Austrian Communist
Party. Fischer her mother’s birth name.
20. Sidney B. Fay, “Preface,” in Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A
study in the Origins of the State Party (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1982),
xxxii–xxxiii. Fischer’s book was first published in 1948 by Harvard University Press.
21. Fay, “Preface,” xxxiii. For accounts of Ruth Fischer richly based on primary
source materials, see Peter Lübbe (ed.), Ruth Fischer–Arkadij Maslow: Abtrünnig
wider Willen. Aus Reden und Manuskripten des Exils (Munich: Oldenbourg 1990),
pp. 1–48; Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde (eds.), Kampfname Ruth Fischer: Wand-
lungen einer deutschen Kommunistin (Frankfurt-Main: Dipa, 1995), 7–75; and Fisch-
er’s own “Autobiographical Notes” [1944], in: Abtrünnig wider Willen, 442–477; and
Mario Kessler, Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten, 1895-1961
(Cologne: Böhlau, 2013).
22. Fay, “Preface,” xxxiv.
23. Even though it is not my purpose to argue casualties versus wrongdoers, the
reader has a right to know my position, and that is that I share the sentiments of Ellen
Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown:
1998), 122: “Although [Gerhart] Eisler had, it is true, worked for the Comintern in
the 1930s, by the end of 1946, when his case broke, he no longer held any position of
power.” See also below, fn. 40.
24. Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston, 1969), 302. Various sources spell the composer Eisler’s older brother’s first
name as Gerhard or Gerhart. Here I use the spelling used by the sources I quote,
although the preferred spelling in Gerhart.
25. Oral communication with Eisler’s second wife, Louise Eisler (Eisler-Fischer),
with Albrecht Betz December 31, 1973, cited in Betz, Eisler: Political Musician, 197.
26. Thirty Years of Treason, Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee
on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Viking, 1971),
55. Also, Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 464, fn. 15.
27. The Network, 5 (May 1944), 3.
28. The Washington Post (October 18, 1946), 1–2.
29. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the University States.
Louis F. Budenz. Friday, November 22, 1946. Hearing before the Committee on Un-
American Activities House of Representatives (Washington: United State Government
Printing Office, 1946), 3.
30. Fischer, “Autobiographical Notes,” Abtrünnig wider Willen, 465–473.
31. Fischer obtained a copy of Maslow’s death certificate; see Ruth Fischer Papers
(MS Ger 204), Houghton Library, Harvard University: Dr. Roberto Santiesteban
Pérez to Ruth Fischer, November 25, 1941.

18 James E. Parsons
32. Guenther Reinhardt, Crime Without Punishment: The Secret Soviet Terror
Against America (New York: Hermitage House, 1953), 38, 40–47.
33. Fischer made her accusation in a letter dated April 27, 1944; see Abtrünnig
wider Willen, 160–161.
34. Reinhardt, Crime Without Punishment, 45–46.
35. Los Angeles Times (October 22, 1946), 1.
36. Quoted from Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” in James W. Muller,
ed., Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1999), 4–5 and 8–9.
37. Budenz. Friday, November 22, 1946, 2–3.
38. Budenz. Friday, November 22, 1946, 35.
39. https://vault.fbi.gov/Hanns%20Eisler, last accessed September 11, 2016; also
https://archive.org/details/HannsEisler, last accessed September 24, 2016. For a com-
prehensive overview, see James Wierzbicki, “Hanns Eisler and the FBI,” Music &
Politics 2/2 (2008), 1–31.
40. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_219/admininfo.html, last
accessed September 11, 2016. See further, Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 122–131.
Schrecker, 463, fn. 13, typifies the FBI’s investigation of Gerhart as a succession of
“dirty tricks.”
41. Quoted from Thirty Years, 57–59.
42. Thirty Years, 61–62.
43. Hubert Kay, “The Career of Gerhart Eisler as a Comintern Agent,” Life 22, no.
7 (February 17, 1947), 99.
44. Brecht, Music and Culture, 81. Brecht appeared before the HUAC in Wash-
ington, D.C. October 30, 1947. For his testimony, see Thirty Years, 207–220. For an
overview see Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 314–337.
45. See further, Jack D. Meeks, From the Belly of the HUAC: the HUAC Investiga-
tions of Hollywood, 1947–1952 (Ph.D. dissertation: University of Maryland, 2009), 199.
46. Hearings Regarding Hanns Eisler. Hearings before the Committee on Un-
American Activities House of Representatives. September 24, 25, and 26 (Washing-
ton: United State Government Printing Office, 1947), 1–4; also available at https://
archive.org/details/hearingsregardin1947unit, last access September 27, 2016. For a
transcript, see Thirty Years, 73–109. Hughes testified before the Senate War Investi-
gating Committee August 6, 1947, Willkie before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee February 11, 1941 in support of the Lend-Lease Act.
47. Eisler subsequently published the statement the following month in The New
Masses (October 14, 1947), 8, an American Marxist magazine affiliated with the US
CP; reprinted, “Fantasia in G-Men,” in Hanns Eisler, A Rebel in Music, ed. Manfred
Grabs (London: Kahn & Averill, 1999), 150–154. Thomas served as US Representa-
tive from New Jersey, 1937–50, was convicted of fraud in 1950, resigned from Con-
gress, after which he completed a term in a federal prison.
48. Hearings Regarding Hanns Eisler, 25.
49. Text derived from Hollywooder Liederbuch, 88–89.
50. For Eichendorff’s poem see Sämtliche Werke des Freihern Joseph von Eichen-
dorff: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 1, book 1, ed. Harry Fröhlich and Ursula
Regener (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), 280.

Resisting Tyranny with Song 19
51. Brecht, Music and Culture, 32. The German is from Hanns Eisler Gespräche
mit Hans Bunge, 45.
52. Hanns Eisler, Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier, ed. Manfred Grabs
(Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1976).
53. Composing for the Films, 70–71, 78.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert, Claudia. “Das schwierige Handwerk des Hoffens”: Hanns Eislers “Holly-
wooder Liederbuch” (1942/43). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche, 1991.
Betz, Albrecht. Hanns Eisler: Political Musician, trans. Bill Hopkins. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Bick, Sally. “The Politics of Collaboration: Composing for the Films and Its Publica-
tion History.” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2010): 141–162.
———. “Eisler’s Notes on Hollywood and the Film Music Project, 1935–42.” Cur-
rent Musicology 86 (2008): 7–39.
Blake, David. “The Early Music.” In Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, ed. David Blake,
11–64. Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995.
Churchill, Winston. “The Sinews of Peace,” In James W. Muller, ed., Churchill’s
“Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later, 1–13. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1999.
Eisler, Hanns [and Theodor W. Adorno]. Composing for the Films. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1947.
———. “Fantasia in G-Men,” in Hanns Eisler, A Rebel in Music, ed. Manfred Grabs,
150–154. London: Kahn & Averill, 1999.
———. Hollywooder Liederbuch, corrected reprint of the first ed. with annotations
by Oliver Dahin and Peter Deeg. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 2008.
———. Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier, ed. Manfred Grabs. Leipzig:
Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1976.
Eisler, Hanns [and Theodor W. Adorno] and Hans Bunge. Brecht, Music and Culture,
ed. and trans. Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Fischer, Ruth. Stalin and German Communism: A study in the Origins of the State
Party. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982 (originally published
1948).
Hearings Regarding Hanns Eisler. Hearings before the Committee on Un-American
Activities House of Representatives. September 24, 25, and 26. Washington:
United State Government Printing Office, 1947.
Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the University States. Louis
F. Budenz. Friday, November 22, 1946. Hearing before the Committee on Un-
American Activities House of Representatives. Washington: United State Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1946.
Kampfname Ruth Fischer: Wandlungen einer deutschen Kommunistin, ed. Sabine
Hering and Kurt Schilde. Frankfurt-Main: Dipa, 1995.
Kay, Hubert. “The Career of Gerhart Eisler as a Comintern Agent,” Life 22, no. 7
(February 17, 1947): 99–110.

20 James E. Parsons
Kessler, Mario. Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten, 1895–1961.
Cologne: Böhlau, 2013.
Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980.
Mann, Thomas. “Germany and the Germans,” in Thomas Mann, Death in Venice,
Tonio Kröger, and Other Writings, ed. Frederick A. Lubich, 303–319. New York:
Continuum, 1999.
Meeks, Jack D. From the Belly of the HUAC: The HUAC Investigations of Holly-
wood, 1947–1952. Ph.D. dissertation: University of Maryland, 2009.
Parsons, James. “‘The exile’s intellectual mission’: Adorno and Eisler’s Composing
for the Films.” Telos 149 (2009): 52–68.
Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at
the Movie-Makers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Ter-
rence Kilmartin, 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1981.
Reinhardt, Guenther. Crime Without Punishment: The Secret Soviet Terror Against
America. New York: Hermitage House, 1953.
Roth, Markus. Der Gesang als Asyl: analytische Studien zu Hanns Eislers “Holly-
wood-Liederbuch.” Hofheim: Wolke, 2006.
Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow. Abtrünnig wider Willen. Aus Reden und
Manuskripten des Exils. Peter Lübbe, ed. Munich: Oldenbourg 1990.
Sämtliche Werke des Freihern Joseph von Eichendorff: Historisch-Kritische Aus-
gabe, vol. 1, book 1, ed. Harry Fröhlich and Ursula Regener. Stuttgart: Kohlham-
mer, 1993.
Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1998.
Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch, trans. Rosamond Ley and
John Nowell. London: Black, 1958.
Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993.
Thirty Years of Treason. Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities, 1938–1968, ed. Eric Bentley. New York: Viking, 1971.
Viertel, Salka. The Kindness of Strangers. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1969.
Weber, Horst. I am not a Hero, I am a Composer: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood.
Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag, 2012.
Wierzbicki, James. “Hanns Eisler and the FBI,” Music & Politics 2, no. 2 (2008):
1–31.
Youens, Susan. Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1991.

