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      The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

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      The work is a guaranteed success. After it is over, audience members leap out of their seats for a standing ovation.Such has been the response to “Rhapsody in Blue” ever since its premiere 100 years ago, on Feb. 12, 1924. George Gershwin had been asked by the conductor Paul Whiteman to supply a “jazz concerto” for the event An Experiment in Modern Music at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan, and the landscape of American music hasn’t been the same since.Thanks to the centennial, you’re likely to come across a lot of “Rhapsody” performances this year — not that the anniversary makes much difference, because that’s always the case. Indeed, “Rhapsody” is one of the most frequently programmed pieces in the symphonic repertoire by an American composer.Beyond the concert stage, the work’s themes are heard in movies and television, and are piped into the cabins of United Airlines flights. It has even functioned as propaganda: At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, during the height of the Cold War, the American contingent brought out 84 pianists to perform excerpts from the “Rhapsody,” accompanied by a battalion of dancers.As with many other classical hits, casual listeners might be surprised to learn that the familiar melodies are part of a much longer composition. First, George Gershwin wrote a substantial two-piano score. The composer Ferde Grofé orchestrated the premiere for Whiteman’s idiosyncratic jazz band, including banjo. Later on, Grofé did two more orchestrations, in 1926 and 1942; the last one was for full symphonic forces and is the version most often heard today. Gershwin himself never fussed with making an authoritative edition, going so far as to suggest four possible cuts in the score.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      As Changes Come to Boston Symphony, Conductor’s Contract Is Extended

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      The music director, Andris Nelsons, was moved to an evergreen contract, with an expanded role at Tanglewood. And Carlos Simon was named to a new composer post.The tenure of Chad Smith, the innovative arts leader who last year left the Los Angeles Philharmonic to run the comparatively old-fashioned Boston Symphony Orchestra, is beginning to take shape.In an announcement on Thursday, the Boston Symphony said that Andris Nelsons, its music director, would move to a rolling, evergreen contract rather than one with a fixed expiration date, and that he would take on a new, educational role as the head of conducting at Tanglewood.Additionally, the orchestra appointed Carlos Simon to a newly created post of composer chair; and announced that it would establish the Boston Symphony Orchestra Humanities Institute, an initiative with the goal of expanding the ensemble’s relationship with Boston outside its storied concert hall.“I came to the Boston Symphony with the idea that this is an extraordinary institution with a remarkable history,” Smith said in an interview. “But the opportunities of what we can do in the future were most compelling.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Revels, and Struggles, in Jazz

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      At Carnegie Hall, a program of Stravinsky, Weill and freely improvised Gershwin highlighted a dialogue between jazz and classical music.Much of 20th-century classical music owes a deep thanks to jazz. And while on paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night was organized for a festival at the hall, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, the subtext was American jazz.All three of the composers on the program (Stravinsky, Weill and Gershwin) loved and, to one extent or another, made references to the style in their music. Although Stravinsky was based in Europe when he premiered “Petrushka” in 1911, he was already a U.S. citizen when he revised this piece in 1947, and had long experimented with incorporating jazz into some of his pieces — and jazz musicians loved him right back. Weill, who left Europe for the United States after the fall of the Weimar Republic, was also steeped in jazz. And Gershwin, of course, wouldn’t be Gershwin without it.The Philadelphians opened with a magical performance of “Petrushka,” led off by a piquant solo from Patrick Williams, the associate principal flutist. The orchestra staked out rhythmic details with crystalline precision and saw each phrase through with patience and a rich sound. Stravinsky relays the spirit of Petrushka, the folkloric Russian trickster puppet, and the ballet’s tale of a deeply twisted puppet love triangle, with equal parts humor and darkness; the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the musicians captured the piece’s flickers of light and its swirls of despair.Weill’s Symphony No. 2, from 1934, is an oddity: structurally and harmonically a mash-up of plush, Mahlerian harmonies, Weill’s acidic stage works, and jazz-inflected plain-spokenness. In its best moments, such as in the dreamy, lonely slow movement — with a trombone solo played gracefully by Nitzan Haroz — this music feels like being inside an Edward Hopper painting.The giddiest part of the evening was a literally jazzed-up version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and the members of his trio: the bassist Martin Jaffe and the drummer Jason Marsalis.Roberts has made a specialty of reworking Gershwin; along with the “Rhapsody,” which he recorded nearly three decades ago, he has toured his version of the Concerto in F. In Tuesday’s account of the “Rhapsody,” the orchestra played its traditional score, but Roberts used the piano solos to introduce extended improvisations for himself, sometimes in flights of Romantic, Rachmaninoff-esque fancy, and occasionally nodding instead to the blues and stride piano. By the jazz standards of 2024, Roberts is conservative, and while he didn’t cast any new light on a cherished standard, his performance was still charming.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Cleveland Orchestra Says a Lot, but Only Through Music

