The Haba "school".

We must exercise a certain caution when using the word "school" in the sense of a musical movement. Admittedly it is now conventional in music history to employ terms like the "Low Countries", "Neapolitan" and "Venetian" schools to characterise particular trends in music of the Renaissance and Baroque, the "Mannheim" and "Viennese" school for the Classical period, and the "Second Viennese School" for the circle of Arnold Schonberg and his followers (not to speak of the "national schools" that appear everywhere in the literature), but the most recent historical analysis has challenged this blanket use of the concept. The fact is that the definition and application of the term "school" is very changeable and relative, like historical knowledge itself. When a new musical phenomenon appears, it is either rejected or accepted by those contemporaries who encounter it, but neither rejection nor acceptance is the result of truly objective aesthetic judgment; since this is impossible when the phenomenon is so new. The initial experience is not, therefore, the criterion of subsequent evaluation. If the new phenomenon is to any degree accepted, however, what follows is a phase in which efforts are made to universalise and stabilise it, and at this point the distinguish marks of the new phenomenon become a measuring rod, and the first "continuers" appear. Only then, as the new movement starts to identify its own historical position, does a search for "forerunners" ensue, subsequently enabling us to talk of a "school", a "personal style", the "style of a generation" or "epoch" and so forth. Bearing all these caveats in mind we find that it is both possible, and impossible, to talk of anything like a "Haba School". In his attempts fully to integrate microtones into European musical language and give them a place equal to that of traditional tonal and harmonic techniques, Haba remained an isolated solitaire in the history of European music, but as we shall show, he was not without his continuers. His rejection of the classical romantic doctrine of musical forms and his promotion of "athematism", was supposed to open the way to absolute creative freedom and emancipate the composer from dependence on a given compositional canon. Some considered this to mean the loss of a firm footing, not a negligible aspect of the creative process of composing (whatever the extreme avant-garde may have thought), and perhaps even less negligible when it comes to the reception of the music by the audience. On the other hand theory is one thing and its application another. Haba himself was not a purely microtonal nor a purely athematic composer. His musical talent was spontaneous and his music was never contrived.

It was another feature of Haba's personality that he managed to gather around him a very large circle of kindred spirits. These included his pupils in the strict sense of the word, i.e. those who attended his courses in microtonal music at the Prague Conservatoire, and his "pupils" in the broader sense, i.e. people who met him at his innumerable lectures (at home and abroad), who worked with him in musical associations and societies, and studied his articles in the music journals and books.

Entry into Musical Life

Alois Haba was undoubtedly one of the most influential people in Czech music in the period between the two world wars. He was a composer, theorist, organiser, propagator of modern music and a teacher. Active in music clubs and societies, he used them as a platform for applying and promoting his views. In the world of Prague associations he developed this activity first and foremost in Pritomnost [Presence], becoming its chairman at the beginning of the 1930s, and in the Czechoslovak section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM. In both societies he had the deciding voice in the most critical years, when political and national conflict was becoming ever more intense. Haba always remained a convinced member and representative of his nation (one could even say his ethnic group) and he also remained a convinced supporter of international co-operation without regard to linguistic, racial, religious or other barriers. In the mid-1930s his tolerance did not make life easy for him. As Hitler's Germany became ever more aggressive he was often accused of tolerating "Jews and Germans" around him--a double criticism fired by the Czech nationalism and antisemitism that grew in direct proportion to the nationalism and racism of the Nazis.

Haba's class at the Prague Conservatoire contained a lively mixture of nationalities; over the years it was attended by students from the Kingdome of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia (from 1929 Yugoslavia), Lithuanians, Turks, Poles, Bulgarians and others. Haba taught for ten years at the Conservatoire on the basis of an annually renewed permission to hold "courses in microtonal music". Microtonal music was not a separate subject in the curriculum, but was considered a department of the composition class and could only be taken by students who had already taken the usual obligatory composition subjects. Not until 1934 was Haba appointed a professor of composition at the Conservatoire.

When he started his courses at the Conservatoire he already had the first practical tests of his ideas behind him. He must have been immensely gratified when his quarter-tone quartet (String Quartet no. 2 op. 7) was performed by the Have-mann Quartet in Berlin and especially when another quarter-tone quartet (String Quartet no. 3 op. 12) was performed by the Amar-Hindemith Quartet at the ISCM festival in Salzburg in 1923. At the orchestral part of the ISCM festival in 1924, held in Prague, Haba had been able to present a quarter-tone piano, newly made by the August Forster firm and built according to Haba's design, as part of the subsidiary programme. During just five years, when Haba moved from theoretical exploration of the possibilities of microtones to their practical application in composition, he had managed with the help of performers to prove that music of this kind was possible.

Haba's graduation piece in Franz Schreker's composition class in Berlin (Ouvertura op. 5) was well constructed, effective, melodically inspired, and harmonically and instrumentally rich, but it did not venture beyond the post-romantic style. The gulf between this piece and the String Quartet op. 7 that he wrote practically at the same time is a gulf between two different musical worlds. Yet Haba's creative development had its own logic. It was the result of an encounter between a unique individual talent and the unique creative conditions offered by the period immediately after the 1st World War. Creative enthusiasm was a reaction to ordeal, and the young generation of artists bore a genuine resemblance to a phoenix risen from the ashes (the comparison was frequently made). The Czechoslovak republic too had arisen from the ashes of the Habsburg Monarchy. Its musicians, artists and writers felt the need to show that they could give it its own, unique, competitive and modern art. Haba's internationalist sentiments combined perfectly with the inheritance of his roots in the Moravian countryside, and with the social sensitivity and breadth of culture through which he transcended these rural roots.

