Escape

It is actually unimaginable that a place like the Theresienstadt concentration camp could have a musical life with concerts and even world premieres. After Pavel Haas was deported there in 1941, he composed for the musicians inside the camp. When his study for string orchestra was premiered there, the Czech conductor Karel Ančerl saved the sheet music. A strikingly formulated, rhythmically idiosyncratic work with its own unique tone was preserved for posterity. Pavel Haas was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and murdered there. Six years earlier, in 1938, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was not yet on the run, but he would soon be. Europe is close to the abyss, and the future seems more than uncertain for Bartók too. A commission for a violin concerto flutters through the door. It is to be a classical concerto as usual, if you please, with three contrasting movements. But Bartók had something else in mind. In the end, he creates a fascinating work with his 2nd Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: he artfully dresses the "dreaded", such as the twelve-tone row on which the work is based, in a breathtaking late-romantic tone. He thus created a rousing concerto before he was driven into exile in America.

Change of perspective. New horizons. The Bohemian Antonín Dvořák looks beyond his own nose. First in England, later in the United States. In 1885, the world premiere of his 7th Symphony was celebrated in London. A success that the sometimes unjustly underestimated composer had deliberately planned: "My symphony should turn out in such a way that it moves the world." No sooner said than done, even his good friend Johannes Brahms was completely enthusiastic and was happy to forgive his colleague for the odd borrowed melody. With his Symphony in D minor and its comparatively grim and serious tone, which almost led to the nickname "Tragic", Antonín Dvořák brilliantly refutes the cliché of the always cheerful Bohemian musician, which was already being tried at the time.