'Religious Patriotism and Grotesque Ridicule: Responses to Nazi Oppression in Pavel Haas's Unfinished Wartime Symphony'

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61988987%3A17500%2F20%3AA2101TE0" target="_blank" >RIV/61988987:17500/20:A2101TE0 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-to-Music-under-German-Occupation-1938-1945-Propaganda/Fanning-Levi/p/book/9781138713888" target="_blank" >https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-to-Music-under-German-Occupation-1938-1945-Propaganda/Fanning-Levi/p/book/9781138713888</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315230610" target="_blank" >10.4324/9781315230610</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

'Religious Patriotism and Grotesque Ridicule: Responses to Nazi Oppression in Pavel Haas's Unfinished Wartime Symphony'

Original language description

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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60403 - Performing arts studies (Musicology, Theater science, Dramaturgy)

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2020

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

The Routledge Companion to Music under German Occupation, 1938-1945: Propaganda, Myth and Reality

ISBN

978-1-138-71388-8

Number of pages of the result

22

Pages from-to

377-398

Number of pages of the book

550

Publisher name

Routledge

Place of publication

New York

UT code for WoS chapter

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