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      With neither encores nor speeches, this ensemble presented a subtly clever, cogent and complete pair of concerts at Carnegie Hall.The conductor Franz Welser-Möst is a man of few words. Or, judging by his two concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last weekend, no words.Dressed in his usual performance costume of white tie and tails, Welser-Möst strode to the podium, turned his back to the audience and, with the finesse that characterizes this orchestra’s performances, let the music speak for itself.If he did want to speak, he’d have a lot to talk about. Welser-Möst recently announced that he was stepping down from the Cleveland Orchestra in 2027, after 25 years as its music director. He is one of Carnegie’s Perspectives artists this season, and with these concerts was opening the hall’s festival Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.The Clevelanders, with their evenly balanced tone and precise articulation, reflect the understated poise of their maestro. Their sound has a lovely finish: softly molded winds, round-toned brasses, strings that never turn strident. The unflashy solos captivate in the way they refuse to draw attention. When a tempo takes off, there’s no sense that the players are flustered or swept away in it. Transitions are handled with care, even perhaps too much so.Perspectives artists open their musical world, the loves and preoccupations that animate it, by organizing their own series. In March, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in three programs, and for his two last weekend, he surveyed some sounds of the Weimar era — jazz, serialism, lurid down-at-heel drama, machine music — with a rigor and cohesion that were his own.The ensemble’s meticulous and methodical approach found an inspired match on Sunday in two challenging symphonies by Prokofiev — one written during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and one during the wartime years that followed. At first, the players’ resistance to the garishness of the Second Symphony’s blaring machine music, Prokofiev’s nod to the fashion for compositions that imitate the sounds of industry, seemed to miss the point. But it was as though Welser-Möst took apart this rusted apparatus, polished every screw and gear, and put it back together again. It whirred with magnificent efficiency; the strings, locked into repetitive patterns, threw off bright, clean sparks. The sequence of variations on a theme was kinetic, and lyrical moments wore their beauty lightly.Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, grandly classical in conception, with dashes of the composer’s wily idiosyncrasies, was played with lush strings and enveloping brasses. Motifs were given expansive statements, then were cut up and brought back with edge and suavity. The fourth movement had a mahogany tone of divided cellos and a finale of mechanical energy and busy tinkering before a thrilling final flourish.Felicities abounded in the programming. The first concert paired Ernst Krenek’s “Little Symphony,” a Neo-Classical mishmash of Mozart and jazz, with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, whose score Krenek completed at the request of Mahler’s widow, Alma. The second concert juxtaposed two symphonies that utilize a theme-and-variations form, Prokofiev’s Second and Webern’s Op. 21. Both concerts ended with some drama, with the suite from Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and Prokofiev’s Fifth, which incorporates music from his stage works.The concerts gestured at the historical context on either side of the Weimar era. Prokofiev’s Fifth represented a time when the composer was writing under Stalin’s totalitarian regime; the Mahler, the work of a turn-of-the-century composer whose legacy the Nazis tried to tarnish. As programming it felt subtly clever, cogent and complete, despite the tight focus.The flip side of the Clevelanders’ general unflappability, which served them so well in Prokofiev’s ardent, piquant musical language, was a tendency to smooth out a work’s individuality. In the Mahler, Welser-Möst charted an unbroken, long-breathed line from the violas’ mysterious sadness and the violins’ soaring romanticism to the dissonant climax, in which the piece seems to implode with its own emotional cataclysm. But Mahler’s music is too multifaceted, too spiked with peculiar about-faces, for lyrical sameness.A similar problem bedeviled the Bartok. Welser-Möst sanitized the sordid street scene that brings the curtain up, and the piece’s strong episodic structure, its constant lurching between sexuality and violence, weakened as vignettes blurred together. Trombone glissandos and trumpet blares were downright polite. As in the Mahler, the playing was tasteful to a fault.The clarinetist Afendi Yusuf beautifully rendered the solos that represent a woman who lures men off the street to be robbed; Yusuf’s playing was reluctantly beckoning at first and then more fluid, confident and complicit.An arrangement of Bartok’s Third String Quartet by Stanley Konopka, the orchestra’s assistant principal viola, worked better as a vehicle for theatrical expression. Konopka divided the ensemble into a double string orchestra and had them seated antiphonally on the stage. Some balance issues aside, it worked brilliantly well, teasing out the piece’s delicacy and aggression with an exciting, fruitful tension.At both performances, there were no encores. Perhaps Welser-Möst and the Cleveland musicians had already said everything they wanted to say. More

