ABSTRACT
Meisel was an Austrian-born composer his involvement with Der heilige Berg is politically charged in part because of his enthusiasm for urban modernity and its potential to generate new musical traditions that reflect the experience of the city. Meisel's commitment to popular music is clearly demonstrated in the montage-like interweaving of multiple traditions, in all his theater and film projects. Reports of an unfinished film-score project suggest that Meisel was planning to continue challenging traditional cultural associations and distinctions between high and low. Meisel's music, like the film as a whole, seems to occupy the disputed territory between modernism and modern "mass culture", between the individualized, heroicized notion of the artist on the one hand and mass production and consumption on the other. By the end of the 1920s Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director he was staging large-scale productions, including an innovative use of film and the simultaneous staging of multiple scenes.
