ABSTRACT
Scholars, performers, and audiences continue to be fascinated by the music composed in the Nazi concentration camp/ghetto of Terezín, better known under its German name Theresienstadt. This chapter reviews the methodological and discursive strategies of interpreting music from Theresienstadt, focusing specifically on the case of Pavel Haas. Interpretations of works from Theresienstadt tend to be biased by pre-conceived ideas, such as spiritual resistance, which has, in fact, dominated much of the discourse on music in the Holocaust. Haas was perfectly capable, as his war-time Symphony demonstrates, of writing instrumental music that conveys the sense of patriotism, quasi-religious hope, and subversive satire. The Four Songs are different in essence from Haas’s earlier patriotic works. The literary text set by Haas in Al s’fod and the Four Songs makes it relatively easy to see the relevance of the works to the experiences of the ghetto’s inhabitants.
