Brecht, Music, Culture

Slought is pleased to announce "Brecht, Music, Culture," a multimedia performance by Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements, on Tuesday, October 29th, 2013 from 6:30-8pm. The event will be introduced by New York-based artist Zoe Beloff.

In this intimate, multimedia performance, the public revisits the East Berlin of 1958 in the form of a conversation between Hanns Eisler and Hans Bunge. Hanns Eisler, an Austrian composer who studied with Arnold Schoenberg, is played by Paul Clements. Eisler was an enormously intelligent and entertaining conservationist: witty, incisive, and lively, with knowledge and profound understanding of historical processes. Hans Bunge, whose words are spoken by his daughter, Sabine Berendse, poses a series of questions throughout. Bunge, a writer and journalist, was one of Bertolt Brecht's assistants at the Berliner Ensemble and, after the playwright's death in 1956, Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel, entrusted him with the responsibility of creating the Brecht Archive.

The initiative behind this conversation was Eisler's wish to keep alive the memory of his great friend and colleague Brecht, who was arguably Germany's greatest twentieth-century playwright. The conversation reflects on their exile from Nazi Germany in Los Angeles where they numbered among their many friends and acquaintances Charlie Chaplin, Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. He also recalls their bruising encounters with the House Committee on un-American Activities and his subsequent deportation from the USA. Back in post-war Europe, he considers the quality of artistic, political and intellectual life in the German Democratic Republic; the social significance of music; and far broader philosophical themes concerning the future of the arts, artists and the lives of ordinary people.

An array of photographs accompanies this performance as well as some original recordings of Eisler himself singing and playing the piano.