Karel Husa: Skladatel mezi Evropou a Amerikou by Jiří Vysloužil (review)

A summary of significant dates and places in Karel Husa’s life suggests a successful career as a composer. Born in Prague in 1921, he studied at the Prague Conservatory from 1941. Then on to Paris in 1946, where he lived for eight years, a pupil of Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, and André Cluytens (for conducting). An offer of a job at Cornell took him to America in 1954, where his career continued to flourish as a well-regarded American university composer and conductor. He retired with full honours in 1992. Those with a knowledge of Czech political history, however, will note the significance of these dates. On 17 November 1939 Czech universities were closed by the Nazis, thwarting Husa’s original plan to study civil engineering. The Prague Conservatory was not a university-level institution and thus not closed, and Husa, who had shown some interest in music, registered there to avoid being drafted as a labourer in German factories. When the war ended he moved to the newly created university-level Prague Academy of Performing Arts with his teacher, Jaroslav Řídký. By the time of the Czech Communist putsch in 1948 he had been in Paris for a couple of years, following a well-trodden path for Czech composers such as Martinů and Kaprálová. Was he instructed by the Czech authorities to return? This question is not answered at first, but towards the end of the book Vysloužil writes: ‘When after the Communist putsch in February 1948 he was not allowed further study abroad by the Czechoslovak authorities, he decided to remain in Paris’ (p. 154). The fact that he was listed as a Czech composer at the Brussels ISCM festival in 1950 caused official disfavour (p. 36) and Husa was thereafter regarded by the authorities as a renegade exile, not permitted, for instance, to attend the funerals of his parents. It was only forty years later with the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 that Husa was able to return to his homeland—not permanently but to accept the honours that Czech institutions began to bestow on him.

Now 91, Husa is (at the time of writing) still alive, as is the author, Jiří Vysloužil, publishing this substantial book at the age of 87. Ironies pile up as one contemplates the combination of these elderly gentlemen. In 1948 Vysloužil was an ambitious young Communist apparatchik who would have had no option but to go along with the banning of a promising Czech composer living abroad. The author of many other works including a definitive biography of Hába, Vysloužil is one of the great survivors in Czech musicology. While no doubt a thorn in the flesh of the older musical professoriat (he became effectively head of department by the 1960s), he used his strong political standing to maintain a fine department of musicology in Brno, which, especially after the failed Prague Spring, increasingly served as a safe haven in a politically uncertain world. A politically compromised member of his staff was not dismissed but simply taken off teaching duties, devoting his time instead to an immensely useful dictionary of Czech musical culture. The annual Brno colloquia became one of the chief meeting places for East and West German musicologists. It seems somehow fitting in what might well be his last musicological act that Jiří Vysloužil should write the first Czech monograph on Karel Husa and welcome him within the pantheon of Czech composers: ‘With the return of Karel Husa to Bohemia, with the return of his musical works, a new living chapter began to be written in Czech music from which he had been unjustly excluded before’ (p. 152).

New Grove II (2001) characterizes Husa as an ‘American composer and conductor of Czech birth’ and provides purely American literature on Husa. Czech interest in the composer briefly flickered after the Prague Spring...