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WIERZBICKITo judge from the waves of scholarship and performances that marked the 1998 centennial of his birth, the composer Hanns Eisler has already attained the status of national hero in his native Germany.But in the United States, where he lived from 1937 until 1948, Eisler remains by and large a shadowy figure. 1 Musicological treatment of Eisler in the United States-indeed, in the west in general-amounts to a brush-off.When serious interest in Eisler has been expressed, typically it has centered on the handful of scores he wrote for Hollywood films and a theoretical book about film music that he coauthored with Theodor Adorno. 2 Beyond that, the standard "read" on Eisler is that he was once upon a time an adventurous musical modernist but then consigned himself to the sidelines when, in the mid-1920s, he espoused the idea that music is useless if it is directed only toward sophisticated ears.As rapidly as Eisler's music gained in aural simplicity, it seems, so it lost status in the minds of western critics.More than a quarter-century ago British composer-musicologist David Blake, one of Eisler's few non-German champions, concluded his Grove Dictionary article on Eisler with what amounts to an exhortation: "No composer has suffered more from the post-1945 cultural cold war.As the cross-currents between Eastern Europe and the west increase, a proper international A shorter version of this article appeared as "Sour Notes: Hanns Eisler and the FBI," in Modernism on File: Writers,
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