21
Chapter 2
Memory as Resistance
Viktor Ullmann’s Terezín Settings
of Friedrich Hölderlin
Brent Wetters
It is commonplace to state that all interpretation is contingent, but we are less
apt to consider the concrete factors that mediate those contingencies. In this
chapter, I interpret Viktor Ullmann’s vocal settings of poems by Friedrich
Hölderlin, but I place emphasis on the historical circumstances that would
have fostered competing interpretations of those poems at the time Ullmann
set them. I am proposing two very different readers of the poems, although in
both cases a preponderance of historical evidence confirms that these readers
are not “imaginary.” Both readers could be said to suffer from a “tyranny of
circumstance”: one is a soldier, the other a concentration camp inmate. These
hypothetical readers are separated both culturally and geographically, but
may be said to read the poem at the same time. The first poem is “Abend-
phantasie” by Hölderlin and the year is 1943.
It is first necessary to say something about Hölderlin, who, for his often-
fanatical adherents, is always paradoxically both obscure and the most impor-
tant of poets. His importance often seems to be founded on that obscurity.
1

Musicologists, who study the late twentieth century, with no doubt will
recognize his name as a frequent source for texts among the post-war avant-
garde. Yet before the war, few composers set his poems to music, the most
notable exception being Johannes Brahms’s “Hyperions Schicksalslied.”
Even a composer like Gustav Mahler, who referred to Hölderlin as one of his
very favorite poets, did not ever set his words to music.
2
After the war, among
the many composers who did so are Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Kaija Saa-
riaho, Heinz Holliger, Carl Orff, Hans Zender, Wolfgang Rihm, Benjamin
Britten, and Aribert Reimann.
Friedrich Hölderlin was born in 1770 in a small town on the River Neckar.
He showed early promise as a writer and philosopher and was associated
with Jena romantics like Novalis (Georg von Hardenberg) and Friedrich

22 Brent Wetters
Schiller. Schiller published the first fragment of Hölderlin’s epistolary novel,
Hyperion, a work exhibiting the Hellenism that would characterize much
of his writing and poetry. In addition to original work, Hölderlin was also
a prolific translator of Greek writers Pindar and Sophocles. However, an
uncompromising and difficult style, coupled with personal and psychological
problems, meant that his writing was virtually unknown in his lifetime. He
suffered a mental break at the age of thirty-seven and spent the remainder of
his life committed in a tower in Tübingen. These biographical details formed
the basis for much of his early notoriety: the tragic figure of a poet consumed
by his art.
Hölderlin remained obscure well after his death, though his reputation
as a difficult and insightful poet persisted; first Friedrich Nietzsche, then
Stefan George, and later Martin Heidegger championed his works. In recent
years, Hölderlin’s fame has risen to the extent that we might now speak of a
Hölderlin-industry, and his works are treated with almost sacred reverence by
composers and theorists alike. His writing has proved amenable to the gen-
eration that came to prominence after World War II for a variety of reasons,
not the least of which is his dedication to the idea that only future genera-
tions would properly understand his works. Some composers of the genera-
tion found that his rigorously systematized poetics suggested something like
serial organization, even if his theory of “alternation of tones” never had any
properly musical signification.
3
For Maderna, Hölderlin’s tendency toward
fragmentation and not just incomplete writing, but uncompletable writing,
suggested a pretext for new modes of aleatoric composition in the 1960s.
4

The fragmentary aspect was also decisive for Luigi Nono in his last works
that also drew on Hölderlin for inspiration. In the case of the string quartet,
Fragmente-Stille, a Diotima, Hölderlin’s words seem to achieve the status
of sacred relic. In this composition, Nono pairs paratactic music and gap-
ing silences with inscriptions from Hölderlin’s poetry. Nono commands,
however, that those words should never be vocalized, but projected inwardly
by the performers. There is presently no quicker route to profundity than to
invoke the name of Hölderlin.
But Hölderlin’s star had reached its zenith at least once before, during the
Second World War, when he was a favorite poet of Nazi propagandists. It is
this moment I would like to examine, because it complicates the usual expla-
nations for Hölderlin’s current popularity. His post-war reception most often
is presented in terms of “reclamation” and “rehabilitation,” thereby ignoring
the extent to which his work was contested during the war. Perhaps the most
famous Hölderlin polemic was conducted between Martin Heidegger, The-
odor Adorno, and their followers. These arguments, however, had much more
to do with philosophical intent and a sense that one or the other of the two
was abusing Hölderlin in the service of their own ideologies. The competing

Memory as Resistance 23
interpretations that concern the current endeavor are pragmatic: how would a
given poem be interpreted differently by two readers of very different circum-
stances? But just because two interpretations may diverge drastically does not
mean that one or another is wrong. An interpretation always has more to do
with the context in which it is read than the poem’s inherent meaning. Here,
then, are two very different readings of Hölderlin’s “Abendphantasie” (1799).
5
Our first reader is a German soldier, not much older than twenty, serv-
ing on the Eastern Front. Because 1943 was the hundredth anniversary of
Hölderlin’s death, commemorations abounded. As part of the celebrations,
the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft published a collection of his poems to be sent to
soldiers serving on the front lines—the so-called Feldauswahl.
6
These small
pocket-sized editions were intended to provide soldiers with patriotic feelings
about the nation they had been sent to protect. The association of Hölder-
lin’s with military combat was not a new idea imposed by the editors of the
Feldauswahl. Military sacrifice had been a component of the perception of
Hölderlin’s poems ever since his first major editor, Norbert von Hellingrath,
died in Verdun during World War I.
7
His poems became yet another cultural
artifact that bolstered the German claim to cultural superiority. Robert Ian
Savage has shown conclusively that the official love shown to Hölderlin and
his works was neither transitory nor entirely misplaced, but the character of
his appropriation was markedly different than it was for other figures such
as Heinrich Kleist, Schiller, or Ludwig van Beethoven. All, certainly, were
offered as examples of German exceptionalism, but, “Whereas Schiller and
Kleist, whose works were more easily susceptible to jingoistic exploitation,
had been the poets of German military success, Hölderlin became the poet
of German defeat.”
8
The particular character of Hölderlin’s writings, Savage
concludes, gave the military defeats “an aura of tragic grandeur and neces-
sity.”
9
It would be hasty to speak of misappropriation; even those passages
in Hölderlin that are critical of the idea of Germany (as in certain lines from
Hyperion) were read as if paving the way for a “true” or “pure” Germany to
come.
10
But it is not my intention to recast the entire history of Hölderlin’s
wartime reception; I would instead like to read “Abendphantasie” from the
perspective of this soldier who would have received a copy of the Feldaus-
wahl on the Eastern Front.
ABENDPHANTASIE
Vor seiner Hütte ruhig im Schatten sizt
Der Pflüger, dem Genügsamen raucht sein Heerd.
Gastfreundlich tönt dem Wanderer im
Friedlichen Dorfe die Abendglocke.

24 Brent Wetters
Wohl kehren izt die Schiffer zum Hafen auch,
In fernen Städten, fröhlich verrauscht des Markts
Geschäft’ger Lärm; in stiller Laube
Glänzt das gesellige Mahl den Freunden.
Wohin denn ich? Es leben die Sterblichen
Von Lohn und Arbeit; wechselnd in Müh’ und Ruh’
Ist alles freudig; warum schläft denn
Nimmer nur mir in der Brust der Stachel?
Am Abendhimmel blühet ein Frühling auf;
Unzählig blühn die Rosen und ruhig scheint
Die goldne Welt; o dorthin nimmt mich
Purpurne Wolken! und möge droben
In Licht und Luft zerrinnen mir Lieb’ und Laid! —
Doch, wie verscheucht von thöriger Bitte, flieht
Der Zauber; dunkel wirds und einsam
Unter dem Himmel, wie immer, bin ich.—
Komm du nun, sanfter Schlummer! zu viel begehrt
Das Herz; doch endlich, Jugend! verglühst du ja,
Du ruhelose, träumerische!
Friedlich und heiter ist dann das Alter.
11
EVENING FANTASY
The plowman sits quietly outside his hut, from which his hearth modestly smokes.
The evening bells cordially welcome the wanderer into the peaceful village.
The skippers also return to the harbor, in distant cities, the markets’
busy noise dims; in quiet arbors friends enjoy an intimate meal.
Whereto then I? Mortals live from wages and work; everything is joyful when
alternating exhaustion and quiet; why then does the thorn in my breast never sleep.
Spring blooms in the evening sky; countless roses bloom and calmly reveal
the golden world; oh, take me there, crimson clouds! And above may
My love and pain melt into light and air!—but the spell breaks, as if banished by
a foolish request; all becomes dark and lonesome under the sky, as ever, am I. —
Come now, then, sweet slumber! The heart desires too much; but finally, my youth,
your dreamy disquiet will burn out! I will achieve peace and serenity in my old age.
The poem opens with stanzas that describe two nostalgic scenes of domes-
tic idyll. In the first we encounter a farmer resting in the shade outside his

Memory as Resistance 25
comfortable hut. The traveler who arrives on the scene finds a pleasant and
inviting setting. In the second stanza, the frame moves closer to portray a
blissful village scene—a bustling market, friends enjoying a festive meal.
The evening scene is a picture of contentment. The mood changes abruptly in
the third stanza when it becomes apparent that these scenes are being viewed
or imagined by one who cannot access them. (“But where shall I go?” and
“Must I alone find no relief from the thorn that goads me?”) This sudden shift
reveals that the previous scene is a wistful remembrance tinged with sadness.
To the soldier on the front line, this juxtaposition would likely have conjured
feelings of nostalgia for the homeland he had left behind (as was almost cer-
tainly intended by the volume’s editors). The soldier suffers in the knowledge
that he is protecting precisely this idyllic life.
The remaining stanzas aim at resolution and transcendence, and the speaker
finds solace in that sacrifice. We can imagine that the soldier reading the final
stanza would not have found much difficulty substituting death in battle for
“gentle sleep.” To a soldier in battle, “gentle sleep” and the end of suffering
is the inevitable reward for noble sacrifice. And should our soldier survive,
the poem says, the serenity of old age will be the reward. Therefore, to read
the poem from the perspective of its avowed purpose in the Feldauswahl is
to sanctify the soldier’s sacrifice. The poem assures our soldier that his pain
services a higher purpose: the protection and creation of a purified Germany.
The second reader—not yet Victor Ullmann, instead someone occupying
his historical position—was a resident of a town some one-hundred kilome-
ters north of Prague, a town then named Theresienstadt. By 1941, the town
had been converted into a Jewish ghetto, with the fortress of Terezín across
the River Ohře serving as a concentration camp and way-station for inmates
deported to Auschwitz. The ghetto became a tool in the Nazi propaganda
machine: inmates were allowed more freedom than in other ghettos, espe-
cially for artistic endeavors, and the Nazis in turn used the camp to show
international observers that the Jewish prisoners were happy and well-
treated.
12
As many studies and documentaries have shown, the picture of life
given to those observers did not in any way comport with reality: the ghetto
was horribly over-crowded, hunger and disease were rampant, and politi-
cal and cultural life were tightly controlled. In spite of these torments, the
composer Viktor Ullmann was nevertheless able to continue composing up
until the moment he was sent to Auschwitz. Inmates like Ullmann were thus
presented with the unenviable choice of refusing to make music or knowing
that their activity made them at least partially complicit with their oppressors.
Ullmann did write and perform, but also looked for subtle—and sometimes
not-so-subtle—ways to protest his reality through his music.
It is a curious irony that Ullmann was more productive in Terezín than he
had been for much of his previous life. Before his internment, his career had
been somewhat erratic, with several personal and professional setbacks. He

26 Brent Wetters
was born in 1898 in what is now the Czech Republic, although his father was
of Austrian descent. He studied with Arnold Schoenberg and received critical
acclaim for many of his early works, but never succeeded in obtaining a per-
manent position, and moved frequently between Germany, Switzerland, and
the Czech Republic. He was in Stuttgart when the National Socialists took
power, whereupon he promptly returned to Prague.
13
He remained in Prague
another nine years before being sent to Terezín in the September of 1942.
In Terezín, Ullmann integrated himself into the musical and cultural life
of the ghetto and paradoxically found himself with renewed motivation to
compose, as is documented both by his prolific output during his internment
and by a short text he wrote in Terezín titled “Goethe und Ghetto” now held
by the Jewish Museum in Prague. The provenance of the document is unclear,
as is its intended audience, but it asserts that the camp conditions did not have
the negative effects that might have been assumed.
14
A survivor from Terezín,
Thomas Mandl, believes that the text dates from late-summer of 1944, a time
when Mandl remembers considerable—ultimately unfounded—optimism
that the war would soon be over. News had reached the camp of troubles on
the Eastern Front, as well as the assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler. This
optimism, Mandl asserts, accounts for the retrospective character of the text,
as if Terezín were an unhappy phase in his life about to come to an end.
15

It would be reckless to take its claims at face value, given the camp’s status
as a propaganda tool; the text could even have been written under duress in
spite of the claims of Mandl. However, without praising the material condi-
tion of the camp, Ullmann asserted that Terezín was, for him, a “school of
form”:
Theresienstadt was and remains for me a school of form. Previously, where one
does not feel the burden and weight of material life because they were displaced
by comfort and the magic of civilization, it was easy to create beautiful forms.
Here, where in daily life one must overcome material through form, where
everything musical stands in stark contrast to the environment: here is the true
master class, wherein one sees with Schiller the secret of the work of art: to
extinguish the material through the form.
16
Precisely the oppressive environment of the ghetto illuminated the separation
of musical form from its material reality. Ullmann ascribes to Goethe and
Schiller a desire for art to overcome “Stoffe” through form. In Terezín, such
“overcoming” was not merely an aesthetic ideal, but a practical and ethical
imperative.
One can imagine various artistic responses to such imprisonment, and we
can find examples of each response among Ullmann’s Terezín works. One
such response was to embrace the Judaism that had provoked his internment.

Memory as Resistance 27
Some of the inmates, Ullmann included, who had never been culturally
Jewish, found that embracing their Jewish identity now became a mode
of defiance. This impulse was also at work outside of the camps; Arnold
Schoenberg reaffirmed his Judaism as he fled to Los Angeles, for example.
When his Jewishness was forced on him as a negative attribute, he responded
by reclaiming it as a matter of pride. Among his Terezín works, Ullmann
wrote and set several Yiddish and Hebrew texts. His Jewish works in Terezín
include the “Zehn jiddische und hebräische Chöre” (1943), “Drei jiddische
Lieder für Singstimme und Klavier” (1944), and “Drei hebräische Knaben-
Chöre” (1944).
17
Imprisonment inspired solidarity among fellow inmates, and
they became Jewish despite their cultural heritage, though one should not
discount the extent to which Ullmann’s turn to Jewish music may have also
been prompted by the practical needs and wishes of other inmates. Ullmann
indicates in “Goethe und Ghetto” that one effect of the camp was to place
practical considerations—like which musical instruments were available—at
the fore.
18
Another artistic response was to write music or create art that explicitly
rejected and protested the current reality. Almost Ullmann’s last work at
Terezín was an opera that falls into this category. He wrote Der Kaiser von
Atlantis while imprisoned and began rehearsals in the camp. The plot’s alle-
gorical subtext was unmistakable: an emperor decrees that his subjects should
engage in universal war, until all are dead, but Death decries the emperor
for usurping his role, and so breaks his scythe. Thereafter the characters—in
spite of concerted efforts to kill each other—are suspended between life and
death. This form of protest is also undoubtedly the most risky. German offi-
cials unsurprisingly objected to the opera and cancelled the performance, and
most of the cast and participants were subsequently assigned for deportation
to Auschwitz.
These are self-evident ways to respond to oppression. In a concentration
camp, simply staying alive is its own kind of protest. But why would Ull-
mann choose to set poems that were, at the same time, being conscripted into
the war-effort of his oppressors? One of those compositions was a setting of
“Abendphantasie,” and the same lines that spoke to the German soldier about
the nobility of his sacrifice take on an entirely different character if we read
them from the perspective of an inmate at Terezín.
The broad themes of the poem remain the same: a nostalgic past contrasted
with a miserable present ultimately transcended through death. However, the
line “Wohin denn ich?” loses all sense of agency, though its conspicuous
lack of a verb already points in that direction Michael Hamburger’s trans-
lation favors the translation “Where shall I go?” Ullmann, however, could
have read this line as “Where will I be taken?” or even “Where will I end
up?”
19
A soldier wonders where his military service will take him, how long

28 Brent Wetters
he will be able to endure the suffering, and when he will be able to return
home. The inmate at Terezín, by contrast, is not “going” anywhere; he is
being taken places, put places. Perhaps most striking in our speculative
Terezín-reading of this poem is the complete absence of sacrifice, and not
simply because, as Giorgio Agamben argues, it is barbaric to speak of sacri-
fice and death camps in the same breath. (It is for this reason that Agamben
refuses to use the term “Holocaust.”
20
) The poem itself says nothing overtly
about sacrifice. Only the imposition of the context of a soldier reading the
poem inflects the poem’s present suffering as one undertaken as a matter
of choice. The Terezín inmate suffers all the same, but feels that suffering
as an injustice rather than sacrifice. The “death-to-come” in the final stanza
does not offer redemption, merely respite from physical and mental pain.
Further, the final hope for the quiet of old age now becomes bitterly ironic.
Old age is the one thing that seems completely inaccessible in the camp, and
yet, precisely by invoking it, the inmate in this speculative reading stakes a
claim on a life outside.
The first of Ullmann’s three Hölderlin settings, “Sonnenuntergang,” is espe-
cially poignant in its refusal to acknowledge the horror of his present situation
without conceding anything to his oppressors. Hölderlin’s poem describes a sun-
set, and, on its surface, Ullmann’s setting is quiet and direct. However, its humble
pretense masks a pointed glance that seems to penetrate the camp walls, holding
on to a memory whose very existence Nazi authorities were trying to erase.
SONNENUNTERGANG
Wo bist du? trunken dämmert die Seele mir
Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ists,
Daß ich gelauscht, wie, goldner Töne
Voll, der entzückende Sonnenjüngling
Sein Abendlied auf himmlischer Leier spielt’;
Es tönten rings die Wälder und Hügel nach.
Doch fern ist er zu frommen Völkern,
Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegangen.
21
SUNSET
Where are you? Drunken the soul dims with all of your joy; because it is just
that I have listened like the sun-drenched boy full with golden tones who plays
his evening-song on a heavenly lyre; it echoes around the hills and forests. But
he has now gone to distant lands far from the pious people who still honor him.

