Czech composer Pavel Haas’ career was gaining momentum through the 1930s. A Jewish man, he wrote music for theater, film and the concert hall, and he debuted a well-received opera in 1938.
Nazi Germany occupied a large swath of the former Czechoslovakia that year and by the end of 1939 swallowed up the rest of the country.
Nazis banned the performance of Haas’ music because of his religion and forbade him to work. But he continued writing music — even after being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and ghetto.
Many middle school and high school students will soon learn this history through the aural lens of Haas’ music.
Monday marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the release of an innovative lesson plan produced by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.
“No matter who we are or where we come from, or how old I am, or how much I know about the Holocaust, I can listen to a piece of music and I can feel something,” said Helen Turner, education director at the Holocaust museum.
“Holocaust Composer Stories: Pavel Haas” is the first of four planned programs centering on composers who were directly affected by the events of the Holocaust.
The curriculum’s centerpiece is a 45-minute video that includes a live performance of Haas’ little-heard String Quartet No. 3 and expert discussion of the music and the context of its composition. Violinists Alison Harney and Nathan Lowry, violist Beth Guterman Chu and cellist Elizabeth Chung — all members of the SLSO — recorded the piece.
Finding a different approach
“Holocaust Composer Stories: Pavel Haas” is a milestone for the SLSO.
“This particular project is different from anything that we've done because it's not about music education, strictly speaking. It kind of flips the model, and it's using music to educate about something else,” said Maureen Byrne, the SLSO’s vice president for educational and community programs.
“Holocaust Composer Stories: Pavel Haas” is also the organization’s first digital education tool for students in middle school and high school. A state law passed in 2022 mandates Holocaust education for Missouri students in grade 6 and above beginning with the 2025-26 school year.
SLSO started building digital education materials during the coronavirus pandemic, when in-person classes were not safely possible. SLSO educators broke with their usual practice of in-person classes only as a temporary, emergency tactic, but the digital education tools were well-received — and can reach many more students, throughout the U.S. and internationally.
The videos, accompanied by classroom materials and made available to teachers free of charge, found wider audiences than their creators expected. So the SLSO invested more money into equipment and staffing.
Its lineup of music-education videos now includes Tiny Tunes, geared for children age 3 to 6; Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, for students in grades one through five; and a program based on Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” also for elementary school students.
Over 400,000 students used these programs last year, according to the SLSO — including children in India, Sri Lanka and China.
Several schools have already pre-registered for the curriculum, including ones in Hazelwood, Lindbergh and Principia in Missouri; Edwardsville, Illinois; and the Illinois Center for Autism.
Students will listen closely to Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 and talk about topics such as how the composer expressed his emotions through the music or how Haas’ variations on a repeated musical phrase summon different moods.
A voice silenced too soon
Haas wrote the piece while not yet imprisoned but after the Nazi threat was clear. He divorced his wife, who was not Jewish, to try to protect her and their new daughter.
“This is really hard music to listen to. This is not easy stuff,” said Sarah Ruddy, a musicologist and SLSO’s manager of education programs. “I think you can hear how scared he was in the dissonance, in the rhythms he chooses to use, in the ways he develops the motives. It’s heavy, heavy music.”
There’s a rhythm that goes throughout the string quartet’s first movement that Ruddy likened to a heartbeat.
“Sometimes it speeds up, and sometimes it feels a little more erratic,” Ruddy added. “Sometimes he weaves it into melodic lines. Sometimes it's the accompaniment. But it is always there. And it really sounds to me like Haas’ heart is going to beat out of his chest because he is so worried about what is going to happen.”
In December 1941, Haas was sent to Theresienstadt (also known as Tezerin), a concentration camp and ghetto where German soldiers detained Jews before sending them to death camps.
Haas was featured in an infamous propaganda film the Nazis produced to publicize the lie that its inmates did meaningful work in reasonable conditions. The people incarcerated there were pictured playing sports and stitching clothes with apparent contentment.
An orchestra is seen performing Haas’ “Study for Strings,” which he wrote while imprisoned there. He’s seen briefly as he acknowledges the applause from a room full of people dressed in neat-looking clothes with a star sewn onto them.
In reality, people confined there were subject to intense overcrowding, malnutrition and disease. Nazis spent months beautifying the work camp for the film and an international inspection, directing prisoners to build fake shops and homes.
Haas continued to write music while imprisoned there. But in 1944 he was sent to the Auschwitz death camp, where historians say he was likely murdered in a gas chamber shortly after his arrival.
His voice was silenced, but his music remains.
Haas' String Quartet No. 3 is emotionally dense and technically difficult, even for SLSO members.
“It’s one of the hardest quartet pieces I’ve played,” said Chu, the violist. “There are parts where you might be playing something extremely fast and then the next moment is just blissfully quiet and calm. There are technical difficulties with playing double stops and some chords that are really gnarly. It’s a true challenge to play it.”
Chu’s grandparents lived in a shtetl outside Warsaw before World War II before finding asylum in the U.S. in 1938. They each were part of large families — she had 12 siblings, he had 10. Apart from one sister, they were all murdered in Nazi camps.
“I've been able to [play the string quartet] in an artistically clinical way, and gotten into the music and into the composer's head, all of those things. But when I have thought about my own history, it's become much more difficult for me,” Chu said. “It’s been a very valuable way for me to confront my own past.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Pavel Haas' name.