An Example of Courage

Haba's path to teaching the theory of composition was undoubtedly made easier by the teacher training that he received at the pedagogical institute in Kromeriz before he decided to set out on a composer's career. Music teaching was at that time an obligatory part of teacher training and he was also able to test out his music teaching skills in practice during a period in Vienna. It has recently come to light that in 1918/19 he taught violin and musical theory at a private music school (Schallinger-Schule) where pupils of Franz Schreker, including Felix Petyrek and Heinrich Knoll also taught. Haba undoubtedly obtained the job--just like a post as an editor at the Universal Edition--through the good offices of Franz Schreker, who was accustomed to helping his pupils improve their material situation in this way.

Haba gave his first lecture on the new possibilities of music in Prague in 1921 at the Prague Conservatoire. Even at this early stage he already found enthusiasts who were later to work with him among the young conservatoire students. He impressed them as a man of courage unafraid to venture into uncharted territory. For Miroslav Ponc, for example, a pupil in Bedrich Wiedermann's organ class, his meeting with Haba meant a radical change in his whole attitude to the musical world. Haba's own brother Karel Haba became one of his students, as did the later leading figures of 20th-century Czech music Miloslav Kabelac, Klement Slavicky, Vaclav Trojan, and among others Jaroslav Jezek, famous primarily for his work with the "Liberated Theatre" of Jiri Voskovec and Jan Werich, and the author of countless enduring songs with jazz rhythms that he wrote for the latters' plays. Jaroslav Jezek had another side as a composer, which found expression for example in his Sonata for Violin, performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Florence in 1934. Pieces by Haba's pupils (from at home and abroad) appeared quite often on the programmes of ISCM festivals, but the circumstances of the inclusion of the Jezek sonata were exceptional. The international jury had originally chosen Haba's Toccata for Piano for the festival, but the success of Jezek's sonata when premiered in Prague shortly beforehand led Haba to ask the jury to change the programme. In a gesture that must still be rare, to say the least, in the history of music festivals, he withdrew his own piece and recommended Jezek's composition instead.

Over the quarter-century of Haba's career as a teacher first at the Conservatoire and after the 2nd World War for a short period at the newly established Academy of Performing Arts (created out of the former master school of the Conservatoire), more than a hundred musicians of whom we have some record passed through his classes. If we were to add all of those who encountered Haba at lectures in the societies where he presented new pieces, at his appearances abroad and so on, the real number of people influenced by Haba would be much higher. Not everyone who in some way experienced Haba's training became composers, and many chose other musical professions. These included for example Karel Ancerl (1908-1973), later head of the Czech Philharmonic (1950-68) and after his emigration in 1968 of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Ancerl was a highly versatile musician: he studied conducting with Pavel Dedecek and at the Conservatoire master school with Vaclav Talich, and composing with Jaroslav Kricek and Haba. Under Haba's supervision he wrote a quarter-tone Music for String Orchestra and after graduating (1930) went on to an even tougher test in the field.

The Opera "Mother" in the Hands of a Pupil

On the 7th of May 1931 Haba's quarter-tone opera Matka [Mother] received its world premiere in Munich under the baton of Hermann Scherchen. The production of this opera, which has remained the only one of its kind to this day, was a risky undertaking. In his vocal music up to that time Haba had tried out quarter-tones only in his Suite on Interjections of Folk Poetry [Suita na citoslovce lidove poezie], which had been performed, also under the direction of Hermann Scherchen, in Frankfurt am Main in 1924. When Haba met with Scherchen at the ISCM Festival in Liege in 1930, he told him (so Haba related later), that he had just completed a full-length quarter-tone opera. Scherchen enthusiastically replied "Really? Then we'll put it on next year in Munich at the music festival", and immediately sent a telegram to the intendant of the Munich Theatre Fritzi Buchtger. The telegram he received by return read "Haba's opera impossible, big worries as it is". But Buchtger added "please send more detail" "and so his telegram was not an unambiguous refusal. What Haba had not revealed to Scherchen, however, was that he was already negotiating for a production in Frankfurt am Main (in November 1929 Haba had already commissioned the Prague journalist Viktor Joss to translate the libretto into German for this purpose). The conductor Hans Wilhelm Steinberg was working in Frankfurt at the time, and Haba knew him well from his time at the Prague German Theatre. Together with the intendant Josef Turnau, Steinberg had been pushing through a progressive repertoire; in February 1930 Schonberg's opera Von heute auf morgen was premiered here, with Haba attending. As it happened, when Haba talked to Scherchen about the opera the negotiations in Frankfurt were not going well, and so he left Scherchen a free hand. When the management of the Frankfurt Opera learned about this, they were not slow to show their displeasure to Haba. Finally it was Fritz Buchtger, urged on by the enthusiastic Scherchen, who expressed a willingness to take the risk and so it was Munich that won, especially thanks to financial assistance from important patrons of the arts, the brothers Hans and Werner Reinhart of Winterthur. The very busy Hermann Scherchen needed an assistant, however, and the post was filled by Karel Ancerl. As is evident from the interim reports that Ancerl was sending Haba from mid-September 1930 from Berlin where opera rehearsal were taking place, the twenty-two-year-old fresh graduate was forced to look himself for singers able and willing to take on the difficult work, have special practice sessions with them (at the beginning with a normal semitone piano) and often tackle the almost impossible.

