Pavel Haas Study Day Saturday, 30th January 2016 Cardiff University, School of Music, BLT Registration 9:30–10:00 – Boyd Lecture Theatre Keynote Lecture 10:00–11:30 – Prof Michael Beckerman (University of New York) Al S'fod and the Art of the Hidden 11:30–12:00 – Tea/Coffee Break Session 1: Czech Avant-Garde Music, Arts and Culture 12:00–12:30 – Dr Helena Maňasová-Hradská (Masaryk University, Brno) „For the audience of Brno, which sneers so stupidly at the exhibition of modern art“. The Avant-garde in Brno of the 1920s. 12:30–13:00 – Miloš Zapletal (Masaryk University, Brno) Semantic Impulses in Vilém Petrželka’s Song Cycle The Relay (Štafeta) 13:00–13:30 – Aleš Březina (Bohuslav Martinů Institute, Prague) Martinů and the (Czech) String Quartet Tradition 13:30–14:30 – Lunch Break Session 2: The Charlatan 14:30–15.00 – Prof Pavel Drábek (University of Hull) Pavel Haas's Šarlatán as a Musical Drama 15.00–15:30 – Martin Čurda (Cardiff University) The Fantastic, the Uncanny, and the Grotesque in Haas’s Charlatan 15:30–16:00 – Prof Pamela Howard (RWCMD) War & Fairground: Staging Charlatan 16:00–16:30 – Tea/Coffee Break Session 3: Terezín, Loss, and Trauma 16:30–17:00 – Jory Debenham (Lancaster University) What Lies Beneath? The Façade of the Chinese Songs 17:00–17:30 – Dr Milan Hain (Palacký University, Olomouc) The Invisible Presence: Pavel Haas and the Films of His Brother Hugo 17:30–18:00 – Closing remarks Concert (19:00 – 21:00) Pavel Haas: String Quartet No. 2, ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925) String Quartet No. 3 (1937–38) Performed by: Graffe Quartet (Brno, Czech Republic) Commentary by: Martin Čurda Prof Michael Beckerman (University of New York) Al S'fod and the Art of the Hidden Mgr. Helena Maňasová Hradská, Ph.D. (Masaryk University, Brno) „For the audience of Brno, which sneers so stupidly at the exhibition of modern art“. The Avant-garde in Brno of the 1920s. The paper will outline the national and cultural situation of the city Brno after the formation of the Czechoslovak state in 1918. It will point out the peculiar paradox of the capitol of Moravia especially its origin as „the German periphery of Vienna“ and its tension between self- expression by folkloric symbols of the Czech country from around and by international style of the Constructivism and Functionalism as the styles of the progressive state. Also will be discussed a disposition of local institutional discourse for social idea that in some points received the concept of the international avant-gardes, especially its welfare tone in the context of architecture and design. But it was just the same discourse of industrial city that was not able to accept playfulness and light-hearted enthusiasm for technological progress and for industrial civilisation that avant-garde had ostentatious presented in Prague as well in Brno in the early twenties. In this context the paper will discuss the reception of the German and French Dadaism. Mgr. Miloš Zapletal (Masaryk University, Brno) Semantic Impulses in Vilém Petrželka’s Song Cycle The Relay (Štafeta) The “implied reading” (to employ Iser’s conception) or historical content of Štafeta [The Relay] (1927), a song cycle for voice and string quartet by Janáček’s pupil Vilém Petrželka (1889–1967), was basically determined by two main imaginative factors, sports and collectivism, which were strongly bounded together in temporary social discourses. Just like in other temporary “sport compositions” (Bateman), mainly the motional aspect of sport is represented here, using motorial music structures and other convenient methods of the late 19th century programmatic music. Structure of this composition contains intensive and extensive semantic impulses, which function as the two conceptual patterns in the very basis of the process of creation and also reading of the cycle. The intensive one relates to structural regularization by the dominant of “running model” (Čurda) and principle of rhythmic ostinato. The extensive one refers to public relay races, carnival feasts (Bakhtin) of recycling of the collective national body of the First Czechoslovak Republic. According to these factors, the composition tended to be read as an ideological impetus to faith in collective “new man”. Mgr. Aleš Březina (Bohuslav Martinů Institute, Prague) Martinů and the (Czech) String Quartet Tradition Starting with his very first composition, the charmingly Dvořák-like string quartet The Three Riders (composed approx. in 1903 at the age of 13) Martinů tried to explore the possibilities of this most complex genre of chamber music and to find his specific musical language. In his heavily late romantic String Quartet in E flat major, H 103 (1917) his inspiration was above all Max Reger with his String Quartet in f sharp minor. The following String Quartet´s No.1 subtitle "French" indicates Martinů´s turn towards Impressionism completed just five years later, shortly before he left Prague for Paris. Paradoxically only after his move to the French capital did Martinů find way to