ABSTRACT
Pavel Haas’s unfinished Symphony, composed between 1940 and 1941, is a poignant expression of protest against the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Previous writings on the work have noted that this element of protest is manifested through Haas’s frequent references in the first movement to the Hymn to St Wenceslas. Yet there is a wealth of religious and patriotic symbolism in the work that has not yet been fully explored. This chapter demonstrates how Haas’s use of particular musical topics articulates the twofold legendary role of St Wenceslas as both a saint and a warrior. Drawing on the theory of markedness and correlation, there is an illustration of the way instrumental voices become associated with semantic binaries such as individual/collective, divine/earthly, and despairing/rejoicing, and what role these connotations play in the programmatic narrative, which besides Czech patriotic myths, is predicated on the biblical meta-narrative of the arrival of the prophesied Messiah. In contrast, the Symphony’s second movement represents a complementary facet of Haas’s artistic protest against Nazism, based on grotesque depiction and satirical derision. With its spooky instrumental effects and a puzzling superimposition of the Nazi song ‘Die Fahne Hoch’ and Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’, this music takes on the guise of a frightening danse macabre.
