His opera “Thomas,” which premiered in May 2013, encapsulates that feeling of suffocation. Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, the work focuses on the title character, whose boyfriend, Matthias, has just died in a hospital. Thomas grieves but must interact with the businesslike functionaries of death. The instrumental music is often skeletal, with an ensemble consisting almost entirely of plucked instruments, their quick decays a reminder of transience. The opera expresses an existential loneliness eased only by the gentle shimmer of its microtonal harmonies.
Once Haas began teaching at Columbia, his life changed rapidly. He met Mollena Williams, a writer, performer and alternative lifestyle activist, on OkCupid. Haas had long wanted a partner who shared his interest in B.D.S.M. and dominant-submissive dynamics. After decades of suppressing that desire, he found someone in New York who shared it. They married in 2015, and she now goes by Mollena Williams-Haas. The couple has collaborated on works such as “Hyena,” for which Williams-Haas wrote and performed a text about alcohol withdrawal, accompanied by Haas’s music.
Since his move to New York, Haas, whom I remembered as a shy teacher, has been blunt about his past. Shortly after their wedding, he and Williams-Haas spoke with The New York Times about their relationship, describing how their shared kink encouraged their creativity. Later that year, Haas told Die Zeit that he was raised by a family that remained ideologically close to Nazis after the end of World War II.
“The monsters,” Haas told the newspaper, “they were my parents and grandparents.”
“The Artist and the Pervert,” an intimate documentary about Haas and Williams-Haas, premiered in 2018. When the composer moved to the United States, “There was the thought, ‘I’m in New York now and New York is big, New York is anonymous, I could do what I want and no one will notice,’” he said. “That concept didn’t quite work.”
Klartag, my classmate, followed Haas to Columbia from Basel to pursue his doctorate in composition, and found his teacher transformed. “He was very shy and introverted, at least with the students, in Basel,” Klartag said. “In New York, he really opened up, was very outgoing, outspoken.”
In 2022, Haas published a German-language memoir that goes into greater detail about his past, “Durch vergiftete Zeiten: Memoiren eines Nazibuben” (“Through Poisoned Times: Memoirs of a Nazi Boy”). His grandfather, the architect Fritz Haas, joined the Nazi Party in 1934, when the organization was still illegal in Austria. Haas’s father attempted to raise young Georg in the same ideology. While he was studying in Graz, from 1972 to 1979, Haas realized that Nazi sympathies remained among some Austrian composers. He described physical abuse at the hands of his family and sexual abuse at the hands of his schoolmates.
