ABSTRACT
Sarlatan is an opera innovative and even experimental in many ways. As a student of Leos Janacek, Pavel Haas was in a difficult situation: he must have been well aware of the tremendous contribution that Janacek made to modern opera, a contribution that would take almost a century to give proper recognition. Haas took a different path, arguably inspired by Janacek but essentially original. Haas’s first and only opera Sarlatan composed in his mid-thirties to his own libretto, takes a new path: it combines the traditional principles of the opera with the vogue of the musical theatre of the 1930s, namely the early Brechtian musical play. The music of Sarlatan is an original and imaginative blend of classical and choral music, folk music, ballads and singsong. The music itself is an actor in the play, in a metaphorical sense, with sounds from many sources.
