Karl Haas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karl Haas (December 6, 1913 - February 6, 2005) was a classical music radio show host whose distinctively sonorous voice and humanistic approach to making his joy of music contagious made him well-received by many. He was the host of Adventures in Good Music, which was syndicated to commercial and public radio stations around the world. He also published a book, Inside Music. Aside from being a musicologist, Haas was also an accomplished pianist and conductor.
Haas was born in Speyer, Germany, and studied at the Mannheim Conservatory and the University of Heidelberg. Haas, who was Jewish, left Germany in 1936 with the rise of Nazism. He first settled in Detroit, Michigan, but lived in other places before returning to Detroit near the end of his life. He studied piano with Artur Schnabel.
Haas started Adventures in Good Music at WJR in Detroit, Michigan in 1959. Syndicated broadcasts of the show across the United States began in 1970 at WCLV, a Cleveland, Ohio radio station. The story goes that the station people wanted him to call it something like “Adventures in Classical Music”, which he rejected as being too narrow, or “Adventures in Music”, which he rejected as being too broad. He chose the title as being in line with his philosophy that there are really only two kinds of music: good and bad. His knowledge of every facet of music was encyclopedic. The theme music for his show was the slow movement from Beethoven's “Pathétique” Sonata (Sonata No 8 in C minor) as played by himself.
Haas received the Charles Frankel Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1991. The award was presented to Haas by President George H. W. Bush at the White House. Haas also twice won the George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. In 1997 he became the first (and so far the only) classical music broadcaster to be named to the Radio Hall of Fame.
Haas did not produce any new shows in the last two years of his life. Recordings of his previous work are still broadcast.
