Krása, Dvořák, Haas & Martinů

DVORÁK, KRASA, HAAS & MARTINU

Thursday 14 January 2021, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––

PROGRAMME NOTE

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PERFORMERS VIOLIN Ruth Crouch Amira Bedrush-McDonald VIOLA Brian Schiele CELLO Eric de Wit DOUBLE BASS Nikita Naumov

FLUTE Brontë Hudnott

PERCUSSION Louise Goodwin

CLARINET William Stafford

PIANO Aaron Shorr

BASSOON Paul Boyes TRUMPET Peter Franks

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR DVOŘÁK (1841-1904) Miniatures, Op 75a (1887) Cavatina: Moderato Cappricio: Poco allegro Romance: Allegro Elegie: Larghetto

KRÁSA (1899-1944) Brundibar Suite arr D.Matthews (1938/43, arr.2010-11) Allegro energico Valse: Lento cantabile Allegro vivace Serenade: Moderato Lento Moderato tranquillo Allegro molto à la marcia

HAAS (1899-1944) String Quartet No 2 (1925)

––––– With the obvious omission of Janáček (who’s nonetheless represented by his pupil Pavel Haas), today’s concert offers an overview of Czech music during a particularly turbulent time, as well as casting light on one of the country’s darkest periods – and the astonishing creativity that emerged from it, against the odds.

It begins, however, in domestic contentment. Dvořák’s Miniatures were born out of friendship and mutual admiration, but still had a surprisingly complicated genesis. In 1887, when he wrote them, the composer was living in the Prague house of his mother-in-law, who also rented a room to a chemistry student named Josef Kruis, an amateur violinist.

Kruis received lessons from Jan Pelikán, a violinist in the Prague National Theatre Orchestra, and a former colleague of Dvořák’s. The composer regularly heard the two men playing together, even occasionally joining them on viola, and eventually hit upon the idea of composing a chamber work for the three of them to play together. In his first attempt, the Terzetto in C, he somewhat overestimated Kruis’s technical abilities. So he tried again with these simpler Miniatures.

4th Movement: Wild Night

MARTINŮ (1890-1959) La Revue de Cuisine (1927) Prologue Tango Charleston Final

Realising that his unusual violin/violin/ viola trio wouldn’t make the pieces easy to sell, however, Dvořák quickly made an arrangement of the pieces for violin and piano, which was soon published as his Op 75. He perhaps forgot about his original trio version: it was only rediscovered in 1938, and published in 1945 with the slightly confusing designation Op 75a, despite pre-dating Op 75.

What Dvořák created for himself and his two friends to play together are four short character pieces, each exploring a single melodic idea and a single mood, with no particular attempt to tie them together as a proto-sonata.

Antonín Leopold Dvořák

Even more confusingly, Dvořák initially called the pieces Bagatelles, but, concerned about confusion with his Op 47 Bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium, his publishers changed the

brings me as much pleasure as if I were writing a major symphony – what do you say to that? They are, of course, aimed at amateur musicians, but didn’t Beethoven and Schumann also once write little

title to Miniatures. His version for violin and piano has yet another title: Four Romantic Pieces.

pieces, and look what they came up with!”

It’s ironic that such unassuming, simple, straightforwardly charming pieces have such a complicated back story. What Dvořák created for himself and his two friends to play together are four short character pieces, each exploring a single melodic idea and a single mood, with no particular attempt to tie them together as a proto-sonata. That’s not to disregard, however, the enormous craftsmanship that he put into them. While composing the original trio version, he wrote to his publisher Simrock: “I am writing some short Bagatelles at the moment, just think, for two violins and viola. My work

His opening Cavatina has a touching melody that shifts restlessly between major and minor, while there’s a folksy flavour to his more animated, minor-key Capriccio. The Romance floats a melody in the first violin against animated triplets in the second, while Dvořák closes with a rather desolate Elegy, whose hesitant yet impassioned melody travels through some unexpectedly intense harmonies.

We jump forward half a century for the concert’s next two pieces, and to a Czechoslovakia under growing threat from Nazi Germany. Jewish composer Hans Krása was born in Prague, but felt pulled equally between the Germanic

Krása’s music is simple and direct, drawing heavily on Czech folk tunes, and although clearly written with children in mind, it’s uncompromisingly spiky and unsentimental.

Hans Krása

intensity of Mahler, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky and the wittier, jazzier experimentation that was going on in Paris – indeed, he made a number of visits to the French capital for lessons

children separated from their parents by the conflict that had by then erupted.

By the time of Brundibár’s premiere, in the winter of 1942, Krása had been transported to the Terezín concentration

with Roussel. He worked as a repetiteur at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and composed songs, a symphony, and the Dostoyevsky-inspired opera Bethrothal in a Dream.

camp. By the summer of the following year, most of the children involved in the orphanage performance, as well as the institution’s staff, had been taken to Terezín too.

He wrote his children’s opera Brundibár (Czech for ‘bumblebee’) for a competition held by the Czech Ministry of Education and Culture in 1938. That same year, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the Munich Agreement (known to Czechs as the Munich Betrayal), which allowed German forces to occupy the Sudetenland. The composition contest was cancelled, but Krása nonetheless planned a later performance at the Vinohrady Jewish

Established in the fortress town of the same name in north-west Bohemia, Terezín (known in German as Theresienstadt) was a particularly insidious institution. Originally intended as a way station to the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka, it quickly developed a reputation as a cultural oasis. Jewish residents had spontaneously arranged their own cultural activities while interned, at first secretly, and later, after successfully

Boys’ Orphanage in Prague, which housed

persuading their Nazi guards to allow

If you’ve ever wondered why the idiosyncratic style of Janáček didn’t seem to make more of an impact on later composers, the murder of Haas might be part of the answer.

