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cht out Bre More Ab Ask Me Hanns Eisler in conversation with Hans Bunge with SABINE BERENDSE and PAUL CLEMENTS Sabine Berendse , daughter of the late Hans Bunge, studied at Karl construction of extracts from the conversations illustrated with Marx University in Berlin and received her Masters in Library and images and brief original recordings of Eisler’s music. Information Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A current resident of Cardiff, Wales, she and Paul Clements The basis of the fourteen recorded conversations was Eisler’s have created the first English translation of conversations between wish to keep the memory and work of Brecht alive after Brecht her father, a theatrical assistant for Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble had passed away in 1956. Bunge would use Brecht’s diary that in Berlin, and the composer Hanns Eisler. Ask Me More About Brecht he had kept between 1934 and 1955 to cite passages from it will soon be available in bookstores. to refresh Eisler’s memory. Eisler would then comment on it. Paul Clements has taught, acted and directed in the U.S., Canada, Topics include Eisler’s political ideas and his thoughts on the Scandinavia and in the UK. Paul was Director of Drama at the Royal social significance of music; his relationship with Bertolt Welsh College of Music and Drama, 1985-1996, and Principal of Brecht’s dramatic works; Eisler’s and Brecht’s period of exile in Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts from 1996 until he retired in the USA ; their bruising encounters with the House Commitee 2008. He was also artistic director of the National Youth Theatre of on Un-American Activities; the coming into being of some of the Wales. This year Paul and Sabine Berendse’s book, Ask Me More plays Brecht wrote and for which Eisler composed music. About Brecht will be published, and they are touring in America and Europe with dramatised extracts from the book . The conversations are also about Brecht’s understanding of music, raising the issue of whether Brecht was truly a Marxist, Notes from Sabine Berendse and touch on meetings between Brecht and Charlie Chaplin and Thomas Mann. For the best part of the last two years I have been working with Paul Clements on the first ever complete translation into Eng - The conversations also include discussions of Eisler’s relation - lish of a published collection of conversations between my fa - ship to Arnold Schönberg, his political convictions, and his ex - ther, Hans Bunge, and the German composer, Hanns Eisler, periences of the quality of artistic, political and intellectual life recorded between 1958 and Eisler’s death in 1962. The Ger - in the German Democratic Republic of the 1950s and early man book is called Hanns Eisler Gespräche mit Hans Bunge. ’60s . Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht and it is part of Eisler’s Collected Works (Volume 7). Eisler was such an intelligent and great philosopher, very witty and humorous and lively with such a breadth of knowledge and Eisler, who was born in 1898, is one of the most fascinating understanding of historical processes that it is really still amaz - and controversial composers of the Twentieth Century. Com - ing to read and listen to today. mittedly left-wing and enormously versatile, he composed in various genres: from chamber pieces in the style of the Schön - The program is designed as a dramatic reconstruction of the berg school to ‘agitprop’ ballads and choruses for the Workers’ conversational situation. Eight recordings of Eisler’s music Movement; from full symphonic works to the more conventional covering different genres will be played, and four of the record - film scores he wrote for Hollywood. ings are of Eisler playing the piano and singing himself during the conversations which Bunge recorded. In addition to our translation – which will be published as a book later this year – Paul and I have created a dramatic re - -Sabine Berendse.

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