• Haydn (1732-1809): String Quartet in B minor, Op.64 No.2
• Schumann (1810-1856): String Quartet in A major, Op.41 No.3
• Pavel Haas (1899-1944): "From the Monkey Mountains" Op. 7 (1925)  (original version for String Quartet and Percussion)
  
  A most original, imaginative and carefree work by the Czech composer Pavel Haas, who was a pupil of Janácek, and whose life ended in tragedy, with detention in the Terezin camp and death in Auschwitz.
  
  

Pavel Haas (1899-1944) was born in Brünn, the capital of Moravia, then under the Austrian Empire, today in the Czech Republic and called Brno.  His father, a business man, was a Czech Jew, his mother was Russian.  He started to learn the piano at an early age, and at thirteen he started to write his own compositions.  In 1917 however he was called up to serve in the Austrian army, and he did not start to study at the Conservatoire until 1919: one of his teachers was Janácek.

While working as a private music teacher, he composed works in many musical genres: songs, orchestral works, string quartets, piano music, incidental scores for the stage and even music for 3 films.  Although he was profoundly influenced by Janácek, with whom he shared a great interest in Moravian folksongs, he was also influenced by Jewish chant, by jazz and by Stravinsky.  He soon found his own individual voice: his music is highly expressive, and shows a very original melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention.  Between 1935-37 he devoted most of his time to composing the tragicomic opera Šarlatán (‘The Charlatan’), for which he wrote his own libretto and which was first performed in Brno in April 1938 with a resounding success.  There followed more chamber music, and between August 1940 and November 1941 he was working on a symphony, the composition of which was brutally interrupted by his deportation to Terezin.

Terezin was originally a fortress built by the Habsburg monarchs during the 18th century; it subsequently incorporated a prison for the enemies of the Austrian Empire.  In 1941 the Nazis converted it to a ghetto for Jews, mainly musicians, writers, artists and leaders, who were taken there ostensibly to be protected from the horrors of the war (the word used was not deportation but a euphemistic "re-urbanization").  Terezin in fact was not an "extermination" camp as such, although for the majority of its inmates it was a stopping place on the way to Auschwitz.  But of the possibly 150,000 men, women and children who were taken to Terezin, many thousands actually died there of malnutrition, exposure or ill treatment.

The musicians in the ghetto were very numerous: they formed orchestras and chamber groups, and composers created new works for them to perform.  These included staged works for children performed by children, which had the dual scope of educating and amusing them.

Once in the ghetto Haas continued to write music, including the Study for String Orchestra and Four Songs on Chinese Poems, which today are probably his most performed works.  Other works written in Terezin have however been lost.

Haas was in the very last convoy to leave Terezin for Auschwitz, where he was sent to the gas chamber on 17 October 1944, a few months after his 45th birthday.