Escape

It is hard to imagine that concentration camps were a place where music happened, where pieces were performed and even premiered. After having been deported to the Theresienstadt camp in 1941, Pavel Haas began composing for the musicians within the camp. When his Study for String Orchestra was premiered there, the Czech conductor Karel Ančerl rescued the scores, thus passing on to posterity a well formulated work, stubborn in rhythm and unique in its inflection. In 1944, Pavel Haas was transferred to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

Six years earlier, in 1938, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók is on the verge of fleeing the country. Europe is teetering on the edge of calamity, and Bartók’s future is uncertain, to say the least, when he is commissioned to compose a violin concerto. The assignment is to write a traditional concerto, three contrasting movements, nothing more, nothing less. Yet Bartók’s plan is a different one. The result, his 2nd concerto for violin and orchestra, is a fascinating work based on a twelve-tone series (»dreaded« at the time) which is artistically cloaked in breathtaking late-romantic expression. Bartók manages to create a gripping concerto before being driven into American exile.

A change of perspectives. New horizons. The Bohemian Antonín Dvořák was one who thought outside the box, first in England, later in the United States. In London in 1885, the premiere of his 7th symphony was met with euphoria. This success worked out just as planned for the (sometimes wrongly underestimated) composer, whose words were: »My symphony must be such as to make a stir in the world.« Said and done – even his good friend Johannes Brahms was altogether enthused and kindly forgave him for borrowing one or two melodies. With his symphony in D Minor – the grimness and gravity of which almost led to the subtitle »The Tragic« – Antonín Dvořák brilliantly upended the old cliché of the ever-jovial Bohemian musician.