Hans Krása

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Hans Krása (before 1935)

Hans Krása (born November 30, 1899 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; died October 17, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a Czechoslovak German-language composer .

Life

Krása's father, a lawyer, came from a Czech family, his mother from a German- Jewish family. Krása studied composition at the German Academy for Music and Performing Arts in Prague with Alexander von Zemlinsky . After graduating, he followed his teacher to Berlin . After studying in France as a student of Albert Roussel , he worked as a répétiteur at the New German Theater in Prague.

In 1921 he had his first success as a composer with the orchestral songs op. 1 based on texts by Christian Morgenstern . In 1933, his opera Verlobung im Traum was premiered in Prague under the direction of George Szell . In 1938 Krása wrote the children's opera Brundibár together with the librettist Adolf Hoffmeister for a competition of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education and National Education. Because of the beginning of the Second World War, this was no longer available for evaluation. In 1941 this opera was secretly premiered in the Jewish orphanage in Prague.

On August 10, 1942, Krása was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto . There Brundibár was performed over 55 times. The propaganda film Theresienstadt (“The Führer gives the Jews a city”) also shows a performance of Brundibár . He was married to Eliška Kleinová in the camp for several months to prevent her from being deported as a single woman.

On the night of October 16, 1944, Hans Krása was loaded into a railroad car bound for Auschwitz. There he was murdered as an "older" man in the gas chamber immediately upon arrival .

Rediscovery

The process of coming to terms with the story of the children's opera Brundibár by Hans Krása, which had been forgotten for many years, began in the late 1970s, when the Benedictine sister Veronika Grüters stumbled upon the subject of the opera while searching for the story of her family. She reconstructed a version of Brundibár on the basis of a piano reduction in the Czech and Hebrew languages ​​and was able to realize the first Brundibar performance in Germany in 1985. In the mid-1990s, the organization “ Jeunesses Musicales ” took on the opera and, in cooperation with other institutions, initiated pilot projects in which working aids were created for the performance of the opera. The highlight of this project were joint performances by three top European choirs (boys' and children's choirs) from Bad Tölz, Posen and Prague, who performed the opera one after the other in Berlin, Warsaw and Prague in the respective national language. In 1995 the children's opera was shown for the first time in Austria by ARBOS - Society for Music and Theater - as part of a school and remembrance project with the surviving contemporary witness from Theresienstadt Herbert Thomas Mandl and Eva Herrmannová at the Tanzenberg high school .

Works (selection)

  • Operas
    • Engagement in a dream , 1928–1930, based on Dostoyevsky's novella Onkelchens Traum (Bote & Bock)
    • Brundibár , opera for children (two versions: Prague 1938, Theresienstadt 1943) (Bote & Bock)
  • Choral works
    • The earth is the Lord , cantata for solos, choir and orchestra, 1931 (Bote & Bock)
  • Solo vocal works
    • Four orchestral songs based on texts from Christian Morgenstern's Galgenliedern op. 1, 1920 (UE Vienna)
    • Five songs op.4 for medium voice and piano, 1926 (UE Vienna)
    • Der Schläfer im Tal for lower voice and chamber orchestra, before 1925 (Bote & Bock)
    • Three songs for baritone, clarinet, viola and violoncello , 1943 (Bote & Bock)
  • Orchestral works
    • Symphony for small orchestra , 1923 (UE Vienna)
    • Overture for small orchestra , 1943/44 (Bote & Bock)
  • Chamber music
    • String Quartet , 1921 (Edition Max Eschig, Paris)
    • Theme with variations for string quartet , 1935/36 (Bote & Bock)
    • Chamber music for harpsichord and 7 instruments (4 clarinets (4th also saxophone), trumpet, violoncello, double bass), 1936 (Bote & Bock)
    • Dance for string trio , 1943 (Bote & Bock)
    • Passacaglia and Fugue for string trio , 1944 (Bote & Bock)
  • Incidental music
    • Mládí ve hře by Adolf Hoffmeister, 1934/35 (in: A. Hoffmeister, Hry z avantgardy, Prague: Orbis 1963)

literature

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVhjuR_Sls4
personal data
SURNAME Krása, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-German composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 1944
Place of death Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp