Robert Haas (musicologist)

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Robert Maria Haas (August 15, 1886 - October 4, 1960) Austrian musicologist.

At the beginning of his career with the Austrian national library, Haas was mostly interested in Baroque and Classical music. Later on, he was engaged by the newly-formed International Bruckner Society to work on a complete edition of Anton Bruckner's Symphonies and Masses based on the original manuscripts bequeathed by the composer to the Vienna library.

1 Bruckner Editions
2 Other Work
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Bruckner Editions

Between 1935 and 1944 Haas published editions of Bruckner's First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth symphonies. (A scholarly edition of Bruckner's Ninth symphony had already been produced in 1932 by Alfred Orel, and Haas's work on the Third symphony was destroyed during the war).

Haas's editions of Bruckner are controversial, for two reasons. The first is that Haas saw his task as going well beyond merely reproducing the manuscripts. Bruckner usually made several revisions of his symphonies, often incorporating suggestions by his pupils and friends such as Ferdinand Loewe and Franz Schalk. Haas tried to purge what he saw as the corrupting influence of Bruckner's friends from the music. However, this inevitably required Haas himself to make subjective judgements. For example, the Eighth Symphony existed in three versions: Bruckner's original manuscript of 1887, a revised manuscript of 1890 which incorporated suggestions from Schalk, Arthur Nikisch and others, and the first published edition of 1892 which went even further in the direction of the changes suggested by Bruckner's friends. It is widely agreed that the 1890 manuscript represents an improvement over the 1887 version, yet it also omits some passages from the earlier document. Haas decided to make a composite edition based on the 1890 manuscript but adding in some passages from the 1887 version that he thought it a shame to lose. In doing so, Haas produced a text of the symphony that did not correspond to anything ever written or approved by Bruckner. Similar problems occur (to a lesser extent) in Haas's editions of the Second, Fourth and Seventh Symphonies.

Another source of controversy is Haas's attachment to the Nazi party. Haas was an enthusiastic Nazi and did not hesitate to use the language of Naziism to garner approval for his work. He portrayed Bruckner as being a pure and simple country soul who had been corrupted by "cosmopolitan" and Jewish forces. This proved Haas's undoing, as after World War II he was removed from the Bruckner project and replaced by the more scholarly, if less inventive, Leopold Nowak who went on to produce new editions of all Bruckner's symphonies.

The great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler criticized what he called Haas's "violation myth" in his private notebooks:

Only unproductive minds can seriously believe that a great productive artist [i.e. Bruckner] can be 'put under pressure' for the duration of a depression. ... The falsification that is done here to the character of Bruckner - Bruckner as a fool - is much greater than [that done] by the essays [attempts?] of the first scholars, Loewe and Schalk [1]

On the other hand noted Bruckner conductor Georg Tintner has described Haas as "brilliant" and calls Haas's edition of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony "the best" of all available versions.^[2] It should be noted that many conductors, including Herbert von Karajan, Bernard Haitink and Günter Wand continued to prefer Haas's editions, even after the more scholarly Nowak editions became available.

[edit] Other Work

Haas also edited some of the music of Hugo Wolf, Claudio Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, Christoph Willibald von Gluck's Don Juan, and other Baroque music. He also wrote about the Wiener Singspiel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.