 "Dear Professor! Scherchen left yesterday and told me I had to
arrange everything by myself, or if necessary with help from Buchtger.
In fact I'm glad, because I shall be able to act with complete freedom.
It is better to carry the whole responsibility than just a major part of
it. He hasn't yet sorted out the finances of my position either. He
hasn't had the time. He offered me a "Vorschuss" from his money, but I
couldn't accept that. [...] Yesterday Novotna and Gajewska cancelled.
Novotna hadn't obtained permission for a three-week stay in Munich from
the intendant, and she's going to shoot 2 films that have to be ready in
3 months, and so she doesn't have time for quarter-tones [...] It
doesn't matter, since in 2 days I'll have other singers. There are
plenty in Berlin, and there must be some good people among them. What is

unpleasant, is that instead of rehearsing I shall have to do the rounds
of Berlin for another 2 days." (13th November 1930)

Ancerl's letter is the one proof we have that the later world star Jarmila Novotna, who in 1929-33 was a soloist at the Berlin State Opera, was approached with a view to engaging her for a role in the premiere of Mother. The films he mentions were probably Pozar v opere [Fire in the Opera] (in the original Barcarola, 1930, directed by Carl Frohlich) and Zebravy student [The Beggar Student] (Bettelstudent, 1931, directed by Victor Janson).

 "Dear Professor! Finally I've got more concrete instructions I
arrangements from Scherchen. I flew about after him for a full 3 says
before I could get a quiet moment with him to talk over our business. He
has left everything to me, including the casting of the individual
roles. He just gave me the names of singers, and introduced me to the
director [...] who will introduce me to all the Berlin people involved
and will work for the thing, since you know that a primadonna wouldn't
even look at a little repetiteur from Prague [...] When I've filled some
of the roles here and set up rehearsal guidelines I shall go to Munich
to Buchtger to look for the other singers and orchestral players. [...]
Please send me the material for the singers to Berlin, since I can't
start the rehearsals until I have parts. Scherchen thinks it will be
difficult to rehearse just from the parts [...] Please write to Forster
and ask him to arrange for me to have a quarter-tone harmonium at my
disposal at any time, and if necessary be able to have it moved wherever
I need it. [...] I hope I shall be able to do everything the way I
envisage it. I shall need to work from morning to night, but you can
rely on me." (21st September 1930)
 "Dear Professor! The situation is becoming rather clearer. [...] We
ought to have two instruments here, one in Munich, and Scherchen would
have to get a quartertone upright piano. Maybe the orchestra will be
from Munich too, and so an upright could come to Munich. This will be
sorted out very soon, since I shall have to go to Munich probably as
soon as the day after tomorrow. This is because the singers want to know
something about the financial side of the whole thing, and so I need to
speak with Mr. Buchtger, who is in charge of the whole thing, as soon as
possible. (I don't want a revolution between Meistersingers). [...] I
rehearse for 6 hours and search for singers for 8 hours. I hope it won't
go on like this for too much longer [...] For the moment I'm rehearsing
with semitone pianos, but it's lethally difficult work and then everyone
complains that it's straining their voices. I can believe it, because
they don't hear the real sound, but have to derive it all from the
semi-tones, and so they strangle all the quarter-tones. I've turned into
the complete singer, just imagine how often I have to sing 2-3 bars in
advance for the singers! Wherever I go I sing quarter-tones, but I
already know how." (28th September 1930)
 "I can't find an contra-alto for the love of God. Scherchen is
coming to Berlin on the 4th of this month, and I hope he will help me
find a chorus, or at least tell me how I ought to set about finding one
here." (2nd December 1930)
 "Today I had my first opportunity to speak with Scherchen properly
about everything. Just imagine, he had a whole hour. I think everything
will be different now. The thing is this: suddenly something prompted me
to ask him if I could study conducting with him. I explained to him that
I had time in the evenings and so on. I think that the idea appealed to
him, and he seems to enjoy teaching very much. [...] We really do need
to start rehearsals with the orchestra. It's already December.
Especially when you consider that around Christmas we won't be able to
do anything, or with the choir for that matter, since as you know
yourself Christmas is all celebrations here and no work at all. At any
rate you can see that I'm not downcast. I'm sure, and I guarantee you
that if the ensemble can just be put together, then by the end of April
the opera will be rehearsed to tip top standard. [...] It's strange that
all my singers understand me well except Debuser [Tiny Debuser, who sang
the title role]. Today I had to call her 3x yet again. [...] But I won't
bore you with that, since tomorrow I shall really take a firm line with
her (she is being terribly sweet now, just because Scherchen is here."
(4th December 1930)
 "The string ensemble is almost complete, only no one wants to do
anything more before the end of the year." (15th December 1930) "My hope
that I would get a quarter-tone harmonium in my flat hasn't been
fulfilled [...] Scherchen was supposed to conduct today, but he didn't
turn up. [...] What am I supposed to do with Zelenka's designs? [...] I
shall write to Zelenka and send him a plan of the Munich theatre as soon
as I get it from Buchtger." (5th January 1931)

The Czech stage designer Frantisek Zelenka (1904-1943) designed the stage for the Munich premiere, but his sober stylisation, which was typical of many Czech stage designers of the interwar period, failed to find favour with Fritzi Jessner of the New Theatre (Neues Schauspielhaus) in Konigsberg, today Kalinigrad), who was directing there. Hermann Scherchen was also working in Konigsberg at the time, and the idea was to present Mother with his orchestra there. Jessner's preference was for realistic village decor, but this was not in line with Scherchen's concept of the production and so the direction was finally taken up by the director of the Prague National Theatre Ferdinand Pujman. The result was that Ancerl had to cope not only with the musical side of the production (including supervision of the transport of quarter-tone instruments), but with other aspects as well.

