Alois Hába

condition (records/box): NM / EX  Insert included.

The problem Alois Hába (1893-1973) set himself in the 1920s was not merely technical. It was philosophical. Conventional chromatic harmony, he argued, had exhausted its expressive resources - not because composers had failed to use it well, but because it was structurally incapable of conveying certain registers of experience. The answer, he proposed, was to divide the octave further. Quarter-tones - intervals half the size of a semitone - offered a system whose harmonic logic he codified in his monumental New Harmony-Textbook (1927), and which he argued was prefigured in the microtonal inflections of his native Moravian folk music. He had special quarter-tone pianos, clarinets, and trumpets constructed. He founded a department of quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory. And in 1927-28 he composed Matka (The Mother), a full-scale opera in ten scenes - the first, and still among the very few, operas written entirely in the quarter-tone system.

The libretto is Hába's own, drawn from the peasant world of his native Valašsko in the eastern Czech highlands. The plot is deliberately plain: a mother, her family, the arc of ordinary life. The austerity is deliberate. Hába's aesthetic concept of "athematicism" - the avoidance of repetition and variation of memorable themes, replaced by a continuous, non-repeating melodic flow - meant that the quarter-tone inflections of the singers and instruments could not rely on recognizable material to carry the emotional weight. Everything had to work in the moment, through texture and intonation alone. The Prague premiere in 1931 established Hába internationally as the most consequential microtonal composer of his generation. The Nazis banned his work in 1939. The communists labeled him a formalist and sent him into retirement in 1953. He described his retirement as the beginning of real creative freedom.

Recorded in 1964 at Prague's Domovina Studio with the Prague National Theatre Chorus and Orchestra under conductor Jiří Jirouš; quarter-tone piano by Jiří Pokorný. Issued by Supraphon in a two-LP box with full libretto and notes in Czech, English, French, and German. One of the essential documents in the history of 20th-century opera.