Haas's Charlatan and the Play of Premonitions

Abstract

In the late 1930s the Czech Jewish composer Pavel Haas, a student of Leoš Janáček, had a hit on his hands with an opera titled The Charlatan. Set in seventeenth-century Germany, it tells the story of the traveling quack Dr. Pustrpalk and his roving band of brawlers and thieves. The composer described the opera's creation: “In 1934, I was captivated by a subject that came to me. It dealt with the wandering life of a doctor-charlatan of the seventeenth century. I wrote the libretto myself and by 1937 the score of the opera was finished. The vibrant subject of the plot and also the inviting milieu in which the events take place intrigued me such that I went to work with joy and relish.”2 The protagonist of the opera is based on the character of one Dr. Eisenbart, an infamous medical faker who was the subject of a 1929 novel by Josef Winckler. Haas, of course, had to disguise his collaboration (a word soon to take on other associations) with Winckler, since the Nuremberg Laws forbade such associations; thus Eisenbart became “Pustrpalk,” a minor character from Czech medieval theater.3 While the opera was successfully premiered in Brno in 1938, the Munich Agreement and subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia made further productions impossible, and it was not performed again until 1998.

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