"Haas is the son and grandson of Nazis, and all his music grows out of the survival instinct born from what he describes in his memoir as the inherited horror of a childhood marked by physical and sexual abuse. My parents were criminals, he says calmly. I reached that conclusion after a long process of coming to terms with it, shaped by shame and fear. I could not speak about this in words, but I could speak about this in music."
"It was out of this need to exorcize his own demons that In vain (2000) emerged, a monumental piece that conductor Simon Rattle did not hesitate to call the first masterpiece of the 21st century. Haas composed it when the far-right party to which his family had once belonged entered the Austrian government. I felt that everything we believed we tried to escape was returning. Hence the title: in vain, he explains."
Georg Friedrich Haas, age 72, inaugurates an artistic residency at Spain's National Center for Musical Dissemination (CNDM) with a performance of In vain. He is the son and grandson of Nazis and a survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse, which shaped his music as an outlet for inherited horror and survival instinct. Haas has described his parents as criminals and found musical expression when words failed. In vain (2000) emerged to exorcize these demons and was composed as Austria experienced a resurgence of far-right politics. The piece employs microtonal language to expand listening toward an unsettling, otherworldly harmonic spectrum.
Read at english.elpais.com
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