Composer
Biography:
| »Hába is our bravest experimenter in the realm of sound. This courage is of great importance because it was driven not only by rational speculation but by creative passion, which is a trait of Hába's personality.«These words of the Czech musicologist Vladimír Helfert aptly characterize the artistic appearance of Alois Haba. born on 12. June 1893 in Vizovice (Czech Republic / East Moravia), he did 1908-1912 teacher training at the teacher training college in Kroměříž (Kremsier) and worked for a short time at the elementary school in Bílovice near Uherské Hradiště. He studied composition from 1914-1915 with Vítězslav Novák in the master class of the Prague Conservatory and later (1918-1923) with Franz Schreker at the Music Academy in Vienna and at the Music Academy in Berlin. There he also got to know the artistic criteria of Ferruccio Busoni and the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schönberg. As one of the pioneers of microtonal music, stimulated by Wallachian and Moravian folk songs, he dealt early with micro-intervals (quarter, fifth and sixth tone system). From 1923 he was a composition teacher at the Prague Conservatory, where he founded a department for microtonal music . 1945-1951 he was head of such a department at the Prague Music Academy. Hába was active in Czech and foreign musical life as a composer and organizer of contemporary music. According to his suggestions, musical instruments were built in the quarter-tone and sixth-tone system (pianos, harmonies, trumpets, etc.). The fact that Hába is seen as an isolated individual from today's point of view is not for musical but for political reasons. His class for quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory had not only shaped the musical life of Czech Republic, his students had also been internationally successful. National Socialism violently ended this development: Hába was – in a similar way to Křenek – declared a »Jew«, and his music was declared »degenerate«. Many of his students were persecuted: Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein and Erwin Schulhoff (the first interpreter on the quarter-tone piano) perished in the concentration camp. Karel Reiner and Karel Ančerl were able to survive Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Walter Süsskind emigrated to the USA, Hába's Yugoslav students Vučkovič and Šturm fell in the partisan war. After 1945, Hába was only able to continue for a short time what he had started before the war: Stalinist cultural policy rejected his music as »formalistic«. Alois Hába wrote numerous symphonic and chamber music works in 1/2, 1/4, 1/6-tone system in the thematic and athematic style, his quarter-tone opera Matka (»Mother«) is particularly important. An important part of his output is his 16 string quartets and a string quartet with a speaker, almost all of which (from No. 6) Written for the Prague Hába Quartet (renamed the Novák Quartet for political reasons in the 1960s) and premiered by the ensemble. The deep friendship between Alois Hába and Dušan Pandula, the founder of the »Prague« and later also the »Frankfurter« Hába Quartet, also made it possible for the composer and the performers to rehearse the works together and exchange ideas. Dušan Pandula passed these authentic interpretive hints on to today's young generation of the Hába Quartet. Alois Hába died on 18. |
Albums:
