Erich Zeisl was born in 1905, the son of Jewish coffee house owners in Vienna. At an early age he would improvise at the piano and composed his first songs. At the age of 15 he entered the Academy of Music in Vienna to study with Richard Stöhr. He continued studying with Stöhr on a private basis, subsequent teachers being Joseph Marx and Hugo Kauder. Through the 1920s Zeisl emerged as a prominent representative of Viennese moderate modernist composers. His impressive list of compositions (lieder, chamber music, choral and orchestral works, masses, an early opera and a jazz-inspired ballet Pierrot in der Flasche (‘Pierrot in the Flask’)) allowed fellow composer and music critic Paul A. Pisk to describe him in 1934 as “[one] of the strongest personalities among composers under the age of 30 in Vienna.”¹

The Anschluss in March 1938 shattered his career. The first performance of his Singspiel Leonce und Lena under Kurt Herbert Adler planned for April/May 1938 was struck from the programme. The name “Erich Zeisl” disappeared from other planned programmes, appearing instead among the lists of banned artists. After the “Reichspogromnacht”, the infamous Night of Broken Glass in November 1938 an affidavit by a New Yorker with the same name enabled some members of the Zeisl family to flee from Austria. First port of call in their odyssey was Paris, though the ultimate destination had to be Los Angeles, where the furniture from their apartment in Vienna was stored in containers, their last available money having been used to transport it to a place as far from Vienna as possible. Before the outbreak of World War II the Zeisls had left Europe, arriving in New York in September 1939.

Like many exiled musicians “Eric”, as he had now anglicised his name, had hoped to establish himself in Hollywood. With the support of his friends Hans Kafka and Hanns Eisler he accepted an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). After a mere 18 months the film company cancelled his contract. Zeisl experienced the downsides of a glamorous world dominated by hardheaded financial considerations, producing music of no artistic value. He wittily described Hollywood as “Schein Heiligenstadt”, an intricate pun on the German word for ‘hypocritical’ (scheinheilig) with Heiligenstadt, an outer suburb of Vienna. All his hopes in the ‘dream factory’ remained unfulfilled. In fact his disillusionment with Hollywood brought about a compositional crisis. By turning to “Jewish” music Zeisl finally found new spheres of expression. In 1944/45 he composed his Requiem Ebraico, in contrast to earlier compositions a deeply religious work, dedicated to his father who was murdered in Treblinka and to all the victims of the holocaust. Today this Requiem is looked upon as one of the first musical responses to the tragic events in Europe. Erich Zeisl died in 1959 of a heart attack after giving a lecture at the Los Angeles City College. In 1946 he wrote to Hilde Spiel that Vienna would have to be “radically denazified” before he would bring himself to go back again,² but his unexpected premature death prevented any return to his home city.

Karin Wagner

¹ Pisk, Paul A.: Erich Zeisel [sic!]. In: Radio Wien. 31st January 1934.

² Erich Zeisl to Hilde Spiel, undated. Cf Wagner, Karin (Ed.): … es grüsst Dich Erichisrael. Briefe von und an Eric Zeisl, Hilde Spiel, Richard Stöhr, Ernst Toch, Hans Kafka u. a., Wien 2008, p. 232.