 "I had some words with Tini [Debuser] on the importance of her role,
and told her what I thought of her approach to rehearsals, and so now
she is working somewhat better, and keeping me waiting only for" an
hour. [...] To be honest, I'm worried about her; she is too frivolous in
her attitude, and doesn't take the whole thing as seriously as she
should. I shall give it another week, and if she doesn't improve I shall
stop working with her. [...] I have put the chorus together in almost
final form. There will be 12 people. So many people have expressed an
interest now that I could form a 16-strong choir, but I think that 12 is
enough, since if there were more I am not sure I would have them all
ready in time. The work is going really well now and progress is being
made. I hope and trust you will be satisfied when you hear it all. It is
wonderfully beautiful preparing such a new thing. I never thought I
would be able to get right into the spirit of it so fast. Buchtger still
hasn't sent me a plan of the stage." (12th January 1931)

In finding and choosing the choir he was helped by the Professor of the Berlin Music High School (Hochschule fur Musik) Georg Schunemann, who knew Haba personally. When Haba had been studying in Berlin he had had Haba's works performed at school concerts, provided him with school musical instruments and allowed him to study phonographic recordings.

 "Today Buchtger wrote to me telling me not to go to Munich, because
1) Meilie [Max Meilie, the singer of the main male role] doesn't want to
rehearse, because Scherchen hasn't yet written anything positive to him,
and 2) there isn't an orchestra yet. You don't have to write to
Scherchen about that, because today I wrote him a long letter explaining
everything in detail. I think that now he will really do something when
he sees what is at stake. Here is Berlin things are now going very well.
I rehearse every day with 8 to 10 singers. Now the only element missing
in the choir is tenors, and I hope I shall get hold of some this week.
[...] How do you see the 4th scene in the choir? I've already tried it
in several different ways, but it has never worked out well, because
either the basses growl something indistinct or else they yell at the
high end. [...] The choral parts ideally suit women. But I hope that
when I've got over the intonation problems with the men, plenty of other
things will come right as well. Debuser is giving me trouble again.
[...] I wonder whether it wouldn't really be more sensible to throw her
out. Lately Scherchen wanted to do it, but didn't and that was my fault.
What do you think? I can't devote much attention to her now, because I
have plenty of work with the others and without me she doesn't do
anything. [...] What is the situation with financial matters? I would
like to know so that I can get Buchtger to write to singers, and he
doesn't want to do that until he knows where the funds are coming from."
(18th January 1931)
 "The whole situation looks less than wonderful because it doesn't
seem to me as if Scherchen and Buchtger are taking care of anything--at
least I still haven't heard anything. [...] I don't know if I can
rehearse the strings in Munich, I don't know if I have performers at my
disposal, and I don't know what the state of affairs is with wind
players. You yourself know very well that if everything is going to come
together, I just have to finally get a chance (it's the end of January
after all!) to work properly. [...] I have already asked Buchtger to
write to singers several times. So far he has done nothing at all. The
singers are absolutely in the right, because they simply must be told at
least the date and roughly the financial conditions. [...] Still, they
are all working very hard and conscientiously. [...] I don't know
anything about Meilie. [...] Debuser browbeats me, but I browbeat her as
well. I am already doing the 7th Picture with her, and I think it would
be a pity to start again from scratch with someone else. I can cope with
it, but Scherchen ought to take more interest in the thing. I'm still
lacking tenors for the choir. I've exhausted all the sources and don't
know where to get hold of them. [...] As far as the singers are
concerned I can guarantee that I'll have them ready by mid-April, but I
can't answer for the orchestra, because I don't have one yet." (24th
January 1931)
 "So far I don't have tenors, but I'll find some [...] Debuser has
improved. I wonder for how long. On Wednesday there was an interesting
concert here. They played Schonberg's Suite op. 29 for violin, viola,
'cello, 3 clarinets and piano, and then Hindemith's String Quartet op.
32 and Stravinsky's Octet. After Schonberg all the rest seemed to pale.
Never before had I felt that kind of difference, but the Hindemith and
Stravinsky went down better." (30th January 1931)
 "Yesterday Scherchen was here and Buchtger came as well. Scherchen
finally sorted everything else, asked for the addresses of the singers
and wants to write to them all himself ... He set a date for rehearsals
in Munich. Rehearsals will begin on the 22nd of April and by that time
he wants everything to be ready. Confound it, I'll be sweating. He wants
you to come to him in Wintherthur for about ten days so that he can work
with you at least 6 hours a day on your opera. [...] He immediately made
a firm contract with Meilie. [...] Buchtger has himself talked to some
of the singers, especially those who were giving me trouble. It looks as
if finally everything will now come together. Next month the Munich
dance ensemble will start to rehearse the ballet. I have to be
repetiteur with them. Otherwise I have to assist with Stravinsky's
Oedipus Rex, Honneger's Antigone and probably with Milhaud too. This
really speeds up my work tempo, but it doesn't matter, since I'm
learning a lot. I shall certainly cope." (23rd February 1931)

