The great social and musical-aesthetic upheavals of the first half of the 20th century had a decisive impact on the biography of Hanns Eisler as well as on his compositions and writings.

The significance and the wide spectrum of his work are reason enough to make it accessible to scholars and musical practice in its full breadth.

Edition management
Thomas Phleps (sheet music), Georg Witte (writings)

Editorial/scientific collaborators: sheet music: Knud Breyer / Johannes C. Gall, Writings: Maren Köster

Edition Advisory Board
Notes: Hartmut Fladt, Werner Grünzweig, Elmar Juchem, Roland Kluttig, Giselher Schubert
Writings: Albrecht Betz, Albrecht Riethmüller, Jürgen Schebera, Friederike Wißmann

The editions are sponsored by the German Research Foundation.
Individual volumes are made possible by the support of the following institutions:
Klöckner Foundation, Lotto Foundation, Hanns and Steffy Eisler Foundation

The Hanns Eisler Complete Edition (HEGA) pursues the intention of presenting all available compositions, writings, and letters to the public in a scientifically appropriate form. It sees itself as historical-critical and aims to present the transformations of the compositions and writings as their history, thus making the various versions recognizable as testimonies to different aesthetic and contemporary historical positions.
Eisler's complete works, which until the 1990s were usually only selectively perceived, found their first publishing approach in the edition 'Eisler - Gesammelte Werke' (EGW), founded by Nathan Notowicz, later supervised by Manfred Grabs and Eberhardt Klemm, and published from 1968 onwards by the Deutscher Verlag für Musik in Leipzig; however, only four volumes of sheet music and five volumes of writings appeared. The Hanns Eisler Complete Edition follows on from this. However, the principles of the edition had to be fundamentally revised, so that one can speak of a completely new beginning of the editorial work.
Thus it proved necessary to revise the structure of the volumes and series as well as the editorial guidelines, and this in particular with the goal of adapting the standards of historical-critical editions that are generally valid today to the specific and sometimes singular circumstances of Eisler's oeuvre.
The accompanying Critical Report usually appears after the music section, and in the case of large volumes, in a separate volume.

Series I: Choral Music
Series II: Music for Voice and Ensemble or Orchestra
Series III: Music for Voice and Piano
Series IV: Instrumental Music
Series V: Stage Music
Series VI: Film Music
Series VII: Sketches and Fragments
Series VIII: Arrangements of Other Works
Series IX: Writings, Letters and Conversations

This edition was awarded the German Music Edition Prize.