Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain

Name: Hanns Eisler and His Circle in Republican Spain
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ISBN: 9781837653188

Music, Antifascism, War

Diego Alonso Tomás

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Boydell & Brewer
24 March 2026

20th century & contemporary classical music; Individual composers & musicians, bands & groups; European history; History: specific events & topics

Studies the development and impact of Hanns Eisler's music and Marxist activism in the tensions of 1930s Spain, revealing the interplay of varied influences, ideology and antifascist propaganda.

Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain is the first comprehensive study to explore the political, artistic, and intellectual engagements of Hanns Eisler and his circle of Marxist musicians - including the singer Ernst Busch and the musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra - in relation to Spain between 1931 and 1939. The book reconstructs Eisler's collaborations with a broad range of Spanish antifascist organisations, examines the reception of his compositional and theoretical work in Republican Spain, and assesses the deep impact of the Spanish civil war on his vocal and symphonic music. It highlights the influence of key local, national, and international communist structures - notably the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), and the Comintern (Third International) - on the musical and political projects of Eisler and his circle. Grounded in detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of textual, musical, and press materials - primarily preserved in archives in Spain, Germany, Russia, France, and the United States - this study offers new critical frameworks for understanding the role of Western modernist music in contexts of ideological conflict and war. It provides a fresh perspective on the complex entanglements between antifascist propaganda and musical modernism in the interwar period. Hanns Eisler in Republican Spain makes a vital contribution to scholarship at the intersection of music, exile, propaganda, communism, and antifascism, and more broadly, to the study of how political ideologies shaped music, aesthetics, and musical thought across national boundaries during a pivotal era in twentieth-century European history.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC.

By: Diego Alonso Tomás
Imprint: Boydell & Brewer
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781837653188
ISBN 10: 1837653186
Pages: 286
Publication Date: 24 March 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

DIEGO ALONSO TOMÁS is Senior Researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This book stems from a funded research stay at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin.