The Music of Pavel Haas

Analytical and Hermeneutical Studies

Martin Čurda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429781735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899–1944) is commonly positioned in the history of twentieth-century music as a representative of Leoš Janá?ek's compositional school and as one of the Jewish composers imprisoned by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Terezín (Theresienstadt). However, the nature of Janá?ek's influence remains largely unexplained and the focus on the context of the Holocaust tends to yield a one-sided view of Haas's oeuvre. The existing scholarship offers limited insight into Haas's compositional idiom and does not sufficiently explain the composer's position with respect to broader aesthetic trends and artistic networks in inter-war Czechoslovakia and beyond. This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive (albeit necessarily selective) discussion of Haas's music since the publication of Lubomír Peduzzi's 'life and work' monograph in 1993. It provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of Haas's music through analytical and hermeneutical interpretation as well as cultural and aesthetic contextualisation, and thus reveal the rich nuances of Haas's multi-faceted work which have not been sufficiently recognised so far.

1 Music and avant-garde discourse in inter-war Czechoslovakia

Introduction

In order to help situate Haas’s work in the context of avant-garde movements in Czechoslovakia and beyond, this chapter contains a review of the discourse on avant-garde art and music conducted on Czech literary platforms (journals, pamphlets, books) in the inter-war period. The aesthetic landscape of the time is best described as a complex network of numerous interrelated and partially overlapping concepts (such as Poetism, Surrealism, Neoclassicism, Constructivism, and Purism), most of which are usually considered applicable to some art forms, but not to others. However, it will become apparent that the disciplinary boundaries are often elusive: music cannot be discussed separately from other art forms, aesthetics cannot be disentangled from politics and ideology, and trends in the Czech avant-garde discourse are intimately linked with concurrent developments in other countries.

Much of the discussion in this chapter revolves around the notions of Poetism and Neoclassicism. Poetism was the dominant tendency in Czech avant-garde art of the 1920s; although it is rarely associated with music (the term is most readily applicable to literature and visual arts), it will prove highly relevant to Haas’s works from this decade. Neoclassicism, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as one of the two dominant stylistic tendencies (the other being the Serialism of the Second Viennese School) in the development of European art music between the two world wars. While there are a number of Neoclassical features in Haas’s music (as will be demonstrated in Chapters 3 and 4), it may be problematic to speak of a clearly defined Neoclassical style.

Importantly, Poetism and Neoclassicism (like the other –isms mentioned above) are complex and problematic concepts, encompassing a number of constituent ideas (such as physiological art, everyday art, rational order, and free play of imagination), which often constitute points of overlap and create paradoxical alliances between seemingly distinct aesthetic tendencies. Therefore, the various –isms must be first ‘taken apart’, in order to specify which aspects are relevant to Haas’s work.

In search of the Czech musical avant-garde

This chapter is concerned selectively with a particular segment of inter-war Czechoslovak music, arts, and culture. Any attempt to sketch out the variety of the musical scene alone would result in a lengthy catalogue of names, groups, and institutions. The focus here, therefore, is specifically on the Czech musical avantgarde, which started to emerge in the mid-1920s around the left-wing avant-garde group known as Devětsil (established in 1920 in Prague).¹

The members of Devětsil were mostly artists from the fields of literature, visual art, and theatre; music was somewhat marginal. Nonetheless, there were several composers among the early members of the group, namely Emil František Burian (1904–1959), Iša Krejčí (1904–1968), and Jaroslav Ježek (1906–1942). Burian stood at the forefront of the short-lived group called Tam-tam (1925–26), the foundation of which may be regarded as an attempt to form a musical branch of Devětsil. The group, which published its own journal (Tam-tam: Gazette musicale ) between 1925 and 1926, also included the composers Jaroslav Ježek, Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942), Jiří Svoboda (1900–1970), and the writer Ctibor Blattný (1897–1978). Several significant avant-garde projects in the genre of musical theatre also emerged from these circles, particularly Burian’s Divadlo Dada (Theatre Dada, 1927) and the so-called Osvobozené divadlo (Liberated Theatre, 1927), represented by the popular trio of Jiří Voskovec, Jan Werich, and Jaroslav Ježek.²

Some of the above-mentioned individuals later came together in the so-called Music Group of Mánes (Hudební skupina Mánesa, established in Prague in 1932), which included the composers Iša Krejčí, Pavel Bořkovec (1894–1972), Jaroslav Ježek, and František Bartoš (1905–1973), as well as the pianist and publicist Václav Holzknecht (1904–1988).³ This group pledged allegiance to the aesthetic tenets proclaimed by Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and the composers of Les Six.

A special position was occupied by Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959), who left Czechoslovakia to study in Paris in 1923 and took permanent residence there in 1924. Martinů published articles in Czech journals, some of which will be cited below. Although he maintained professional contacts with some of the abovementioned groups and responded in his music to many of the tendencies that will be discussed here, he did not approve of the subversive and iconoclastic elements of the avant-garde agenda.

Haas himself, living in Brno, was necessarily somewhat removed from the epicentre of avant-garde activities, located in Prague. He was not officially a member of any of the relevant groups and did not contribute to any of the avantgarde journals such as Pásmo, Tam-tam, and ReD (Revue of Devětsil). However, Devětsil expanded from Prague to Brno in 1923. Further evidence will be provided in Chapter 2 of Haas’s awareness of the activities of Devětsil in Brno, which included editing the journal Pásmo (1924–26)⁴ and the organisation of art exhibitions, lectures, and social events.⁵

Poetism

The notion of Poetism was articulated by the avant-garde theorist Karel Teige (1900–51) and the poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900–58), the leading figures of Devětsil. In the opening of his 1924 manifesto of Poetism, Teige announced (as avant-garde movements typically did) a breakup with the preceding artistic tradition and an assertion of ‘new’ art. He argued that art must no longer be the dominion of professionals, tradesmen, intellectuals and academics. The new art, he believed, would be cultivated by ‘minds that are less well-read but all the more lively and cheerful’; it was intended to be ‘as natural, charming and accessible as sports, love, wine and all delicacies’, so that everyone could take part in it.⁶ Teige’s critique of artistic ‘professionalism’ was essentially that of the gap between ‘art’ and ‘life’, which Poetism sought to bridge, to achieve an interpenetration of the two. Teige was eager to make clear that Poetism was not intended to be just another artistic ‘–ism’, but a life perspective, a ‘modus vivendi’, ‘the art of living, modern Epicureanism’.⁷ Its artistic manifestations were supposed to offer noble amusement and sensual stimulation, ‘invigoration of life’ and ‘spiritual and moral hygiene’.⁸ Teige implied that art could help transform human life into the state of ‘poiesis’ (‘supreme creation’).⁹ Thus, all people would eventually become artists in the way they would ‘live [their] “human poem[s]” ’: ‘Happiness resides in creation. The philosophy of Poetism does not regard life and a work [of art] as two distinct things. The meaning of life is a happy creation: let us make our lives a work [of art, a creation], a poem well organised and lived through, which satisfies amply our need for happiness and poetry.’¹⁰

Teige’s views on art were underpinned by Marxist materialism, which, however, is not entirely consistent with the emphasis on sensual pleasures, entertainment, and happiness. Teige tried to reconcile this opposition by proposing a dialectical relationship between ‘Poetism’, representing imagination, irrationality, and playfulness, and ‘Constructivism’, representing logic, rationality, and discipline.¹¹ Teige’s pair of Constructivism and Poetism is analogous to Marx’s pair of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Nonetheless, this theoretical model is not without problems; as Peter Zusi explained:

Teige’s image compulsively reproduces the fate of Marx’s: it slips from an expression of dialectical unity to one of static dualism [. . .] of structure and ornament. Through such slippage, the second element (Poetism, or for Marx, the superstructure) appears not as the dialectical counterpart and completion of the first but rather as something supplemental, unnecessary, ...