Although the life of Pavel Haas (1899–1944) found a violent end in the horrors of Auschwitz, his music survived and is increasingly attracting the interest of today’s musicians and scholars. Now, for the first time, this talented pupil of Leo? Janácek is being introduced in a lavish English-language publication devoted to his complete output. The authors, Lubomír Spurn? (a professor at Masaryk University in Brno) and Ondrej Pivoda (the curator of the music department at the Moravian State Museum in Brno, where Haas’s estate is preserved), have long studied Haas’s artistic legacy. Ondrej Pivoda has already edited the Urtext edition of Haas’s String Quartet No. 2 (“From the Monkey Mountains”) for Bärenreiter.
In Pavel Haas: A Catalogue of the Music and Writings, the authors draw on the most recent scholarly research. The catalogue of works covers finished compositions, film scores, incomplete and lost works as well as the composer’s literary estate. In addition to the standard description of each and every work, the entries also include bibliographical references and lists of musical editions and recordings. The book contains a foreword by the editors, an index and illustrations.