Hell’s Fury, The Hollywood Songbook

Composer Hanns Eisler was born in Austria. As a Jewish Marxist, he was exiled by the Nazis in 1938 and found himself in America where he became a storied Hollywood film composer. He also wrote lieder with lyrics based on the works of his friend Bertolt Brecht, Goethe and Shakespeare. In a twisted turn of events, Eisler was blacklisted in the McCarthyism era and deported from the US in 1948. He died in East Germany.

Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook, to be performed at Stanford Live by baritone Russell Braun and pianist Serouj Kradjian, has been hailed as a masterly song cycle of exile.