Hans Krása
Hans Krasa ( born November 30, 1899 in Prague, † October 17th 1944 in the concentration camp Auschwitz -Birkenau, Poland ) was a Czech- German composer.
Life
Krasa 's father, a lawyer, came from a Czech family, his mother from a German - Jewish family. Hans Krasa studied in Prague composition at the German Academy of Music and Performing Arts with Alexander von Zemlinsky. After graduating, he followed his teacher to Berlin. After studying in France as a student Albert Roussel, he worked as a coach at the New German Theatre in Prague.
In 1921 he had his first success as a composer with the Orchestral Songs op.1 texts by Christian Morgenstern. 1938 Hans Krasa wrote together with librettist Adolf Hoffmeister, the children's opera Brundibar for a competition of the Ministry of Education and National Education. Because of the outbreak of the Second World War, this no longer came for evaluation. In 1941 this opera was first performed in secret in the Jewish orphanage.
On August 10, 1942 Hans Krasa was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. There Brundibar was performed over 55 times. In the film Theresienstadt ( "The Führer Gives the Jews a City" ) is also shown a performance of Brundibar. In the camp he was married several months with Eliska Kleinová to prevent the deportation as a single woman.
On the night of October 16, 1944 Hans Krasa was loaded into a rail car with destination Auschwitz. There he was murdered as " older " man immediately upon arrival in the gas chamber.
Rediscovery
The workup of many years forgotten story of the children's opera Brundibar by Hans Krasa began in the late 1970s, when the Benedictine sister Veronika Grüters stumbled across on the substance of the opera in search of their family history. They reconstructed a version of Brundibar basis of a piano score in Czech and Hebrew and was able to realize the 1985 first - Brundibar performance in Germany. The mid- 1990s, took on the organization, " Jeunesse Musicales " of the opera, and initiated in cooperation with other institutions, pilot projects in which job aids have been created for the performance of the opera. The highlight of this project were joint performances of three top European choirs ( boys' and children's choirs ) from Bad Tolz, Poznan and Prague, the opera aufführten one behind the other in Berlin, Warsaw and Prague in the local language. In 1995, the children's opera was as part of a school - and memory project with the surviving witnesses Herbert Thomas Mandl at the high school dance mountain of ARBOS - Company for Music and Theatre shown for the first time in Austria.
Works
- Operas Betrothal in a Dream, 1928-1930, after Dostoevsky's novel Uncle's Dream ( Bote & Bock)
- Brundibar, opera for children (two versions: Prague 1938, Theresienstadt 1943) ( Bote & Bock)
- Choral works The earth is the Lord, cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra, 1931 ( Bote & Bock)
- Five Songs, Op 4 for medium voice and piano, 1926 (UE Vienna) You girls are like gardens Rainer Maria Rilke
- To the brothers Latvian folk song
- Make that something happens to us! Rainer Maria Rilke
- The love of Gaius Valerius Catullus
- Vice versa, Christian Morgenstern
- 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 and Variations for string quartet, in 1935/36 ( Bote & Bock)
- Chamber Music for harpsichord and 7 instruments (4 clarinets (4th and saxophone), trumpet, cello, double bass ), 1936 ( Bote & Bock)
- Dance for String Trio, 1943 ( Bote & Bock)
- Passacaglia and Fugue for String Trio, 1944 ( Bote & Bock)
- Music for the Stage Mládí ve HRE by Adolf Hoffmeister, 1934/35 ( in: A. Hoffmeister, Hry z avantgardy, Prague: Orbis 1963)