SOURCE: '"Ich habe von einen Esel gelernt': Eisler Pro and Contra Schönberg," in High and Low Cultures: German Attempts at Mediation, edited by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, pp. 59-73.

In the following essay, Gilbert discusses the relationship between Schoenberg and Hanns Eisler.

I

In a series of conversations with GDR scholar/journalist Hans Bunge, published under the title Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht (an allusion to a passage in which Eisler states: "Fragen Sie nicht so viel über Schönberg—Fragen Sie bitte mehr über Brecht!"), composer Hanns Eisler mentions a cantata text which he presumably talked his friend and collaborator Bertolt Brecht into writing on the occasion of Arnold Schönberg's seventy-second birthday in 1947, and for which he, Eisler, evidently prepared at least a few musical sketches. Eisler had previously referred to this intriguing birthday present in a brief...