Memory as Resistance 29
To begin, I will dismiss out of hand any suggestion that this setting was
intended to be subversive by making a farce of Hölderlin. That is to say,
one could conceivably protest the idea of “German supremacy” by mocking
German cultural icons, but Ullmann’s setting is by all accounts earnest and
treats its source with loving reverence. Conversely, we can also assume that
this was not intended as any sort of appeasement; Ullmann was not trying
to gain the good graces of his captors by setting their favorite poet. Such
a move likely would have had the opposite effect. Mendelssohn’s music,
for example, was considered subversive because it was not marked as Jew-
ish—the assimilated Jew was more threatening than the non-assimilated.
22
In “Sonnenuntergang” Ullmann found a poem already rich with material
and hidden meanings. As critic Allan Blunden argues, Hölderlin’s poem does
not so much describe a sunset but rather temporally charts the impression it
makes on the poet—the poet’s interior thoughts on viewing it; the poem’s
brevity emphasizes the ephemerality of the event.
23
Reading the poem from
Ullmann’s perspective in the camp, the “Sonnenjüngling” that ends the
first stanza might have resonated strongly with his own biography. Michael
Hamburger translates “Sonnenjüngling” somewhat clumsily as “enrapturing
youth, the son-god,” but it could also be “adorable sun-drenched boy” conjur-
ing the image of idyllic childhood.
24
While the poem is in the present tense,
it is also a present that is already in its process of disappearance. Part of the
allure of a sunset is the knowledge that it is always already somehow lost,
and one could say the same of childhood—a fading innocence. For two of his
own children, however, Ullmann was not afforded the luxury to watch that
innocence fade slowly into adulthood.
25
Instead, his two youngest children,
Johannes and Felicia, had escaped Nazi Germany on one of the final Kinder-
transporten bound for England shortly before his own deportation to Ter-
ezín.
26
From a parent’s perspective, much of childhood is about the conscious
creation of memories; the goal is of course to create happy memories, so his
decision to send his children to England must have been a source of unspeak-
able pain. While that decision might have saved them—and it did save them,
but Ullmann never would have been sure—the rupture also marked them with
a profoundly traumatic end to their childhood.
“Sonnenuntergang” is an example of extended tonality. It is like Berg’s
Piano Sonata, Op. 1 insomuch as it has points where it is clearly tonal and
uses tonal logic to move from chord to chord, but rarely seems tied to a tonal
center. Berg’s sonata was written at a historical point where its points of
tonality are departures, and the extended chromaticism has the character of
an expedition into unknown territory. Ullmann wrote “Sonnenuntergang,” by
contrast, at a historical moment when he himself and most of his colleagues
had already abandoned tonality. As such, its tonality has a nostalgic and
anachronistic character. The moments of tonal articulation, of which there

30 Brent Wetters
are many, sound like remembrances of a tonal system that belong to the past,
and the chromatic alterations give its tonality a fractured and broken quality.
The opening two bars are intensely ambiguous. The first chord containing
fifths A-E and B-F# hints at a few possible directions. The second chord, a
half-diminished seventh built on C-natural, maintains the ambiguity. It does
not seem strongly tied to either what comes before or after; F-sharp is the
only tone common to the first two chords, and by the second beat of bar
two, Ullmann has used the full complement of all 12 tones. From there the
chords descend following a tonal logic, briefly tonicizing F-major. The next
two chords are reminiscent of an A-dominant progressing to D-major with
significant alterations. Bars 3 and 4 follow a linear descent to measure 5,
where D-major is asserted strongly, landing on a D-major triad at the begin-
ning of bar 6, followed by several explicit dominant-tonic resolutions from
A to D. The clearest of the A-major dominant chords also coincides with the
first return of the vocal line to the high A-natural that opened the setting. This
high-point corresponds to “Sonnenjüngling” in Hölderlin’s poem. D-major
presents as tonic from bar 6 until 11, where it begins a transition to B-major
that holds for the remainder of the setting.
The final three bars reprise the opening and set the final word of the poem,
hinweggegangen (“departed”). The first two of the final three chords are the
same as those that open the piece, but now expanded so that each lasts an
entire bar. The vocal line is similarly expanded, descending from A to E on
beats one and two. Ullmann introduces a slight but decisive change when the
vocalist lands on B-natural on beat three instead of C-natural. The vocalist
immediately corrects to the expected C on the first beat of the next bar, fol-
lowed by an unexpected and dramatic leap down to a low B-flat, the lowest
note of the vocal line yet. The vocalist then stops, allowing the dissonant
half-diminished seventh chord to sustain. Ullmann concludes the setting by
reinterpreting two of the notes of that chord—G-flat becomes an F-sharp,
E-flat becomes D-sharp—and the remaining two, C- and B-flat, converge on
B-natural to resolve the ambiguity of the opening gesture with a root-position
B-major chord in the piano—the vocalist departs before the resolution.
Throughout, Ullmann’s vocal melody and musical accompaniment are
in near-constant descent. The vocal line contains five gradually descend-
ing gestures, each punctuated by a quick ascent, where the vocalist quickly
sweeps back to the top of the register. Those flourishes are quick enough that
they never succeed in breaking the general feeling of circular descent. In this
motion, Ullmann breaks with, but also comments on, the convention of step-
progression—the convention that states that each successively achieved high
tone will create a meaningful progressive arc and that the highest tone of a
given piece will usually coincide with a climax of some sort. The highest note
of the “Sonnenungergang” is also its first: the A above treble clef; its lowest is
the final note: the B-flat below treble clef. But this creates a hitch. Though the

Memory as Resistance 31
whole shape of the setting is characterized by the two-octave leap, the pitch
class is marked by a step up one semitone.
Briefly considering the reaction of our hypothetical soldier to this song, it
becomes clear why it was not included among the poems of the Feldauswahl.
The theme of tragic decline and a “coming night” is not one that would have
been useful to Nazi authorities. The soldier might have read the coming night
as an allegory for a doomed, perhaps even misguided, military excursion.
It would not have served the primary function of the volume to “edify” the
soldiers. A poem like “Sonnenuntergang” may have offered solace to Nazi
officials who privately felt their cause was doomed to failure, but the solace
would not have extended to the soldiers feeling the physical effects of that
failure. When from his position of relative safety Goebbels says that “politics
is the highest form of art there is” he willfully disregards those who feel the
physical effects of that aestheticization.
27

My reading of Ullmann’s interpretation of Hölderlin has been speculative,
but his reading of “Sonnenuntergang” was not. Ullmann’s setting is a well-
defined reaction to Hölderlin’s text at a specific point in time. What, then,
does Ullmann’s interpretation of the poem—because what is a musical setting
but an interpretation of a given text?—tell us about his relationship to both his
immediate surroundings and to Hölderlin?
The contour of the vocal line gives shape to the poems subject, a sunset.
Allegorically, sunsets suggest not only the coming of an individual night,
but also of more generalized decline and twilight—think Götterdämmerung.
“Sonnenuntergang” remembers an imagined past beauty—a beauty that then
seemed all but lost: “He plays his evening-song on the heavenly lyre …
[those] who still honor him in his absence.” The unassuming traditionality of
the setting is precisely what marks it as protest. Ullmann’s Hölderlin settings
stake a claim on the Germanic musical tradition and compellingly argue that
Germany had betrayed not only its Jewish citizenry, but its own cultural heri-
tage as well. At exactly the point where Ullmann seems to have confirmed the
setting’s descent into dissonance and despair—the moment the vocalist drops
out leaving only a dissonant chord with little hope of resolution—he allows a
major chord to emerge for one fleeting moment. It might be a sign that though
all seems lost the sun will emerge again. A sign that, even though German
culture and the legacy of Hölderlin seemed bound to follow him in his own
impending doom, Ullmann still carried a hope the things he loved—including
his own children—might survive his present nightmare.
NOTES
1. Hölderlin’s difficulty—whether real or perceived—has made him mostly the
province of academics, philosophers, and, by extension, philosophically minded