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      ‘The Chevalier’ Review: A Music-Theater Portrait of Joseph Boulogne

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      “The Chevalier,” an intriguing music-theater hybrid, unwraps the still little-known life and work of this 18th-century composer.Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid abolitionist.But Boulogne, a.k.a. the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (and whose last name is sometimes spelled “Bologne”), was a biracial man in a time and place that held little space for him, which means his remarkable life has largely been erased from the historical narrative, though that is beginning to change.“The Chevalier,” a trim hybrid of theater and music, seeks to revive his reputation. The show was written and directed by Bill Barclay, the artistic director of Music Before 1800. (Barclay also plays Choderlos de Laclos, a Boulogne collaborator and author of the novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”) A single performance at the eye-poppingly opulent United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday served as its New York City premiere; it will be available to stream next month.“The Chevalier” starts rather unpromisingly. Barclay takes as his point of imaginative departure the few weeks that Boulogne and Mozart were housemates in Paris. Mozart, 11 years younger, grills Boulogne about his life story, and he responds with long, expository answers that hit on major biographical points — more school lecture than beguiling drama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      6 Highlights of Maria Callas’s Opera Career at La Scala

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      The soprano appeared in more than two dozen productions at the house in Milan as she rose to become opera’s leading lady. Here are six highlights.No opera house has been more instrumental to the enduring myth of Maria Callas than the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Her more than two dozen productions at La Scala mirrored the peaks and troughs of her life and marked her finest years as an opera singer.It was near the start of her La Scala years that Callas underwent a physical transformation, losing some 80 pounds and becoming a global celebrity; and it was toward the end of that period that she left her husband Giovanni Battista Meneghini for the wealthy magnate Aristotle Onassis, who then married someone else (Jacqueline Kennedy).Callas’s many performances at La Scala “have passed into legend,” said Neil Fisher, executive culture and books editor, The Times and Sunday Times in London. “If La Scala is a temple to opera, then Maria Callas is one of the goddesses.”Callas during a rehearsal for Cherubini’s “Medea” with the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers at La Scala in 1961. “Medea” was her final show at La Scala.Associated PressLa Scala’s reputation, in turn, is “almost inseparable” from her, Mr. Fisher added: “Postwar, the glamour of opera, and also its mystique, swirls around this character of Maria Callas.”Why does a soprano who died in 1977 remain the single most celebrated opera singer of all time?Because she made opera “about the story and the drama and the narrative,” said the American soprano Lisette Oropesa. “It wasn’t just about the beauty of the voice: She used her voice to tell a story.”Crucially, Ms. Oropesa noted, Callas became the story herself — a “hot-topic, controversial figure” — after her life became mixed up with those of Onassis and Kennedy. As a result, “people to this day cannot stop talking about her,” Ms. Oropesa added. She’s “a legend.”Callas appearing as Violetta in “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, in a 1955 production at La Scala. The character is widely considered one of her three finest roles.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesFollowing is an overview of some of Callas’s career highlights at La Scala.“Aida” (Verdi): April 12, 1950Callas’s very first performance onstage at La Scala was as a substitute for the much-adored Renata Tebaldi, who was unwell. It was, by all accounts, a tepid debut. A skin condition had given the 26-year-old soprano facial blemishes that she awkwardly covered with veils. In “Maria Callas: An Intimate Biography,” by Anne Edwards, the director Franco Zeffirelli (who would go on to work with Callas) recalled “this overweight Greek lady, peeping out from behind her trailing chiffon,” with an “unevenness” in her voice. Her two remaining performances of “Aida” went much better, but this inaugural “Aida” was a blow to the young prodigy’s self-confidence.“I Vespri Siciliani” (Verdi):Dec. 7, 1951This was the first time that Callas was headlining a La Scala production — kicking off the opera house’s season, in fact — and it was a triumph. She was understandably nervous at the start. “The miraculous throat of Maria Meneghini Callas did not have to fear the demand of the opera,” the music reviewer Franco Abbiati wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera (according to the biography “Maria Callas: The Tigress and the Lamb,” by David Bret). Mr. Abbiati lauded the “phosphorescent beauty” of her tones, and “her technical agility, which is more than rare — it is unique.”