Hanns Eisler was born into a liberal middle-class family, which moved in 1901 from Leipzig to Vienna. Here he studied music from books and scores, the family having insufficient money to buy a piano. He served in a Hungarian regiment during the last two years of World War I, and subsequently enrolled as a student at the New Vienna Conservatory. Soon Eisler moved on to become a pupil of Schoenberg, who was instrumental in the publication and public performance of his Piano Sonata Op. 1, which won the Vienna Arts Prize, and then during 1925 he settled in Berlin in order to take up a teaching post at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory, joining the German Communist party the following year.

He soon broke with Schoenberg (for whom however he retai...