String Quartet No.1 in C sharp minor Op.3 (1920–21)

Lento e grave misterioso – ­largamente e appassionato

Paval Haas was one of the Czech Jewish composers who – with Viktor Ullman, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein – were interned in the Nazis’ so-called “model” concentration camp at Terezín, where they were allowed to write and make music for two or three years before being transported to Auschwitz in 1944. Although Haas completed two of his best-known works at Terezín, the Study for Strings and the Four Songs on Chinese Poetry, all three of his string quartets were composed before the German occupation. The first of them dates from the early 1920s when he was a student in Janácek’s masterclass at the Brno Conservatory.

It would be interesting to know the story behind Haas’s first piece of instrumental music. Could Janácek have set his pupil the task of writing a slow movement for string quartet in C sharp minor? Or was he more likely to have discouraged him from attempting to emulate the first movement of Beethoven’s sublime Op.131? Whatever the circumstances, the young composer met the challenge and produced an expertly scored, seriously thoughtful and, in spite of the Beethoven precedent, original work.

True, Haas’s Op.3 begins like Beethoven’s Op.131 with a slow fugue on the theme introduced by violin in the opening bars. But it lasts no more than a minute or two before the tempo accelerates and cello and viola initiate a gradually more and more animated treatment of the fugue theme. An expressive new melodic idea with a distinctive kink in its line intervenes and again activity increases. Although the texture is still contrapuntal and the emotional state still intense, the atmosphere becomes light enough to support a central scherzando episode. But, as the climax of the structure confirms, the emotional reality of the work is represented by the earlier material – including the opening fugue subject, which has never been long absent and which, after a series of Janácek-like trills, is recalled at the end.