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me unkind by thus seeming to oppose your happiness. I do a
violence to my own feelings, indeed I do, Ardent, whenever I refuse
your solicitations.’—Her sobs for some time prevented her
proceeding; at last she continued;—‘But I should be selfish, were I
to allow myself to do as you would have me, and act with a
regardlessness of your interests, for which I should never be able to
forgive myself. My aunt, it is evident to all who see her, is rapidly
approaching her dissolution. She has been kind to me. I wish not her
last moments to be rendered miserable, by what in me would appear
to her ingratitude, and I am most anxious for your sake, dear
Ardent, that she should not, through any imprudence of mine, annul
those intentions in my favour she has so frequently expressed. Her
property is but small, but it will enable us to join your family, and
with industry and economy may produce for us a greater degree of
comfort than without it we can hope to obtain. Wait, Ardent; the
time is not propitious now; but if we are not impatient of our
happiness, we shall soon be as happy as we can desire.’
“I pressed her more closely to my breast—I blessed her in my
heart, but my voice seemed to have lost all power of expressing my
emotions; no longer I made use of entreaties. I was grateful, and
resigned. The day came on which the emigrants were to leave the
seat of all their past enjoyments. My brothers appeared careless of
quitting the land of their fathers. They were hard working, hard
thinking men, who valued nothing except for its utility, and looked
upon the affection with which memory regards the scenes of its
pleasures, as romantic nonsense, only fit to delight children. But my
father could not so readily get rid of the impressions he had
cherished from his infancy; with him the departure from his home
seemed a banishment from his happiness. He visited the lands his
forefathers had owned, but which had long passed from their
descendants. He walked in the fields he had ploughed and drilled
and harrowed since he was a boy, and he looked upon the trees he
had planted, and the buildings he had raised, as if he was taking a
last farewell of a company of ancient friends. As he approached the
cemetery in which lay the bones of his ancestors, his manly form

seemed to lose half its strength—his ruddy cheek grew pale—his
step became feeble, his eye dim, and his heart faint; and as he
bared his head that the cool breeze might fan the thin white hairs
that played about his forehead, he was obliged to lean against a
monument to support his sinking form. Here rested in peace the wife
of his bosom and the mother of his children; and he felt as if he was
about to desert her remains to be trampled on by strangers. He
thought of where his grave would be, and in the agony of his heart
lamented that two who had never been divided in life should in
death be placed so far apart.
“I witnessed the sale of the land and stock; I assisted in packing
up the moveables; I was present when the neighbours came to bid
farewell, and to express their honest regrets; and after having
beheld my family turn their backs upon the habitation of their race, I
hastened to Optima, with the design of enjoying her sweet presence
for the last time, until I had parted with my father and my brothers
at the nearest sea-port. I came to the house of her relative and
found it closed. Having with some difficulty gained admittance,
Optima rushed into my arms, and wept upon my breast. It was not
till a considerable time had elapsed, that I ascertained what was the
cause of her grief. Her aunt had died the night previous.
“After a lapse of a few weeks Optima became mine. On the day of
our marriage she placed a packet in my hands, and speaking in a
voice broken with emotion, she said:—
“‘I have a favour to ask you, and I know on such a day as this you
cannot deny me. Take this, dear Ardent, and make whatever use of
it you think proper. Your heart is yearning to join your relatives; be
assured that wherever you wish to go I desire to follow. I cannot be
happy but where your happiness may be best secured. I am
indifferent to country and to kindred,—I can acknowledge no relative
but a husband, and can know of no country except that in which I
find his home. Whenever your preparations are made, dear Ardent, I
am ready.’
“I kissed off the tears that were trembling on her eyelids, and in
brief but eloquent language expressed the love with which my heart

was overflowing. The packet contained a sum of money amply
sufficient for our purposes. Having by letter previously apprised my
family of these circumstances, they delayed their departure; and
after providing every thing that was necessary for the wants of
agricultural emigrants, we all set sail from the populous seaport
Kangarootown, in a magnificent ship fitted up in the most splendid
manner, and carrying more than three hundred passengers.”
“‘No!’ exclaimed half a dozen anxious listeners, starting up with
horror and surprise.
“’Tis true!” replied the young man, in a voice scarcely audible.
“The Lord ha’ mercy on their miserable souls!” said Hearty.
“We had not been many days out at sea,” continued the narrator,
“and were busily and cheerfully employed in forming plans for the
future, when one evening, as soon as we had all retired to our
berths, the gas with which the interior of the ship was lighted,
through some carelessness had been suffered to escape, and it
having caught fire, the first alarm the passengers received was from
finding themselves surrounded by flames. There were but two or
three boats belonging to the vessel, to which there was immediately
a general rush. Without waiting to secure any of my property, I
instantly hurried on deck with Optima, and was so fortunate as to
secure her and myself a place in the largest boat. I shouted to my
father and my brothers to join us, but as soon as we were full the
rope was cut, and we pulled from the burning ship with all the
strength of desperate men. As the flames rose up into the rigging
we could see hundreds running backwards and forwards, bewildered
and stupified by fear. One after another jumped into the remaining
boats, into which they crowded so rapidly that their own weight at
once sunk them to the bottom. Others in their frenzy leapt into the
sea—the rest retreated from the flames as they advanced, shrieking
their own knell, till the fire beginning to scorch their flesh they fell
over into the waves, or letting go their grasp of the ropes up which
they had climbed, sunk yelling with agony into the midst of the
raging fire. I saw nothing of my brothers. I imagine they perished in
the smaller boats. But while observing the destruction of the ship, I

beheld, high up the tallest mast, the figure of an old man—his white
hair scorched upon his brows—his blood-shot eyes bursting from
their sockets—his trembling limbs clinging to the rigging, screaming
for mercy and for help. I knew the form—the voice pierced my brain.
I would have leapt into the sea with the wild but fruitless hope of
hastening to his rescue, but I was forcibly held to my seat; and
Optima, who had not changed her position since I placed her in the
boat, with her face upon my breast and her arms round my neck,
clung to me trembling with terror. In a moment afterwards the
flaming vessel disappeared.
“We could scarcely congratulate ourselves upon our safety, for
although we had escaped being burnt to death, there seemed but
little hope of our being saved from drowning, or from starvation.
There were thirty of us closely packed together, not one of whom
knew exactly how far we were from land; few were clothed, and
none had either provisions or water. My feelings were of the most
agonising description. I had seen my family perish before my eyes
without having the ability to render them the slightest assistance—all
their property and mine—all that the loving kindness of Optima had
enabled me to procure for our future wants, were swallowed up in
the devouring fire, and now I was left with her upon the boundless
ocean enjoying no other hope than that we should perish together.
Bitter as my reflections were, they grew almost insupportable when I
considered with what a dreadful fate the devotion of her I loved
would be rewarded. But she whose goodness had been thus cruelly
turned to evil seemed to think of nothing, and care for nothing, but
for him to whom she clung. At this instant when we were giving
ourselves up to despair, a light blazing from your ship proclaimed to
us the joyful intelligence that assistance was at hand. Then what a
change came upon us. The murmurs of complaint were turned to
the loud shouts of gladness; and so completely did we enter into the
spirit of the moment, that none noticed the rapid approach of the
ship coming to our relief, till she was just upon us.
“We are saved, dearest!” I whispered.

“Optima unclasped her arms, and took one of my hands in hers.
Then came the overwhelming crush of the great ship—a shout—a
scream—and her keel passed over us. The shock came so
unexpected that none had time to think of the danger, and we were
gasping and struggling in the water before we were aware of the
accident. I made a snatch at what I thought was the sinking form of
Optima, but soon I found out the dreadful mistake. It was a strong
man, who being no swimmer caught hold of my limbs with a
desperate grasp that nothing but death could relax. In vain I strove
to shake him off—I struggled—I fought—I kicked in vain. He held me
as a serpent holds its prey. The thought of my beloved sinking into
the bowels of the great deep, deserted by him whose happiness she
had ever striven to secure, nerved my arms with a giant’s strength,
and catching the drowning wretch by the throat, I squeezed the
breath out of his miserable body, hurled him from me as if he had
been a loathsome reptile, and then struck out into the sea,
swimming in various directions, shouting her name in every tone of
agony—plunging, diving, and beating the waters with the fierce
energy of a madman. My heart sunk within me—my strength was
exhausted. I felt the terrible conviction, that for me there was no
hope—and resigned myself to the cold embraces of the relentless
wave. Of what afterwards occurred I know not, till I found myself on
board the Albatross, recovered from the jaws of death by the kind
and unceasing attention of her friendly crew. But do not think me
ungrateful, when, reflecting upon the dreadful loss I have endured,
and the wretched fate to which I have been left, I express a regret
that my life has been spared.”
“Scrunch me, if I ar’nt springing a leak as no pump can stop!”
exclaimed Climberkin, as soon as the stranger had concluded his
narrative, as he wiped with his knuckles the big tears out of the
corners of his eyes;—an example which was followed by many of his
shipmates.
“May I go to sea in a cockle shell, if ever I heard o’ any thin’ so
cruel molloncholy,” said Boggle; “my eyes are like sieves catching a
thunder shower. But a fellow who can listen to such a tarnation

