Alois Hába was born in the small town of
Vizovice in
Moravian Wallachia, into a family of 10 children. When he was five years old it was discovered that he had
absolute pitch. He and his family often played and sang their native Wallachian folk songs, actively participated in church singing and folk-music performances. 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 teachers' 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. After finishing his studies, he got a job as teacher in Bílovice, a small town near the
Hungarian (now
Slovak) border. Simultaneously, he continued his own musical studies and in 1913 wrote his first compositions, displaying an unwillingness to "follow the rules", which he maintained all his life. Hába was dissatisfied by small-town life, and in 1914, he moved to Prague and became a pupil of
neoromantic composer
Vítězslav Novák. Here he was interested in analysing the works of
Claude Debussy,
Max Reger,
Alexander Scriabin, and
Richard Strauss, and in
harmonization of
Moravian folk music.
Vienna During
World War I, he served in the
Austrian Army on the Russian and Italian front from 1915 until early 1918, when he was moved to
Vienna, where he worked in the music department of the
Austrian-Hungarian Ministry of War. There he almost immediately became a student of
Franz Schreker, who brought out his more radical tendencies. 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. Remaining in Vienna after the war, Hába attended the concerts produced by
Arnold Schönberg's
Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, and became particularly influenced by the "athematic" style used by Schönberg in his
Erwartung. First publications of his compositions included the String Quartet No. 2, his first major quarter-tone work which was composed in 1920. At that time, his lifelong friendship with
Hanns Eisler – with whom he shared political beliefs (Hába became an ardent communist at this time) as well as musical opinions – began.
Berlin Hába found his first success as a composer in Berlin, where he followed his teacher Schreker in late 1920. He published his first theoretical treatise (in Czech), the small booklet
Harmonické základy čtvrttónové soustavy (Harmonic Essentials of the Quarter-tone System). In 1923, he met
Ferruccio Busoni, who had advocated the sixth-tone system and encouraged Hába to continue his work in microtonality. The same year, Hába began to attempt the establishment of a school of microtonal music, but as the Nazis started to gain power in Germany, he came under attack and was driven out of Berlin. He returned to Prague and managed to get a job teaching workshops at the
Prague Conservatory.
Prague ) ) In all three operas, Hába expressed his bold
socialist viewpoint, that caused controversies already at the time. For instance, the production of Nová Země (the plot of which deals with the
Holodomor in Ukraine and how the Holodomor in a Ukrainian village is defeated by
socialisation of production) and founding the
kolkhoz Nová Země (The New Earth) by
National Theatre in Prague in 1936 had to be cancelled by intervention from the Ministry of Culture as
communist and
pro-soviet propaganda. 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. It was also the early 1930s that saw the writing of what is probably Hába's most important orchestral work, the symphonic fantasy
Cesta života (The Path of Life). The 1930s also shaped Hába's political stance and philosophy of life. His strong sense of social commitment found an intellectual basis in the
anthroposophical teachings of
Rudolf Steiner. In 1939 the German
Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia and banned performance of Hába's work. 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. After
World War II, he resumed teaching and held several administrative positions. 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. In 1953 he was sent into retirement, but in his own words it was only at that point that he achieved real creative freedom. In 1957 he was named an honorary member of the ISCM. 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. This work was premiered in the same year at the ISCM festival in Prague, performing by Novák Quartet. Hába was a prolific composer and continued to compose almost to the end of his life. He taught and influenced many musicians. Besides followers in his own country, Hába attracted students from South
Slavic countries (
Slovenia,
Serbia,
Bulgaria),
Lithuania,
Turkey, and elsewhere. The Prague Conservatory in general enjoyed an international reputation, and a great deal of credit for that goes to the contacts and pioneering efforts of Alois Hába. Despite these facts, he died in relative obscurity in Prague in 1973. == Concept ==