Readers caught up in the resurgence of interest in the work of the post-Janacek Czech-German school suppressed by the Nazis will need no introduction to the music of Pavel Haas.
Unlike some of the other composers who exercised the last of their creative energies in the Nazis’ ‘artistic’ ghetto-cum-transit camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin), Haas has little truck with Schoenbergian Expressionism. The idiom of The Charlatan (“Sarlatan”) is firmly rooted in that of Janacek, his teacher. Haas may have refashioned his harmonic language to acknowledge his Jewish roots in the incomplete Symphony of 1940-2, but the folksiness of his opera, premiered in Brno in April 1938, is recognizably Czech. As in Janacek’s Cunning little vixen, the choppy, naturalistic declamation of the text does not preclude an emotive, melodic dimension.
Heard on disc, the opera persuades musically rather than dramatically (the tragi-comic libretto describing the life and loves of a fairground healer is the composer’s own) although it may be fairer to judge after this autumn’s Wexford Festival staging, the first for 60 years. Trailing its quack-hero from one bit of chicanery to the next, it offers many incidental delights. Indeed, given the circumstances of its composition, the score shows Haas in engagingly cosmopolitan mood, embracing Parisian attributes such as one finds in the music of Prokofiev and Martinu. The piquant sonorities remind one of Milhaud or even Weill and give the music a sufficiently distinctive profile to suggest that, had he lived, Haas might have turned Czech opera away from Janacek’s aggressive Slavophilia towards a more mainstream, consciously European style. There are bigger questions too. Could all this ‘lost’ tonal music have sustained a more bracing challenge to the rising tide of serialism, curbing the post-war tendency to wipe the slate clean?
Decca’s recording has been edited together from Prague concert performances given in June 1997 to what was reportedly a poor house. The singing is committed, with Vladimir Chmelo a firmly projected Doctor Pustrpalk, and the wind playing is certainly characterful enough. Only the strings can sound thin and under-rehearsed, and in this respect the set is not an improvement on Israel Yinon’s earlier recording of the suite from the opera (Koch Schwann, 4/97). Haas’s rhythmic irregularities might be expected to make for a few rough edges – the opera is by no means so cleanly performed as the marvellous Hawthorne Quartet versions of Haas’s Second and Third String Quartets (Decca, 3/94) – but enthusiasts should not be put off. The approach is affectionate, sometimes ardent, the sound bright and immediate, the documentation excellent. Like the rest of Haas’s small oeuvre, this is magical music well worth getting to know.'