Pavel Haas

them, openly. Indeed, Terezín ended up as one of the few places under Nazi occupation where Jews were allowed to engage with culture, though still under strict Nazi rules. Nevertheless, concerts,

Later that same year, Nazi officials made the propaganda film Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (‘The Führer Gives the Jews a City’), forcing eminent Jewish actor and director Kurt

opera, lectures and education for the imprisoned children all flourished in Terezín.

Gerron, a Terezín prisoner, to produce it under SS supervision. One of the camp performances featured in Gerron’s film is Krása’s Brundibár.

Ultimately, however, these activities were permitted only because the Nazis saw opportunities in them for propaganda. When the International Red Cross requested an inspection of Nazi internment camps in June 1944, for example, they were shown what appeared to be a cultural paradise in Terezín, whose chronic overcrowding had been temporarily eased – unbeknown to the inspectors – by the deportation of many of its prisoners to Auschwitz just before their visit. Nonetheless, a favourable report was produced.

When Krása was arrested and sent to Terezín in 1942, he took with him an incomplete piano score of the opera, which he reconstructed in the camp for the musicians he had available to him there. Brundibár’s premiere inside Terezín took place in September 1943, using some of the camp’s buildings painted as a backdrop, and the opera went on to receive 55 performances. Its young cast, however, needed constant replenishment and re-rehearsal as the child performers were transported away to the death camps. Following the completion of

The Suite that Martinů arranged for chamber sextet was unveiled in Paris in 1930, where it went down a treat – not surprisingly, with its absurdist humour, its Stravinskian rhythmic wit and its gushing admiration for jazz.

Bohuslav Jan Martinů

Gerron’s film, Krása, Gerron and all of Brundibár’s musicians and singers were themselves loaded onto cattle trucks for Auschwitz, where they were immediately gassed.

Even in his fairytale-inspired Brundibár, however, Krása was able to deliver a clear anti-Nazi sentiment for anyone who wanted to see it. Brundibár is a grotesque, unpleasant (and, significantly, moustached) organ grinder who winds his instrument for money in the market square. Siblings Aninka and Pepíček hope to raise money to treat their sick mother, but when they try singing in the market square, Brundibár chases them away.

Nevertheless, with the help of local birds and animals, the children are able to dispel the villain and take their rightful place.

although clearly written with children in mind, it’s uncompromisingly spiky and unsentimental. The Suite of seven brief movements you hear today was arranged in 2011 from the full opera score by British composer David Matthews, in a version created for the Nash Ensemble.

Krása’s music is simple and direct,

Pavel Haas was another composer featured in Gerron’s propaganda film, with an excerpt from the Study for Strings that he had written while imprisoned in Terezín. He, too, was transported to Auschwitz following the film’s completion, where he was killed in 1944. And if you’ve ever wondered why the idiosyncratic style of Janáček didn’t seem to make more of an impact on later composers, the murder of Haas might be part of the answer: he was the older composer’s closest acolyte, born in Brno, and studying with Janáček there for two years. Haas’s Second String Quartet comes from an earlier and far

drawing heavily on Czech folk tunes, and

happier period: he wrote it in 1925,

following a joyful summer spent in the Moravian Highlands, known locally as the ‘Monkey Mountains’, which provides the work’s subtitle. This is high-spirited music, full of youthful enthusiasm, and vividly depicting scenes of summer abandon. In the Quartet’s final movement – entitled ‘Wild Night’, and evoking, in Haas’s words, “the jolly mood of a warm night’s celebration” – the composer took the unusual step of bringing in a percussionist to join his four string players, to reemphasise the music’s jazz influences.

That unusual addition didn’t go down well at the Quartet’s premiere, and Haas later indicated that the movement could be performed without percussion, but today’s performance sticks to the composer’s original wishes.

Bohuslav Martinů was blacklisted and sentenced in absentia by the Nazis, but survived their invasion of his homeland, first in France, and later in the USA. Drawn to the remarkable, free-wheeling creativity of 1920s Paris, he moved to the French capital from Prague in 1923, though he attemped to return to Czechoslovakia in 1938 following the Munich Agreement to join a Czech resistance force, only to be rejected because of his age. Instead, he composed his Field Mass in solidarity with Czech resistance forces in the French army, for which he found himself banned and convicted by the Nazis. As German forces approached Paris in 1940, he fled south to Aix-en-Provence, then via Spain and

Portugal to the USA, where he remained until his return to Europe in 1953.

La revue de cuisine, however, comes from Martinů’s madcap time in Paris, and is one of three ballets (plus an opera, piano pieces and chamber music) that he wrote in 1927. In its original version, it’s a ten-movement score to a scenario by choreographer Jarmila Kröschlová that whimsically recounts the private lives of kitchen utensils. Pot and Lid’s marriage is floundering; Dishcloth ends up duelling with Broom; and the suave Whisk is stirring things up for the lot of them. The day is saved when a Monty Python-style giant foot kicks some sense into them all.

The full ballet was premiered in Prague, but the Suite that Martinů arranged for chamber sextet was unveiled in Paris in 1930, where it went down a treat – not surprisingly, with its absurdist humour, its Stravinskian rhythmic wit and its gushing admiration for jazz. A trumpet fanfare kicks off the Prologue’s off-kilter March, which quickly seems to lose its way, before the melodramatic Tango transports us to a more seducative, sultry world. The Charleston at first continues the ominous mood of its predecessor, before breaking into a foot-tapping dance, and the Finale – in which Pot is finally reunited with Lid – brings together snippets of the earlier movements with unabashed wit and sparkle. © David Kettle

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