Pavel Haas, St Wenceslas chorale, Hussite chorale, the grotesque, dance of death, Nazism, Czech music, Symphony, musical topic, the military

Composed in 1940–41, Pavel Haas’s unfinished Symphony is one of two major pieces written by this Czech composer of Jewish origin between the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and his imprisonment in the concentration camp of Terezín in December 1941. Like the Suite for Oboe and Piano (1939), the Symphony contains a poignant expression of patriotic sentiments with religious overtones. Both works are known to make reference to the Hymn to St Wenceslas and to the Hussite chorale ‘You Who Are the Warriors of God’. However, the role of religious and patriotic symbolism in this work goes beyond thematic allusions. I will demonstrate that Haas employed the musical topics of religious chant and the military, respectively, to articulate the twofold role of St Wenceslas as a saint and a warrior. Furthermore, the connotations which various instrumental voices gain through properties of instrumentation, timbre, articulation, topical associations, patterns of agency, and the dialogue of such voices (individual or collective, divine or earthly, despairing or rejoicing) contributes to the movement’s programmatic narrative, predicated on Czech patriotic myths and the biblical meta-narrative of the arrival of the prophesied Messiah. In stark contrast, the second movement represents another facet of Haas’s response to Nazi oppression, marked by grotesque exaggeration and distortion, spooky instrumental effects, a mixture of military and fairground topical associations, and a puzzling superimposition of the a Nazi song ‘Die Fahne Hoch‘ and Chopin‘s ‘Funeral March’. This grotesque depiction and satirical derision of the Nazi machinery is rooted in Haas’s life-long fascination with caricature and the grotesque. I will show how the the recurring topic of ‘danse excentrique’, observed in Haas’s works from the 1920s, transformed into ‘danse macabre’ in the second movement of the Symphony.