implement elements of Czech folk music into his melodical and rhythmical style in his String Quartet No.2, H 150 (1925). The following String Quartet No.3, H 183 (1929) is the shortest of his works written for this medium, his radically dissonant harmonies and sonority resemble the Three Pieces For String Quartet written by Igor Stravinsky in 1914 (and revised four years later). The disciplined and neoclassicaly measured String Quartet No 4, H 256 (1937) combines French restraint, which he so admired in the music of his former teacher Albert Roussel, with Czech melodiousness. The last three quartets by Bohuslav Martinů are highly personal works – he dedicated them to Vítězslava Kaprálová (No 5, H 267, 1938), Rosalie Barstow (No 6, H 312, 1946) and his wife Charlotte (No 7, namely women who had played a significant role in his private life. As a bearer of a private message these three quartets have some famous prefigurations in the works of other Czech composers – Smetana’s String Quartet in E minor “From My Life”, for example, or Janáček’s String Quartet No.2. “Intimate Letters”. Stylistically, however, they are quite different from each other. The supremely dissonant and chromatic style of No 5 moves it away from romantic ideas and the seemingly antiquated inspiration of the 1930s. In many aspects it continues and develops the great French string quartet tradition of César Franck and Claude Debussy. No 6 launches a number of late works by Bohuslav Martinů in which moods are subject to change at any time, regardless of any pre- conceived formal groundplan. In this respect, the piece marks the beginning of the composer’s return to his early enchantment with Impressionism, combined with modern technical idioms as the result of many years’ experimentation. The reduction of its musical material and its apparent spiritualization make a cross-reference to Beethoven´s opus 135, explicitly mentioned by Martinů in connection with his own work. The final String Quartet No 7 (Concerto da camera), H 314 (1947) represents a stylistic return to a technical simplicity, which seems to react to the rise of the extremely complex music of young post-war composers. With their continuously developing musical style the nine string quartets by Martinů represent several aspects of the first half of the 20th century. Mgr. Pavel Drábek. Ph.D. (University of Hull) Pavel Haas’s Šarlatán as a Musical Drama Pavel Haas’s only opera is closely based on Josef Winckler’s 1933 novel Dr. Eisenbart (De verwegenen Chirurgus weltberühmt Wunder-Doktor Johann Andreas Eisenbart etc. Berlin, 1933), namely on the shorter popular edition. It has been wrongly claimed that Haas also may have drawn on Ernst Fürst stage play Doctor Eysenbarth (c1935). Revisiting the research of Haas’s biographer Lubomír Peduzzi, the present paper analyses the dramaturgy of Haas’s opera, its music-dramatic situations, its characters and the work’s overall specifity and originality in the context of the Avant-garde opera. Mgr. Martin Čurda (Cardiff University) The Fantastic, the Uncanny, and the Grotesque in Haas’s Charlatan Only months after the premiere of the opera Charlatan in 1938, Pavel Haas’s music was banned from performance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazi authorities due to the composer’s Jewish origins. Haas was subsequently imprisoned in Theresienstadt and eventually killed in Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly, given its historical background, the opera has been interpreted in terms of a ‘premonition’ of Holocaust (Beckerman). In my paper, I will point out the continuity between Charlatan and Haas’s earlier works, which resides in the composer’s lifelong interest in the themes of fairground, circus, carnival, and the grotesque. Much attention will be paid to issues of style and genre, which Haas described as ‘tragi-comical’. Much of the opera’s plot and individual characters’ traits can be best described in terms of the stereotypes of commedia dell’arte (Pierrot, Harlequin, Columbine). However, the comical element is juxtaposed with Expressionist imagery suggestive of the main character’s psychological disintegration, which I will discuss through the notions of the fantastic, the grotesque and the uncanny. Finally, I will discuss the affinity between Pustrpalk (the title character) and literary archetypes of modern individualism, such of Don Juan and Faust, whose transgression of social and/or religious laws inevitably lead to punishment. Taking all these issues into account, I aim to provide a nuanced view of the opera as both a work of art drawing on contemporary avant-garde tendencies and as a commentary on the deteriorating socio-political climate of the time. Prof Pamela Howard (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama) War & Fairground: Staging Charlatan This paper will review the performance history of Charlatan and present an original dramaturgical and scenographic conception which will hopefully come to fruition in an actual performance of the opera in near future.