heart-twister as this here without runnin’ out like a water spout,
must have the soul o’ a nigger.”
“Soul ob a nigger!” exclaimed the fat cook, furiously, while the
drops that ran down his black cheeks evinced his sympathy for the
sufferings he had heard.
“Soul ob a nigger!—What da debble you mean, you fellar! Tink a
nigger no heart—tink him hab no sensebillity, you fellar?” Then
turning to the stranger, he said, as well as his sobs would allow,
“Roly Poly berry much feel for you Sar, oo, oo!—Hard ting to lose
him missee, Sar, oo, oo!—Roly Poly in lub himself once, Sar.—Lubly
cretur too, oo, oo!—She had de dropsy, Sar.—Doctor nebber make
her no better, so she turn her nose against de wall and die like a
lamb, oo, oo, oo!” And away the poor fellow went, sobbing as if his
heart would break.
“Well, whip me into eel skins, if I sees the fun o’ givin’ a fellow the
miserables!” exclaimed Scrumpydike, gulping down a deep draught
of the liquor before him; “I seed many a sight worser nor what
you’ve been telling on us, mister,—and ar’nt a thought it worth while
to say nothin’ to nobody about it. There ar’nt no sort o’ life as
produces so many wonderfuls as that o’ a free mariner. Once upon a
time I was taken prisoner with some other chaps, and kept aboard
one o’ them darin’ crafts what goes bang at any thin’ as comes in
their track—and I seed sich jollifications—sich junkettings—sich
cargoes o’ grog—and sich chests o’ money, as I never had afore a
wink o’ a notion on. There they were, dancin’ and singin’, and rollin’
in riches—caring for nobody—doing whatever they had a mind—
every one o’ the crew a cap’ain, and the cap’ain a prince; and
whenever they had a brush, which was as often as they fell in with
anythin’ worth havin’, at it they went, harem scarem—carryin’ every
thin’ afore ’em—cuttin’ down and blowin’ up, and sinkin’ or seizin’
the richest ships as sailed in them seas. Scrunch me, if they did’nt
seem as happy as periwinkles on a rock.”
“No doubt,” observed Boggle; “and I ar’nt afeard to say, as many a
honest naval would become a free mariner, if he had’nt the

gumption to reccomember he was consiserable sure o’ a sartainty o’
being hanged.”
“Either hanged or drowned, or spiflicated in some other unnat’ral
manner,” added Hearty; “and not without desarvin’ on ’t. None o’
sich scum ever died in a honest fashion. Now in the course o’ my
sperience, I knowed a smartish lot consarnin’ the notorious sea-
sharks, Cap’ain Death and his Lef’tenant Rifle, and——”
“Did you know ’em?” inquired Scrumpydike, eagerly, fixing a
searching look upon the old man.
“No, I did’nt exactly know ’em, but I knowed a good deal on ’em;
and if ever I comes upon their tack, with a few other honest chaps
as knows how to give and take, if I don’t leave my mark on some o’
their figure-heads, I ha’ lost all notion o’ hand-writing;” said Hearty.
“Well, you may chance to come alongside on ’em afore you’re
aware, and then you’d best look out for squalls, old boy;” observed
the other.
“I ar’nt afeard o’ that. But as I was a sayin’, these here varmint
were ’sociated wi’ a gang o’ similar bloody-minded villains, and in a
well armed craft which they’d got hold on, by no partic’lar honesty
I’ll be bound, they went a robbin’ and plund’rin, and burnin’ and
massacr’in’, every ship as they came anigh, till at last flesh and blood
couldn’t stand any sich howdacity—so two or three smartish vessels,
full o’ chaps o’ the right sort, steered into their haunts, and there
they kept cruising about in hopes o’ coming to close quarters. But
somehow or other they hadn’t no sich luck. At last, when they began
to calc’late as Cap’ain Death had given them the slip, one o’ the
ships diskivered a strange sail—and she was narrowly watched,
hoping she might prove to contain the ’dentical set o’ murd’rin’
vagabonds they was arter. Suspicions becoming pretty strong,
signals were made to her consorts to take a long sweep, so as to
circumvent the villains so reg’larly as they couldn’t escape no how.
But that ’ere Cap’ain Death was no goslin’. He seed the canouvres
they was a going about, hung out ev’ry bit o’ canvass he could carry,
and cut his precious stick like winkin! Howsomdever, he war’nt
awake to the movement till they came rollin’ up to him in a manner

quite lovely to look on; and then they showed that they was as good
hands at followin’ as he was at runnin’ away. The chase was carried
on for a matter o’ six hours, in sich a style as made him look behind
oftener than he looked afore; and for all he went on this tack, and
on t’other tack, and tried all sorts o’ games to get out o’ the way,
they came so near as to be able to give him a pretty considerable
taste o’ their quality. Well, as night began to set in, there came on
one o’ the most thund’rin’ storms as ever was—the wind blowed
away as if it would shiver its own bellows into saw-dust, and the sea
came up mountains high, in a manner it was more grand than
pleasant to look on. The vessels in chase, finding themselves close
upon an ugly sort of a coast, were obligated to keep out at sea as
much as possible; but they endeavoured to keep such a look out as
would prevent the villains from making themselves scarce afore
morning. Well, when the mornin’ broke all as clear as if there’d never
been no rumpus—our ship—for, mind ye, I volunteered a purpose to
have a rap at some on ’em—our ship and her consorts, who’d rode
out the gale with nothin’ but the loss o’ a few spars, approached the
shore for the purpose o’ making secure o’ Cap’ain Death, but the
very first thing they clapped their blessed eyes on, was the ship
they’d been in chase lyin’ a perfect wreck among the breakers,
making it a right down positive stark staring fact that every mother’s
son o’ the gallows birds that belonged to her were feeding the crabs
and lobsters, and sich like.”
“Then they were all drowned!” said Climberkin.
“Nothin’s been heard o’ any on ’em from that day to this;” replied
Hearty.
“But war’nt there a sort o’ song which ’twas said the crew of the
ship used to sing?” enquired Climberkin.
“To be sure there was,” cried Scrumpydike, who had for some time
looked more gloomy than usual; “I’ve heard it many’s a time; and if
you’ve a mind to listen, though I ar’nt no great shakes o’ a singing
bird, I’ll give you the only original version as used to be sung by the
free mariners.”

“I don’t want to hear none o’ such villainous ditties!” exclaimed
Hearty, as he left the circle.
“Who axed you, old Snapdragon?” responded the other, and
presently with more animation than music, sung the following
words:—

“Our ship sails on the wave,
On the wave, on the wave,
Our ship sails on the wave, Captain Death!
For free mariners are we, and we ride the stormy sea,
And our captain still shall be,
Captain Death! Captain Death!
Our captain still shall be Captain Death!
“Our black flag proudly floats,
Proudly floats, proudly floats,
Our black flag proudly floats, Captain Death!
And down upon the prey, we boldly bear away,
And we quickly make them pay,
Captain Death! Captain Death!
We quickly make them pay, Captain Death!
“We stifle ev’ry cry,
Ev’ry cry, ev’ry cry,
We stifle ev’ry cry, Captain Death!
And then we spread our sails, that are filled with welcome gales:
Singing, ‘Dead men tell no tales,
Captain Death! Captain Death!’
Singing, ‘Dead men tell no tales, Captain Death!’
“Bring out our golden store,
Golden store, golden store;
Bring out our golden store, Captain Death!
And let’s send the wine-cup round, to forget the dead and drown’d,
And rejoice we’re safe and sound,
Captain Death! Captain Death!
And rejoice we’re safe and sound, Captain Death!
“Thus pass our gallant lives,
Gallant lives, gallant lives,
Thus pass our gallant lives, Captain Death!
And while the ocean flows, and the driving tempest blows,
We’ll live upon our foes,
Captain Death! Captain Death!
We’ll live upon our foes, Captain Death!”

CHAP. VI.
APPEARANCE OF THE AFRICAN COAST.
Zabra had by this time become more familiar to the people of the
Albatross, with some of whom his kindness and generosity made him
an especial favourite. They had ceased to see any thing supernatural
in his large lustrous eyes,—and had forgot that there was any thing
mysterious in the dark colour of his complexion. His solitary
wanderings about the ship created neither fear nor surprise, and the
rich harmonies of his music were listened to with much more
admiration than dread. Loop, a boy belonging to the vessel, who
was a sister’s son of Hearty, had been attacked with fever, and the
attentions of Zabra, during his illness, won not only the heart of the
old man, but that of every one on board. He procured for him every
kind of nourishing food and refreshing beverage, that the Doctor
would allow; took care that he should possess every comfort that
the vessel contained; sung to him, played to him, and stayed beside
his hammock for hours and hours, seeking to while away the tedious
moments of indisposition. Oriel Porphyry having desired that he
should be treated by every one as if he was his brother, instead of
his attendant, Zabra found his slightest request always promptly
attended to; and, though his manner was somewhat proud, as he
seemed to possess abundant funds for every purpose, and gave
liberally whenever he thought it was requisite, scarcely any one in
the ship ever hesitated in joining in his praise.
The boy Loop got well, and he was not ungrateful. As for old
Hearty, nothing could exceed his devotion to his nephew’s
benefactor. To every listener he could lay hold of, he narrated at
length all that he knew of the youth’s history, since he came on
board: the people, rescued from the fire-ship, were in due time
made familiar with every anecdote concerning him with which the

old man was acquainted; and to no one were his details of more
interest than to the young Australian, Ardent, who sometimes
appeared to forget his own sorrows while attentive to the unpolished
eloquence of the honest sailor. From this time Zabra became an
object of general interest. Even Captain Compass seemed to look
upon him with something like respect; Scrumpydike had ceased to
entertain against him any hostile intentions; and Log, the captain’s
clerk, was heard to acquiesce in the opinion of his shipmates, with
an affirmative repeated with the usual supply of adjectives.
But to Oriel Porphyry the admirable qualities of his page became
every day more and more apparent. In the frequent conversations
that took place between them, he could not but observe the
developement of a mind of the highest order. It was not a mind
impregnated with the heavy spirit of bookish learning, but an
intelligence of a lighter, a more graceful, and a more original nature,
replete with a sweet sympathy, and a lofty enthusiasm for all that
was noble, good and beautiful; and throwing over the youthful figure
and handsome countenance of its possessor, a poetical and romantic
character, that was both a wonder and a charm to his companion.
Zabra spoke of Eureka as if he had become acquainted with her
most hidden thoughts, and had been constituted their interpreter;
but of himself he never spoke. When Oriel seemed desirous of
learning something of his history, he appeared uneasy, and
immediately attempted to turn the conversation into another
channel. This was noticed; but the unwillingness of the young Creole
to speak of himself, Oriel attributed to the disinclination usually
shown by natural children to allude to their own illegitimacy,
knowing the unreasonable and cruel prejudices of society: therefore
he ceased to desire from him any information on the subject. Still,
his youth,—the singular beauty of his countenance, and the strange
interest it often expressed, made him imagine that there was some
mystery connected with him.
As he treated Zabra with the utmost confidence, and appreciated
the intelligence he evinced, Oriel Porphyry communicated to him the
contents of his father’s letter.

