Suite (1939)

Furioso

Con fuoco

Moderato

Pavel Haas was one of the group of Czech Jewish composers who were interned in the Nazis’ “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. The oboe suite was written before he was sent to Terezin but after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia – which explains why, having originally scored the work for tenor and piano, he recast the solo line for oboe: the provocative text Czech-nationalist text would surely have been condemned by the Nazi authorities. Actually, the music itself gives almost as much away. Its frequent resort to the St Wenceslas chorale, which makes a significant entry towards the end of the first movement, and the Hussite hymn “Ye who are fighters for your God,” which emerges in the second movement, makes Haas’s sentiments plain even before a triumphant ending that could almost have been written by Haas’s teacher Janácek..