Aurelia Butler

One of Haas’s former students reflects on his time with a teacher who had lessons to offer in music, doubt and influence.One evening in 2013, during my graduate recital in composition at the City of Basel Music Academy in Switzerland, an instrument I had built went flying into the audience. It was a small loudspeaker duct-taped to a string — I called it a sound pendulum — and when the musician twirled it, the tape didn’t hold.Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did. A pianist lost her place in the music. A saxophonist mixed up the performance time and rushed in wearing flip-flops after a frantic phone call from me. In the composition I was most excited about, I badly misjudged an important combination of instruments: A passage meant to sound sleekly metallic was merely tinny.I had a panic attack. I went outside to get some air. My composition professor, Georg Friedrich Haas, and a fellow student, the Israeli composer Yair Klartag, followed, aiming to calm me down.As my breath returned to its regular rate, Haas told me that he valued my music, but that I would need to start believing in myself.Easy for him to say, I thought. This Austrian composer, who turned 70 last August, was close to the height of his fame. In 2010, the music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker referred to Haas as “one of the major European composers of his generation,” and in early 2013 the eminent conductor Simon Rattle described Haas’s “In Vain” as “one of the only already acknowledged masterpieces of the 21st century.”Haas had forged an original voice using microtonal materials, or intervals smaller than the minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation. He mined the unfamiliar density of these sounds to create a primal interplay of tension and release in which shattering tension lived beside wary beauty.I was a 25-year-old with indifferent grades whose homemade instrument had almost clocked someone.But Haas and I had more in common than was immediately obvious. He moved to Switzerland from Graz, Austria, in 2005; I arrived from Salzburg, in the same country, in 2011. We both had high hopes for our lives in Basel but felt ill at ease once we arrived. The city seemed skeptical of outsiders, and the atmosphere at the conservatory could be tense. I only ever seemed to meet gay men my age when I took the seven-hour train ride to Berlin; Haas’s third marriage was in crisis. In Basel, “I lost the ground beneath my feet,” Haas recalled in a recent interview. “I always felt on the defensive.”Haas knew what it felt like to question yourself. Self-belief, he said, “is one of the most fundamental things for me.”I looked forward to Haas’s courses. His private lessons included long silences punctuated by insightful remarks about the music and an occasional sly joke. In seminars, my classmates and I listened to old and new compositions, followed by sometimes raucous discussions about their merits. Haas never discouraged his students from trying an outlandish idea. He would only mention it if he had attempted something similar in a piece and had been disappointed by the result.Georg Friedrich Haas in his New York apartment in 2016.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesHaas didn’t talk to me about self-belief before my disastrous recital, but he modeled the trait by treating each of his students with respect, no matter how much their aesthetic preferences differed from his own. While studying with Haas, I became friends with my fellow composing students — Ryan Beppel, Arash Yazdani and William Dougherty, as well as Klartag — at least partially because Haas discouraged students from jockeying for position. “There was a kind of utopia in that classroom,” Beppel recalled. “We were really supportive of each other, which I now know isn’t always the case in creative circles.”For his part, Haas said that he sees “it as a certain logic in my work as a teacher that I try to accept every person who composes music as he or she is, and pass that on to the others.”He was enthusiastic about the wildest, least practical idea of my composing days: a piece for six ambulances driving around an audience. Their speeds would be carefully calibrated to create different layers of the Doppler effect, or the bending in a note that we perceive when sound passes us by. For obvious reasons, the piece was never performed.By the day of my recital, Haas and I both had our escapes from Basel planned. He was going to New York to become a music professor at Columbia University. I was going to Berlin to become a waiter at an American-style diner.Haas was so focused on moving that he now has no memory of our conversation at my concert. “I was at a complete dead end, and I had to get out,” he said. “I was unbelievably lucky that I was offered a way out.”His opera “Thomas,” which premiered in May 2013, encapsulates that feeling of suffocation. Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, the work focuses on the title character, whose boyfriend, Matthias, has just died in a hospital. Thomas grieves but must interact with the businesslike functionaries of death. The instrumental music is often skeletal, with an ensemble consisting almost entirely of plucked instruments, their quick decays a reminder of transience. The opera expresses an existential loneliness eased only by the gentle shimmer of its microtonal harmonies.Once Haas began teaching at Columbia, his life changed rapidly. He met Mollena Williams, a writer, performer and alternative lifestyle activist, on OkCupid. Haas had long wanted a partner who shared his interest in B.D.S.M. and dominant-submissive dynamics. After decades of suppressing that desire, he found someone in New York who shared it. They married in 2015, and she now goes by Mollena Williams-Haas. The couple has collaborated on works such as “Hyena,” for which Williams-Haas wrote and performed a text about alcohol withdrawal, accompanied by Haas’s music.Since his move to New York, Haas, whom I remembered as a shy teacher, has been blunt about his past. Shortly after their wedding, he and Williams-Haas spoke with The New York Times about their relationship, describing how their shared kink encouraged their creativity. Later that year, Haas told Die Zeit that he was raised by a family that remained ideologically close to Nazis after the end of World War II.“The monsters,” Haas told the newspaper, “they were my parents and grandparents.”“The Artist and the Pervert,” an intimate documentary about Haas and Williams-Haas, premiered in 2018. When the composer moved to the United States, “There was the thought, ‘I’m in New York now and New York is big, New York is anonymous, I could do what I want and no one will notice,’” he said. “That concept didn’t quite work.”Klartag, my classmate, followed Haas to Columbia from Basel to pursue his doctorate in composition, and found his teacher transformed. “He was very shy and introverted, at least with the students, in Basel,” Klartag said. “In New York, he really opened up, was very outgoing, outspoken.”In 2022, Haas published a German-language memoir that goes into greater detail about his past, “Durch vergiftete Zeiten: Memoiren eines Nazibuben” (“Through Poisoned Times: Memoirs of a Nazi Boy”). His grandfather, the architect Fritz Haas, joined the Nazi Party in 1934, when the organization was still illegal in Austria. Haas’s father attempted to raise young Georg in the same ideology. While he was studying in Graz, from 1972 to 1979, Haas realized that Nazi sympathies remained among some Austrian composers. He described physical abuse at the hands of his family and sexual abuse at the hands of his schoolmates.Maybe most painfully, the book explores the roots and manifestations of the composer’s own Fascist views, which he held until his early 20s.I studied in Austria almost 30 years later than Haas, at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. I had excellent teachers and an absurdly generous number of private lessons. But I can imagine the environment in which Haas learned. Once, I borrowed an obscure Mozart score from the university library. The cover page was emblazoned with a Third Reich seal.For Haas, his memoir was an act of exorcism that freed him to devote all his energies to music. “I’ve made peace with myself,” he wrote in the book. “The past is behind me. I still have much to do.”My youth, in Jewish, progressive Brookline, Mass., was much easier and happier than Haas’s. But conservatories have a way of instilling doubt in all but their most exceptional students, and although I don’t compose anymore, I’m still absorbing his broader lesson about self-belief. Recently, Haas brought up my old idea of the piece for ambulances. “It’s really a shame that we weren’t able to continue it,” he said.I couldn’t keep a miniature loudspeaker attached to a whirling string, but he trusted me to compose for real ambulances, he said, “like a 5-year-old child in the clouds somewhere playing with his cars.”In 2020, Haas wrote a piece of similarly fantastical ambition. Titled “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), the work, which premiered last August in Bolzano, Italy, is composed for chamber orchestra and 50 upright pianos, each tuned at the microscopic interval of two cents from the next. (Cents measure the difference between musical intervals; a minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation, is a hundred cents.)Swarming “microclusters” created by this tuning morph in and out of radiant, complex overtone harmonies. Though the title refers to the number of strings in the ensemble, it also recalls Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1907 pornographic, sadomasochistic novel “The Eleven Thousand Rods.”“11.000 Saiten” is a culmination of the past decade in Haas’s life. Now, he wants to encourage self-discovery, no matter how oblique, in others. As he did for me.“My dream as a teacher,” Haas said, “is when something keeps growing underground, like a rhizome, and then at a different place grows into a different plant.” More