Brno 1899 - Auschwitz 1944

Folk music was at the very heart of Pavel Haas’ composing style. He felt closely bound to his home town of Brno where he lived until deportation to the Terezin concentration camp and his studies with Janacek gave him a folk based idiom from which his remarkable musical imagination could flourish.

The son of Jewish-Czech merchants, Haas’ talent as a composer became evident while still in his teens.  He commenced his studies at the Philharmonic Music School interrupting these for two years’ national service in the Austrian army.  On his return he commenced studies with Janacek.  Generally hailed as Janacek’s true successor, Haas was able to assimilate his teacher’s ideology without parody, establishing his own unique voice.  Janacek encouraged the study of the melodic and harmonic complexities of Moravian folk music to provide the basis of all compositions.  This Haas assimilated, drawing also on Czech and Jewish music, jazz rhythms within a Stravinskyan classicist framework  but imbued with his own particular wit, irony and exuberance.

Haas’ body of work was not extensive as it was only in 1935 that he was able to devote his entire time to composition, completing in 1937, his first opera “Der Scharlatan”.  This was banned in 1938, and not performed again until 1999. In 1939, following Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, Haas became increasingly aware of the political significance for the future of Jews in Hitler’s Reich.  In response to Hitler’s capture of Prague, he wrote the Suite for Oboe and Piano. In this he quotes a traditionally Czech theme associated with St Wenceslas; at once a politically nationalistic message to the occupiers and also one of solidarity and hope to his compatriots.

In 1941 Haas was transported to Terezin, having previously divorced his non-Jewish wife to spare her and their son the fate which he foresaw.  The initial shock of his new environment resulted in depression and Haas ceased all musical activity.  It was the indomitable spirit of the young composer Gideon Klein who engendered in him the will to continue:  Klein, perhaps knowing the implications of the alternative, placed manuscript paper in front of him and begged him to compose.  Of the works Haas wrote for the remarkable musical community of Terezin, only three survive.  The “Study for Strings” featured in the Nazi propaganda film made for the Red Cross in which Terezin is portrayed as a flourishing Jewish town.  Only days later, Haas, most of the orchestra and thousands of others were transported to Auschwitz and perished shortly after in the gas chambers.