We do not have any more reports from Ancerl to Haba on the course of rehearsals for Mother; perhaps his work tempo became so tough that he had no time to write any. Most probably this exceptional experience was something that helped Karel Ancerl resolve his own personal dilemma: he entirely gave up composing and became a master conductor. With Haba he shared a tireless commitment to work and an undying faith that things would eventually turn out well. These attributes helped him to survive the horrors of imprisonment in the Terezin concentration camp, where he founded and led an orchestra. After the war he joined Haba in the Great Opera of the 5th of May, which occupied the building of the former New German Theatre (today the Prague State Opera) and Haba became its director. Karel Ancerl also took part in the production of the Czech premiere of Mother on the 23rd of May 1947, this time directing it himself.

Karlik

The job of repetiteur during rehearsals for the Czech production of Mother in 1947 was taken on by another of Haba's pupils, Karel Reiner (1910-1979), familiarly known to everyone as "Karlik" ["Charlie"]. He too was someone who divided his interest between various different branches of music. For many years he not only composed but also was an active pianist and one of the first players on the quartertone piano. The first performers of Haba's quarter-tone pieces included above all his own pupils at the conservatory, not only Reiner but also Jiri Svoboda, Arnost Strizek, Tana Baxantova, and the later conductor of the Scottish Orchestra and Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Melbourne and musical director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Hans Walter Susskind. Outside the circle of Haba's students his interpreters included Jan Herman and most notably Erwin Schulhoff. Reiner--like Schulhoff--also wrote on the theme of play on the quartertone piano: "Not even in the performance of semi-tone music is one particular technique sufficient. [...] Chopin demands a different technique than Beethoven, Mozart a different technique than Liszt, Bach a different technique than Schonberg, Smetana a different technique than Suk or Janacek. In these circumstances it is clear that a similarly limited technical-piano training is even less sufficient for play on the quarter-tone piano. [...] Play on the quarter-tone piano has ceased to be the acrobatic privilege of individuals and has become the basic starting point for understanding the common foundation of all piano technique. [...] The complete piano oeuvre of Alois Haba [on semitone and quarter-tone piano] provides us with some of the greatest milestones in the development of contemporary pianistic art." (Rytmus [Rhythm] 4, 1938-39, pp. 51-53).

Reiner's help was invaluable in saving the threatened 13th ISCM festival in 1935. The festival had been supposed to take place in Karlovy Vary, but a number of unfavourable circumstances exploited by the nationalist campaigns of the Sudeten German party unnerved the town councillors and preparations for the festival collapsed. But within less than six weeks of feverish activity the festival was saved. One of the people who devoted themselves twenty-four hours a day to correspondence and telephone calls, used their diplomatic talents to the utmost and refused to give into depression, was Karel Reiner, and not simply because he was supposed to perform at the festival, playing a Piano Concerto by another of Haba's pupils, the Slovenian composer Slavko Osterc. (At this festival Karel Ancerl conducted Haba's symphonic fantasia Cesta zivota [The Journey of Life].)

For two years Reiner (a qualified lawyer) acted as repetiteur and composer in the avant-garde theatre of Emil Frantisek Burian, for whom he created or arranged a number of stage music compositions, for example for a production based on Karel Hynek Macha's great romantic poem Maj [May], or in collaboration with E. F. Burian for the production Haskovy noviny [Hasek's Newspaper], for the play Mistr Pleticha on an anonymous text from the 15th century (all in 1935), for a production of Procitnuti jara [Spring Awakening] by Frank Wedekind, the dramatisation of Karel Hynek Macha's Kat [The Hangman], Pierre Auguste Caron Beaumarchais's The Barber of Seville, Burian's adaptation of Vaclav Kliment Klicpera's Kazdy neco pro vlast [Everyone does Something for His Homeland], Burian's dramatisation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and for Leonce and Lena by Georg Buchner (1936). He also published articles in music magazines, undertook organisational work and looked for his own musical idiom.

Like Ancerl, Karel Reiner was Jewish, and Nazism had a devastating effect on his life. Reiner went through a number of concentration camps and by a miracle managed to survive not only the "final solution" but also typhus and a death march. He came from a German-speaking family. His father had been the cantor in the Jewish community in Zatec in North-west Bohemia in what was known as the Sudetenland. From the end of the 1920s this originally merely topographic name had acquired political significance, especially after Hitler's rise to power in Germany. From the mid-1930s Hitler's supporters strove to "ethnically cleanse" the area of Czechs and to become part of Germany. Reiner, who deliberately declared himself Czech-speaking, settled in Prague. While he considered himself a Czech, at job interviews he was often asked why he didn't join "the other side": for Germans he was already a Czech and for Czechs he was still a German. For the Nazis he was a Jew with no longer any rights at all.