“Lucia di Lammermoor” (Donizetti): Jan. 18, 1954This was Callas’s first time with the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan at the baton, and she didn’t disappoint. In the famous “mad scene” — where Lucia stabs her new husband on her wedding night — Callas appeared barehanded, in a nightgown and messy hair, on a dimly lit staircase; she had turned down the dagger and fake blood that are usually used to portray the murder. Yet her performance was so realistic that mesmerized audience members jumped up mid-performance, clapping and cheering, and tossed red carnations onstage that Callas touched as if they were gobs of blood. In Opera News, the critic Cynthia Jolly hailed “Callas’s supremacy amongst present-day sopranos,” and “a heart-rending poignancy of timbre which is quite unforgettable,” according to the Bret biography.“La Traviata” (Verdi): May 28, 1955The character of Violetta in “La Traviata” is widely considered one of Callas’s three finest roles — along with Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bellini’s “Norma.” And the May 1955 staging by the director Luchino Visconti is, in turn, considered her finest “Traviata.” It was “a revolutionary production” that was “renowned for its realism, the intimacy and the gorgeousness of the setting, the painterly qualities,” said Mr. Fisher of The Times. It also “encapsulated so much” of the Maria Callas that audiences have come to know and revere. Set in La Belle Epoque, with ornate décor and costumes, the show triggered another audience frenzy on opening night. People cried out Callas’s name, sobbed uncontrollably and showered the stage with red roses, which a tearful Callas picked up as she took a solo bow. The conductor Carlo Maria Giulini later confessed that he, too, had wept in the pit. Yet Callas’s monopolizing of attention in her solo bow was too much for the tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, who quit the show that night.“Anna Bolena” (Donizetti):April 14, 1957This was another Visconti spectacular, and another triumph. Callas played Anne Boleyn, a doomed wife of Henry VIII, in a somewhat lesser-known Donizetti opera. Queenlike, she appeared in a dark blue gown and enormous jewels at the top of a grand staircase, surrounded by royal portraits. Musically, she gave it her all, triggering 24 minutes of applause (according to the Edwards biography), a La Scala record.Yet offstage, in Milan, her star was starting to fade, after she had refused to perform a fifth time with the La Scala opera company on a tour in Edinburgh (she was only contractually obligated to four performances, and was feeling unwell). Protesters awaited her as she headed to the “Anna Bolena” premiere, the Edwards biography reported, and she was accompanied inside by armed police officers. When she got home on the last night of the show, there were obscenities scribbled with animal excrement on her front door and windows.“Medea” (Cherubini): May 29, 1962By the time of her final performances at La Scala, Callas was divorced and in a relationship with Onassis. Her voice was still dazzling audiences worldwide. Just 10 days before this performance of “Medea,” she had sung two arias from the opera “Carmen” at a celebration of President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday (where Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday”).Yet as she was performing “Medea” that night, a sinus infection led Callas’s voice to waver in parts, though she sang all the way to the end, and still managed to draw some press acclaim.Long after her passing, Lord Harewood, a Callas supporter and onetime director of the Royal Opera House, recalled in an Evening Standard article that was excerpted in the Bret biography that it was “evident that her voice had deteriorated markedly,” and attributed it to her “being at sea with Onassis in his boat” and attending “too many parties.”“You felt that this wonderful career was coming to an end,” he was quoted as saying in the Bret biography. “But I thought that she still had great power, a tremendous grandeur about everything she did. In spite of everything, she never lost that.” More

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      Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88

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      Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Schickele. His health had declined after a series of infections last fall, she said.Under his own name, Mr. Schickele (pronounced SHICK-uh-lee) composed more than 100 symphonic, choral, solo instrumental and chamber works, first heard on concert stages in the 1950s and later commissioned by some of the world’s leading orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles. He also wrote film scores and musical numbers for Broadway.His music was performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Lark Quartet, the Minnesota Opera and other notable ensembles, as well as by the folk singers Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie, for whom he wrote arrangements.But to his resigned chagrin, it was as a musical parodist in the tradition of Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Spike Jones — Mr. Schickele’s particular idol — that he remained best known.For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      At 70, the Composer Georg Friedrich Haas Encourages Self-Discovery

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      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