“Your father is a noble character,” he exclaimed with fervour; “and
the proudest title of which you ought to boast, is that of being his
son. I never could have supposed that it was possible for such
nobility to reside in a spirit devoted to the mere money-getting
purposes of traffic, but I have been educated in an aristocratic
school, and with its lofty principles I have imbibed some of its
illiberal prejudices. I would my father had been such a one—I should
not have been the fugitive I am.”
“Express no regrets, Zabra. Let it be my pleasing task to see that
your fortunes are worthy of your merits;” said Oriel Porphyry,
affectionately taking in his the hand of his youthful companion. “And
although I have not much reason to think well of the proud
Philadelphia, for his conduct has not been such as would be likely to
inspire me either with affection or respect; when I think of his
relationship to her whose genuine worth it is impossible not to
appreciate, I cannot regard the unfavourableness of his disposition.”
“Eureka is not unmindful of your kind feelings towards her;”
observed the other in a more tremulous voice than he had hitherto
used. “It is her desire to deserve your affections, that has supported
her under many trials. Her father is proud, but not so proud as
Eureka. Yet there is an impassable gulf between the pride of the
two. He would sacrifice every one around him for the immediate
gratification of his own self-love: she would sacrifice all selfish
considerations that interfered with the happiness of one she loved.”
“And think you I cannot honour such goodness in the manner it
deserves?” asked the merchant’s son. “Let him be what he will—let
his pride be as mean, and his ambition as selfish as it may, for the
sake of Eureka I will endeavour to forget his unworthiness. All I
hope is, that he will not attempt to force her inclinations to an
alliance more pleasing to him.”
“He cannot force her inclinations—that he knows;” remarked
Zabra. “He has made the attempt for the first and last time; and
Eureka is now beyond his reach.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Oriel with astonishment.

“Ay!” he replied. “He thought the more completely to secure your
separation from her, to hurry her into a marriage with the wealthy
and powerful head of the princely house of Vermont; but the
character of such a man, had no other obstacle existed, would have
been sufficient to have produced in her feelings a repugnance which
nothing could overpower. As it was, she indignantly refused to
become a sacrifice to her father’s ambition. Her sentiments,
however, on the subject, were so little regarded by him, that he
made preparations to compel her to the union.”
“Ha!” exclaimed master Porphyry, “I could not have imagined such
despotism in a parent.”
“Closely as she was watched,” he continued, “Eureka managed to
escape from her confinement; and when she sent me to be the
companion of your fortunes, she had secured for herself the asylum
she required.”
“But where is she? Let me hasten to afford her the protection of
which she must be so much in want!” exclaimed the impetuous
Oriel; then reproachfully added, “Why, why did you not tell me this
before?”
“I have obeyed my instructions;” replied the youth calmly. “It is
sufficient for you to know that now she is safe, and that she is in the
enjoyment of as much happiness as it is possible for her to obtain
under the circumstances. Her retreat can only be made known to
you when all the purposes of the present voyage are completed, and
you return to Columbus.”
“But can I not communicate with her? will she not write to me?”
eagerly inquired the other.
“Be satisfied that it is impossible she should forget you, and
endeavour to prove to her without the aids of continual
correspondence, that in your affection the same durability exists.”
“I will! I will!” cried Oriel; “I will do all she would have me. I will
follow the plan my father has laid out, even to the minutest details;
will try to find patience for its endurance by thinking of the blissful
result with which it will be crowned. We are now approaching the
southern coast of Africa,” he continued after a pause of some

duration, which neither had attempted to interrupt; “and my
immediate destination Caffreton, the great mart of traffic in this part
of the world is the first point of my commercial voyage. My father
has written me very full instructions which I have carefully studied,
and you will shortly see, Zabra, how well I shall be able to play the
merchant.”
They had been standing together on the deck gazing upon the
world of waters before them during the preceding dialogue, and
were now silently observing the progress of some distant vessels,
when they were joined by the learned Professor Fortyfolios.
Addressing Oriel, he said—
“That portion of land you observe yonder, rising out of the sea, is
an important Cape, well known in the annals of navigation, and was
called by the ancients the Cape of Good Hope. It used to be
celebrated for producing an inferior wine, called Cape Wine, which
being cheap, as it was worthless, was brought in considerable
quantities for the purpose either of adulterating wines of a higher
value, or was palmed upon the ignorant as the produce of a different
vintage. The English, a people with whose history you are doubtless
familiar, though not wine growers, were the greatest wine
consumers of that period, and it was the immense demand for this
necessary of life among that people, which the wines of Spain,
Portugal, Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and other countries, could
not sufficiently supply, that brought this Cape into notice. The
African wines are now remarkable for their admirable qualities. That
it was the search after new liquors that sent the English into this
part of the world chroniclers are not agreed, and that there were
other wines produced in the same locality much superior in flavour, I
think is more than probable, because I have found in the course of
my reading, eloquent commendation of an African wine, called
Constantia, and I have good reason for imagining that the deserts
which the first voyagers of that nation met with on some portions of
the coast, when they ascertained that a superior liquor was here
procurable, originated the English proverb ‘Good wine needs no
bush.’ However, there can be no doubt that the English planted a

colony at this very Cape; gradually drove the natives from their land
as they increased in power and numbers, till the whole continent
from the Cape of Good Hope to Alexandria, and from Abyssinia to
Senegambia, acknowledged their sway, and, in a great measure,
spoke their language.”
“Truly, those English were a great people!” remarked Oriel.
“They were so,” said the Professor; “when we consider what they
did, and the means they had to do it, we must acknowledge that
they deserve the epithet, ‘great.’ At an early period of the world’s
history, England was utterly unknown. In the times of Assyrian
greatness, in the eras of Babylon, of Jerusalem, and of Troy—and in
the more brilliant ages of the Greeks, the Romans, and the
Carthaginians, such an island had never been heard of—scarcely two
thousand years had elapsed before this speck upon the waters
became the most powerful kingdom upon the earth. She had
possessions in every quarter of the globe; her conquering armies
had penetrated into the remotest regions, and her gallant navies had
triumphed in every sea. She had given a new people and a new
language to the vast continent of America; she had founded a new
division of the world in Australia; she had been acknowledged the
mistress of the mighty Indies; she had forced a path through deserts
of perpetual ice, and found a home in the scorching heat of the
torrid zone. And by this time what had become of the nations of a
more remote antiquity? Of some, the localities were not to be
traced; others remained a heap of stones. The Carthaginians were
extinct—the free and noble Greeks had become slaves or pirates—
and the daring Romans, who boasted having conquered the world,
were an ignoble emasculated race, confined to a single city and its
suburbs, and governed by a despotic old woman in the shape of a
priest.”
“The form of government under which the people of this continent
exists, is republican, I believe;” observed Master Porphyry.
“The whole is divided into a multitude of republics, some of which
are always at war with one another,” replied his tutor; “and they
show their idea of liberty, of which they make the most preposterous

boast, by keeping up a system of slavery the most tyrannical and
revolting that can be imagined.”
“Ay, ay,” exclaimed Captain Compass, coming up and joining in the
conversation; “it’s the way of the world. Hear your most famous
spouter about the blessings of freedom and all that sort of thing,
and ten to one if you don’t find him ready to domineer over every
body beneath him. When I hear a fellow mighty fine in his notions of
universal liberty, I always feel pretty certain that he only wants the
power to trample on the independence of all who might stand in the
way of his particular enjoyments. But this is all natural enough; the
feeble are monstrously indignant at the exercise of power in the
hands of their rulers; but when by any accident they become
powerful, they all at once see the advantages of keeping down those
who are down, and in a very short time become just as despotic as
those of whom they complained.”
“What vessels are these, Captain?” inquired Oriel, pointing to
several ships, appearing at different distances in the open sea before
them.
“Yonder vessel, whose tall masts are bending before the brisk
breeze that fills her sails, is an Algerine merchantman, and has most
probably a cargo of dancing masters, cooks, figurantes, and opera
singers, which are as much now the chief produce of the people to
whom she belongs, as they were a thousand years ago the principal
exports of their progenitors. That sombre thing, with the long funnel
in the centre of her deck, is very similar to the steamers of which the
ancients were so proud, before an improved propelling power was
discovered. She belongs to the Abyssinians—a people remarkably
slow in adopting the inventions of their more civilised neighbours;
she trades from the sea of Babel Mandeb to the Gulph of Guinea,
sometimes touching at Madagascar, and the neighbouring islands,
and carries passengers, pigs, crockery, and snuff. This rakish looking
craft, flying afore the wind like a petrel in a storm, is a free trader
with a rich cargo of smuggled merchandise from the continent to the
Mauritius; and the big ship yonder, bearing down upon us as if she’d
sink every thing that stood in her way, is a man of war belonging to