Even after the war Reiner had a difficult time. It was impossible to revive severed bonds and restore the institutions and organisations of the pre-war period. Politically speaking, the first three post-war years saw Czechoslovakia becoming increasingly dependent on decisions made in the Soviet Union. While the inter-war avant-garde in Czechoslovakia had been broadly left-wing and had seen in the Soviet Union the only power capable of defeating Nazi Germany, after the war left-wing orientation meant the loss of freedom and artistic liberty and subjection to ideological diktat. It took Karel Reiner several years to realise that by adapting to the demands for "communicability, simplicity and melodic character" promulgated by Socialist Realism, he was losing his own identity. When he refused to abandon "formalist" composition, he started to be undesirable for the future development of socialist culture. There followed years in which his music was scarcely ever performed. Once again, he was afflicted with the feeling that he "belonged nowhere", for the last time when after 1968 he condemned the Soviet occupation and resigned from the Communist Party, which he had joined soon after the war. In all the trials that he encountered in his life and in his efforts to defend his moral credit Reiner drew strength from the principles that he had come to embrace through his association with Alois Haba.

An Education in Freedom

Haba's influence on his pupils related not just to music, but also to overall outlook in life. In the 1920s--and perhaps even earlier, during his studies in Vienna--Haba had been introduced to the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner. In the light of Steiner's theories he saw the role of the artist in society and musical compositions as a duel between contradictory elements and an attempt to achieve equilibrium. In this respect he influenced Karel Reiner, who also espoused anthroposophical doctrines, and affected the spiritual orientation of another of his pupils, Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944). Viktor Ullmann was the son of an Austrian officer, a Jew who had converted to Christianity. His native language was German, and he grew up in Vienna, fought in the First World War (from which his father returned an invalid) and started to study law before deciding on music and attending Arnold Schonberg's composition class. In 1919 he moved to Prague and thereafter his life (apart from the years 1930-33) was bound up with the cultural milieu of the Czech capital. We do not know precisely when and where he first met Haba, and it is possible that they became acquainted in Vienna just after the war. Ullmann first took a sceptical attitude to Steiner's ideas, but in the end studied them in detail and was so enthralled that for a time he gave up composition. Haba acted as Ullmann's sponsor when the latter joined the Anthroposophical Society and Ullmann himself called his new step in life, for which he credited Haba, the "conversion of Saul into Paul". In Stuttgart he purchased a debit-ridden anthroposophical bookshop, but this soon went bankrupt and in 1933 Ullmann fled from his creditors to Prague (not from Hitler, since at that time he was protected from German discriminatory laws by his status as Austrian citizen and Christian). Radical decisions had not brought Ullmann good fortune, but as he himself said, fortunately he still had music. A new distinctive phase in Ullmann's composing career began in the mid-1930s.

Haba and Ullmann remained close friends. Ullmann's search for all kinds of creative possibilities also (already at a relatively mature age) brought him to Haba's microtonal class at the Prague Conservatoire (1935-37). His graduation piece was a Sonata for Quarter-tone Clarinet and Quarter-tone Piano, of which only the clarinet part has survived. Subsequently he never used quarter-tones in his music. It can be said that in this piece he reached the boundaries of an experiment that helped him to find a musical idiom in which elements of historical forms are balanced by great freedom of tonality and effective use of timbre. There are also grounds for supposing that it was Haba who introduced Ullmann to the folk song that has left its traces in his Piano Sonata no. 2 and Slav Rhapsody.

Viktor Ullmann the composer has been rediscovered since 1975, when his one-act opera written in Terezin Cisar z Atlantidy (Der Kaiser von Atlantis--The Emperor of Atlantis) was first performed in Amsterdam, but in a new orchestration (the original form has been in performance since the 1990s). Many of his pieces have, alas, been lost. The works that remain have become without exception part of the concert and opera repertoire. In 2006 there are plans finally to present the long delayed first performance of Ullmann's opera Pad Antikristuv (Der Sturz des Antichrist--The Fall of Antichrist) on a Czech stage (the world premiere, as yet without successors, was produced in 1995 in Bielefeld).

Ullmann's The Fall of Antichrist was written in 1935. It has its counterpart in the output of Alois Haba, in the form of his never performed opera Prijd kralovstvi Tve [Thy Kingdom Come] of 1942. Ullmann's opera was based on a play by the anthroposophist poet Albert Steffen about the struggle of technocracy (the Technician), demagogy (The Priest) and free creative life (the Artist) with despotic desire for power (the Regent). The Artist prevails over the Regent and by his conviction and faith liberates his "brothers"--the Technician and the Priest--and the whole of mankind. Haba in his opera on his own libretto written with the help of Ferdinand Pujman, places social classes in opposition, allegorised into a duel between the anthroposophical symbols Lucifer and Ahriman. Ullmann's music for the Antichrist is tonal, with long declamatory passages but also melodic sections with the great orchestral apparatus of the post-Romantic inheritance. Haba's opera is written in a sixth-tone system, i.e. in an even more finally nuanced idiom than his opera Mother. To have produced a work of this kind, with no chance that it would be performed, in the midst of the war, under the rule of a system that branded his music as "degenerate" (entartete) and banned anthroposophy, was the rebellion of a spirit that refused to be overcome. This rebellion of the spirit was also evident in the work of Viktor Ullmann in Terezin, where he composed, took part in concerts and write music reviews. In the latter he never conceded that standards of performance might be judged more tolerantly in the improvised conditions: "We have listened to and loved the Magical Flute from childhood. Many still have Mahler in their ears, others Richard Strauss, Schalk, Walter, Zemlinski; we have heard the leading international singers of Mozart, seen the stage design of great artists and preserved the memory of the soft, incomparable sound of the tenderly accompanying orchestra. Is it possible that we may be allowed to express criticism of a production that is to this memory what a second stage rehearsal is to a dress rehearsal? A production that the conductor is not even allowed to conduct--and why not?--and that has to be accompanied by a more than problematic piano? [...] While Gustav Mahler was in the provinces, he kept his promise: not to present Mozart and Wagner there!"

