Alois Hába - Toccata Quasi una Fantasia Op.38

Tomáš Víšek - Piano

Alois Hába (1893-1973) was a Czech composer. When he was five years old it was discovered that he had absolute pitch. In school, Alois became very interested in the musical aspects of the Czech language, above all in pitch, rhythm, accent, dynamics, and timbre of the speech. In 1908 he entered the teacher's training college in Kroměříž, where he began to develop an interest in Czech national music, analyzing the works of Bedřich Smetana. Already at that time he found out from his textbooks that the European system of music was not the only one in the world and that even some European music had in the past used different scales than the ones used in his time. He therefore started to develop his own point of view in this issue.

He studied with Franz Schreker in Vienna in 1918. At that time, Hába wrote his first quarter-tone piece, Suite, consisting of three fugues in the quarter-tone system, composed for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. In 1923, he met Ferrucio Busoni in Berlin, who had advocated the sixth-tone system and encouraged Hába to continue his work in microtonality. After that he was kicked out of Nazi Germany and he went back to Czechoslovakia.

After the premiere of his quarter-tone opera Matka (Mother) in 1931, introducing a practically athematic concept, Hába emerged as a leader of Czech modernist music and became internationally well known as one of the most important avantgarde composers. This opera also uses two quarter-tone clarinets and two quarter-tone trumpets, which were built especially for this work. Hába expressed his bold socialist viewpoint throughout his operas and that caused controversies already at the time. In 1933, when Josef Suk became director of the Prague Conservatory, Hába was made a full professor and established the Department of Quarter-tone and Sixth-tone Music. Here he had much influence over his many students.
His works became banned during Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. They closed down the Prague Conservatory in 1941 and prevented him from teaching. During the war Hába wrote a continuation of his Theory of Harmony, completed, as already mentioned, a sixth-tone opera (which was never produced), and considered constructing a twelfth-tone harmonium.
At the turn of forties and fifties, the work of Alois Hába was affected by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, becoming transitionally simplified, much more "thematic" and tonal, and also setting texts projecting communist ideology. He was nevertheless unable to rid himself of the label of “formalist” stuck onto him by Marxist aesthetics.
When Hába returned to his style, he continued in his experimental musical studies, which culminated in the 1960s with the use of fifth tones in his Sixteenth String Quartet in 1967.

Alois Hába's works total 103 opuses, the majority of which are various kinds of chamber music. Among the most important are his string quartets, which document and demonstrate the development of his style. In addition to quarter tones, Hába used sixth-tones in his String Quartets nos. in the 5, 10, and 11, as well as in Six Pieces for Sixth-tone Harmonium or String Quartet (1928), Duo for Sixth-tone Violins (1937), Thy Kingdom Come, a Sixth-tone Musical Drama in Seven Scenes (1937–42), Suite in Sixth-tones for Solo Violin (1955), and Suite in Sixth-tones for Solo Cello (1955).

Видео Alois Hába - Toccata Quasi una Fantasia Op.38 канала fyrexianoff