Passacaglia and Fugue (1944)

Sehr ruhig

Allegro molto

Hans Krása was one of the Czech Jewish composers - with Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein - who were interned in the Nazis’ “model” concentration camp at Terezín and allowed to write and make music for two or three years before being transported to Auschwitz in 1944. The Passacaglia and Fugue was in fact the last thing he wrote. It could well be that the two pieces were intended as the last movements of a longer work including also Tanec, which is scored for the same ensemble.

However that may be, they are a perfectly complementary pair and, as such, complete in themselves. The Passacaglia, based on a seriously thoughtful eight-bar theme introduced by cello in the opening bars, consists of eighteen resourcefully scored variations including an attractively melodious waltz-time episode, an impassioned climax and a last, attenuated echo of the theme high on cello harmonics. The passacaglia theme is also the source of the subject of the manic but not unentertaining Fugue which, as it gives rise to the melodic augmentations expected in an exercise of this kind, calls the Passacaglia itself directly to mind.