Modern Music between Nations

Among his pupils from the former Yugoslavia, the one with whom Haba kept up probably his liveliest correspondence was the Slovenian Osterc, who was in any case only two years his junior. Slavko Osterc (1895-1941) had arrived in Prague in 1925. In some ways he shared a starting-point in life with Haba. Apart from the fact that both had originally been supposed to become teachers and had to struggle to beat a path to art, they had both had the same teacher, Vitezslav Novak, at the beginning of their careers as composers. In addition, Osterc had also been trained by Karel Boleslav Jirak and gone through Haba's microtonal department. Later he was himself to pass on his experience when teaching composition at the conservatory and Academy of Music in Lublyana. Haba's contacts with Osterc related not just to exchanging news about their compositions but above all to the activities of the ISCM. Osterc was a member of the ISCM international jury in Paris in 1937 and played an important role in promoting Czech composers there. He managed to arrange a matinee of quarter- and sixth-tone music outside the main festival concerts and won votes for most of the pieces proposed by the Czech section. After negotiations in the jury he informed Haba that:

 "[...] now to details, mainly about the L' ad 1/6 matinee. The jury
allowed it, but doesn't want to be responsible for the programme,
because the pieces have not been submitted to them. In my view that is
perfectly all right. You can therefore start to negotiate with the
French section. But [the leader of the French section Jacques Ibert] has
already been lamenting that there isn't enough money. And so at the
moment that would be the one vulnerable point. But I know you and I am
sure you'll find a way over this.
 Naturally our internal work: putting together and presenting a
programme--will be difficult. [...] Kacinskas's Nonet looks like the
only piece for the moment, but of course you are better informed about
everything! It hasn't been possible to push through Bartos, Polivka and
Koffler, because Borkovec also sent a piece and Martinu too, outside the
section, and so I was already rather anxious about Reiner. The situation
was that apart from me no one was enthusiastic about Reiner (it's a
modern jury!!!, that was why Koffler was dropped--just because he writes
in modern style) and I invested all my energies in pushing for Reiner
and even got unanimous agreement for him, which makes me truly happy for
Charlie's sake. As far as orchestral pieces are concerned, then it is
you, Zebre and Rosenberg, that was unisono [...]" (25th December 1936
from Paris)

And Haba's reply: "You have put up a brave fight and I'm just as curious about the whole programme as I am about the hue and cry that I expect for L and 1/6 matinee [...] For me and Reiner it will be a little hard to live with the jury decision, even though we are both delighted by it! Because at home the "financial reward" for pieces keeps going--to the others! Reiner and I at least have recognition abroad! If at least Bartos's piece had been accepted, as I strongly hoped, it would all be allright. But this way--just Haba and his most faithful pupil--Dr Reiner, there will be bad blood." (26th December 1936)

Just by way of explanation: Frantisek Bartos, Pavel Borkovec and Vladimir Polivka were not Haba's pupils, but Vladimir Polivka had taken part in presenting some of Haba's piano pieces. The Polish composer Jozef Koffler was a pupil of Schonberg and is considered to be the first Polish composer to use twelve-tone music. He fell victim to the Nazis, who murdered his entire family. The Slovenian composer Demetrij Zebre studied with Haba in the mid-1930s. The Swedish composer Hilding Rosenberg, regarded as a "romantic modernist", was a member of the jury along with Alfred Casella, Wladimir Vogel, Nadia Boulanger and Ernst Krenek in the year that Haba gave up his place at the festival to Jaroslav Jezek. The programme of the microtonal matinee consisted of works by Haba and his pupils Karel Reiner, the Slovak Julius Kowalsky and the Englishman Frank Wiesmeye. Inventions by Bohuslav Martinu, who was living in Paris at the time, was not performed at the festival.

Jeronimas Kacinskas (born 1907) from Lithuania, studied with Haba in the years 1929-31 and became his zealous supporter. For many years he tried vainly to get the teaching of microtonal music introduced in Klaipeda. He wrote his Nonet for the Czech Nonet, which premiered it. It was not, however, performed in Paris, and Haba was finally to help get it played at the next festival in 1938 in London (just like the piece by Koffler), when he was once again a member of the international jury. Kacinskas later found temporary exile in Czechoslovakia after escaping from Lithuania after the occupation of the Baltic states. He spent some time in a refugee camp in Lednice in Moravia.