the Liberians—a powerful nation of blacks. All these small fry that
are starting up from every point, are merely coasting vessels—
government packets,—fishing smacks—pilot boats,—pleasure yachts,
and other floaters of a similar nature.”
“But what is this?” inquired Oriel, pointing to something of a very
strange appearance that was seen at the distance of about three
quarters of a mile, making way at a rapid rate towards the shore.
They all gazed in that direction, and a most extraordinary spectacle
they beheld. At first it seemed like a ball—but as it approached the
ship it enlarged, and every one who saw it knew it to be a balloon.
How it came there, floating on the waves by itself, many
conjectured; but their surprise at its appearance was wonderfully
increased, when they observed a man, with his body immersed in
the waves, clinging to it, or more probably attached to its fastenings.
His peril he endeavoured to make known by screams of the most
piercing description; but it was not till the miserable wretch was
being rapidly borne past their vessel that the people of the Albatross
discovered the full extent of his danger. For at least half a mile
behind him the sea was a mass of white smoking foam, which was
created by nearly a hundred immense sharks following him with
eager speed, lashing the waves with their tails, leaping over each
other, plunging, snorting, and displaying the most ravenous desire to
catch him in their enormous jaws. Sometimes the balloon ascended
a little distance above the sea and then would rapidly descend,
plunging the unhappy aeronaut over his head in the salt water; but
while the sharks were all striving against each other to make a
mouthful of his limbs, it would again ascend, floating swiftly over the
surface, bearing its screaming appendant about a foot above his
unrelenting pursuers, who continued to follow him struggling
furiously with each other, and eagerly snapping at his limbs
whenever they approached the surface of the water. It was
impossible to render him any assistance, although he passed within
a few yards of the ship, he was carried so swiftly along; and on he
went, shrieking with agony, now high above the waves—then dashed
in beneath them—then flying over the surface, with the horrid

expectation of being immediately devoured by the hungry pack by
whom he was pursued.
“Scrunch me, if that isn’t the most cruel chase I ever saw,”
exclaimed the captain.
“These sort of accidents are not at all extraordinary,” observed
Fortyfolios, “and with such things must frequently occur. Balloons are
an old invention, and one the least useful for philosophical purposes
of any we have received from the ancients. Attempts have been
made, attended with success, to get one or several individuals borne
by them from an island to an adjoining continent, and from one part
of a continent to a part far remote; but as they have found it
impossible to control the current of wind met with in certain
elevations, and as they can seldom rely upon a current in any one
direction lasting for any length of time, they have been able to rise
as high as they please, but can never previously fix exactly upon the
place of their descent; and it has in many instances occurred, as in
the one we have just now observed, that after the aeronaut has
made his ascent, a sudden wind takes him in a direction contrary to
what he designed, or various currents rising unexpectedly at nearly
the same time, he is shifted about to every point of the compass;
and when he is obliged to descend, he finds himself floating over
some unknown sea, or some wild uncultivated land, hundreds of
miles from human assistance, where he is left to endure the
conviction that he must either be drowned or starved. A balloon is,
in fact, a toy, with which one fool amuses many.”
Nothing more was said on the subject, although the dangerous
situation of the poor fellow who had attached himself to the balloon
was anxiously watched as long as he remained in sight, and the
imminent peril in which he was seen: his heart-rending cries, and
desperate struggles, long left their unpleasant impression on the
memory of all who beheld him.
The bold outline of the coast they were approaching every hour
became more apparent: its singular mountain and other landmarks
were seen, pointed out, and commented on. Birds flew into the
rigging—weeds accumulated before the ship—and stray logs of

timber, broken barrels, and pieces of wreck, were continually floating
past. The character of the scenery now began to be clearly defined—
the lowlands spreading out far and wide into the interior, intersected
by numerous railroads, and the mountains holding up their proud
heads covered with vegetation nearly to their summits. The more
the country became visible, the greater was the evidence it exhibited
of a high degree of cultivation, a fruitful soil, and a numerous and
industrious population; and as buildings began to be made out, it
was observable from their form, numbers, and disposition, that
manufactures was a primary object in the estimation of the
inhabitants.
“You will find these people a money-getting generation,” said the
professor to his pupil: “their sole object appears to be to
accumulate, and their only idea of the respectability of a person is
derived from the proportion of substance he is worth. They never
ask, is a man an excellent husband, an exemplary father, or an
admirable citizen?—is he distinguished by the attention with which
he fulfils his moral duties, or celebrated by the right application of
extraordinary talents? they merely inquire how much money he has
in his pockets. In fact, when they speak at all of ‘a good man,’ they
allude to some individual imagined to be possessed of a certain
amount of available property: money with them is every thing.
Respectability means money—reputation or credit means money,
and cleverness means money. Money, therefore, is the universal
virtue: they who have the most are honoured the most, and they
who have it not at all are considered by those who have it, although
in ever so small a proportion, as being separated from their fellow-
creatures by an impassable chasm, where all that is infamous is
thought to dwell.”
“And yet they are considered to be a very religious people,”
remarked Oriel.
“None are more regular in going to church, none are greater
respecters of the ceremonies of worship, but of religion they are
ignorant,” replied Fortyfolios. “Nothing can be more certain than that
it is impossible that a pure morality or a sincere devotion can exist,

when the heart is filled with one engrossing desire—the
accumulation of capital—the very principle of which is selfishness—a
feeling incompatible with the social charities of true religion.”
“But when did you ever find that any thing like true religion
generally existed?” inquired the captain, in a tone approaching
sarcasm. “Since the memory of man the faith of the majority has
been unvaryingly orthodox, and sticks, like a lobster to its shell, to
the old proverb, ‘Every one for himself, and the devil take the
hindmost,’—and more absurd conduct doesn’t exist than some
people exhibit, who, after having made money a standard of
excellence, condemn to infamy not only those who are not
possessed of it, but they who gain it by means not in exact
accordance with their notions of the way it should be obtained.
Scrunch me, if it don’t make one ready to heave one’s ballast
overboard, when I see the homage paid to a mean-spirited
scoundrel, who by chicanery, hypocrisy, avarice, and a horde of
other contemptible vices, robs his fellows of a pretty handsome
share of plunder; and hear the execrations heaped upon the bolder
and better villain, who lays society under contributions in a more
open, manly, and daring manner. They pretend to notions of
honesty, too, that’s the joke. Why a fish would laugh at a thing so
ridiculous. The government in their necessity take from the people,
and those who can’t afford to pay they send to prison—an individual
in his necessity takes from another, and the very government who
set the example of appropriation punish the appropriator as an
offender. Then governments plunder each other, or rather the people
of each other; but when any of the people attempt to rob their
governments, they judge, hang, draw and quarter the poor wretches
without the slightest mercy. Honesty, forsooth! If the whole world
were asked what the meaning of the word was, every man would
give a different definition, and not only would each contradict the
other, but every one would contradict himself. Honesty appears to be
of all shapes and all sizes: it will suit all complexions—it will flavour
every dish. Honesty is every thing, and yet it is nothing. It is neither
fish, flesh, nor fowl—will neither sink nor swim—and is not to be

touched, seen, or tasted. Honesty is every where—the greatest
rogue is honest to his chosen associates—and yet it is no where, for
the desire of appropriation is universal. It is a sort of ghost that only
exists in the minds of the superstitious—a mirror that shows any
reflection thrown upon it—a sky that all over the world can take
every variety of colour. Some call it truth, and lay claim to its
possession, although their lives are a continual deceit; some call it
justice, and fancy themselves exceedingly just, although they would
consign to eternal perdition all not exactly of their way of thinking;
and some call it conscientiousness, and are satisfied with their own
dealings, when, at the same time, their first thought is for their own
personal gratification. But we are entering the bay, and these fellows
require looking after.” So saying, he suddenly left the group, and
began shouting to the crew some orders about the ship.
“Captain Compass has singular notions,” remarked the professor:
“I should not feel particularly comfortable if I thought he entertained
the opinions he expresses. There would be an end to all sense of
moral obligations if such ideas became general.”
“Oh there is no harm in him,” replied Oriel. “He is too frank, too
careless, too bold to have any evil intention. It has often appeared
to me, though, that the principle we call honesty does not exist
either in ourselves or in society to the extent we imagine; and
believing such a state of things an evil, I have often wished, but
never been able, to find a way in which it could be remedied.”
“It is an evil, undoubtedly,” here observed Doctor Tourniquet, who
had for some time been an attentive but silent listener—“and there
is but one way in which it can be completely removed.”
“And how is that way to be found?” inquired Oriel Porphyry.
“The cause of this want of a definite unvarying character in our
notion of honesty,” said the Doctor, “may be traced to the present
and past construction of society, where each individual has a
separate interest, exists in a state of competition with the others,
and must always be endeavouring to shape his own notions of right
to his own exclusive advantage: were property a fund in common
from which each might be allowed to take what he pleased—there

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Tyranny And Music 1st Edition Joseph E Morgan

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