"Degenerate Formalist"

The Nazi regime classified Haba as a "degenerate" composer, and for the communist regime he was a "formalist". After 1948 he was deprived of his place as director at the Great Opera of the 5th of May and of the chance to go on teaching. With only two years to go before he reached pensionable age, Haba naturally defended himself, albeit in a fashion that today we might consider undignified, if not hypocritical. He wrote the following to the Dean of the Academy of Performing Arts Antonin Sychra: "I have composed, and still composing and intend to go on composing. Among my latest compositions a number were highly rated at the [communist] Composers' Union plenary meeting, and not in any formalist sense. Likewise my 7th String Quartet op. 73 and youth song Jarni zeme [Spring Earth] won prizes in the last year. I am now working on a Wallachian Suite for orchestra and plan a series of other works inspired by the life of the people and the present. [...] Considering these circumstances it is my view that if my work as a teacher is currently considered undesirable, a certain account should at least be taken of my work as a composer and present creative orientation." (8th July 1951)

Haba had never been embarrassed to approach people in the highest places with his requests, and did so this time as well. He wrote in his own cause to the Minister of Education Zdenek Nejedly: "I have been teaching in this field for 28 years. In 1933--after my illegal visit to a theatre and music conference in Moscow--the then Ministry of Education wanted to suspend my teaching activities at the State Conservatory of Music. [...] During the Second World War the teaching of composition in the L and 1/6-tone system was threatened by the Nazis for both artistic and political reasons. This did not surprise me. I used even my L and 1/6-tone compositions to fight for a better future for working people. You yourself wrote about my cycle of L-tone male choral pieces Pracujici den [The Working Day] (on a poem by J. Hora), dedicated to all working people for the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the USSR [...] The L and 1/6-tone system may also be employed for artistic expression of the kind that you spoke about at the last congress of Czechoslovak composers [...] Apart from this, on the 1st of February 1950 I signed a socialist contract with the Rectorate of the Academy of Performing Arts in which I undertook that in addition to my existing teaching duties I would act as permanent advisor to composition students for the writing of mass songs, choral works, cantatas, operas and other socialistically orientated music." (July 1951)

The document is one that speaks for itself as a witness to the times. Haba's attendance at the International Olympiad of Revolutionary Theatres in Moscow in 1933 definitely cannot be called illegal; incidentally, one result of this visit had been to re-establish, or perhaps initiate a closer link with Hanns Eisler, whom we have mentioned above. The paradox of Haba's argumentation and the folly of the Fifties is the fact that in the String Quartet op. 73, which he speaks of in the letter to Sychra, Haba managed to smuggle in the Czech Christmas carol Narodil se Kristus Pan [Christ the Lord is Born]. Four years later, in the same way, his Concerto for Viola contained a version of the song of St. Michael, who as the angel who weighs the souls of the dead is one of the central symbols of anthroposophy.

In 1956 Haba attended the Summer Courses of Contemporary Music in Darmstadt, but faced with the Darmstadt experimentalists the former enfant terrible of the interwar period emerged as a defender of the "good old times". Nonetheless, when he was asked to give a lecture to musicology students at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University in Greifswald in 1963, it was he who provided the East German students with some contact with events in Western music. He made an impact in the GDR particularly by demanding that music teaching concentrate just on music itself, its structure and specific meaning independent of philosophical systems that ultimately always manifest themselves as ideology. According to one of those present at the lecture Haba defended freedom of choice of musical material, without "expressing an opinion on questions of socialist realism and dogmatic definition, as if these questions did no exist for him". (Gedanken zu Alois Haba, 1996, pp. 95-97).

To be a successful teacher a person needs to remain a pupil throughout his or her life. This was the case with Haba. He kept up with events of all kinds (not just in music), studied historical systems of harmony and the music of non-European cultures and towards the end of his life even wrote a fifth-tone string quartet with a very concise structure, something quite new in his output.

Many Languages, One Music

Apart from those already mentioned, important pupils of Haba included Dragutin Colic, Dragutin Cvetko, Radoslav Hrovatin, Marjan Lipovsek, Ljubica Maric, Pregrad Milosevic, Maks Pirnik, Milan Ristic, Pavel Sivic, Franc Sturm and Vojislav Vuckovic from the former Yugoslavia, from Bulgaria Vasil Bozinov, Atanas Grdev and Konstantin Iljev, Jan Wieczorek from Poland, Kazim Necil Akses and Halil Bedi Yenetken from Turkey, Mykola Kolessa from the Ukraine and many others. The English violinist and composer Frank Wiesmeyer (already mentioned above) later took the professional name Georg Whitman and did a great deal to propagate Czech music in England.

In his Ceska moderni hudba [Czech Modern Music] (1936) Vladimir Helfert defined Alois Haba as "the most extreme wing in the development of Czech modern music, [...] a phenomenon that has advanced the furthest in terms of evolution but at the same time represents the European standard of our music." The way in which the generation that did not come into direct contact with him on "the school benches" still responds to Haba as teacher was been summed up by the composer Alois Pinos in 1993 (Opus musicum 1993, pp. 277-284): "Nobody composes thoroughly in a microtonal system like Haba, but the impulses he gave have lived on, for example in the now dead leading representative of the 'Brno School', Josef Berg, and also Josef Adamik, Frantisek Emmert, Peter Graham, Marek Kopelent, Vaclav Kucera, Arnost Parsch, Alois Pinos, Rudolf Ruzicka, Martin Smolka, Milos Stedron and others. Haba has his heirs (but not mere copiers) abroad as well. The Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, for example, admits his influence, although (as Haas himself says) 'my way of seeing Alois Haba is--to put it cautiously--very individual.'"

Insofar as the authentic responses of Haba's pupils have come down to us, summarising how they saw the value of his teaching, they echo the opinion of Mykola Kolessa, who wrote to Haba on the occasion of his seventieth birthday: "Your works and the creative methods to which you introduced us [...] in your very interesting lectures and creative discussions, have left deep traces in me, even though I haven't in fact used the quarter-tone system in my own work as a composer. Even today, after such a long time, I like to recall your teaching methods, which are a great help to me in my activities as a composer and teacher." (26th July 1963)