His opera “Thomas,” premiered in May 2013, sums up that feeling of suffocation. Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, the play focuses on the main character, whose boyfriend, Matthias, has just died in a hospital. Thomas is grieving, but must interact with the serious officials of death. Instrumental music is often skeletal, with an ensemble made up almost entirely of plucked instruments, whose rapid declensions are a reminder of transience. The opera expresses an existential loneliness relieved only by the soft glow of its microtonal harmonies.
Once Haas began teaching at Columbia, his life changed quickly. He met Mollena Williams, a writer, performer, and alternative lifestyle activist, on OkCupid. Haas had long been looking for a partner who shared her interest in BDSM and the dominant-submissive dynamic. After decades of repressing that desire, he found someone in New York who shared it. They married in 2015 and she is now called 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 music by Haas.
Since moving to New York, Haas, whom he remembered as a shy professor, has been open about his past. Shortly after their wedding, he and Williams-Haas spoke to The New York Times about their relationship and described how their shared stench encouraged his creativity. Later that year, Haas told Die Zeit who was raised by a family that remained ideologically close to the Nazis after the end of World War II.
“The monsters,” Haas told the newspaper, “were my parents and my grandparents.”
“The Artist and the Pervert,” an intimate documentary about Haas and Williams-Haas, was released in 2018. When the composer moved to the United States, “he thought, 'Now I'm in New York and New York is big. 'New York is anonymous, I can do whatever 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. “In Basel he was very shy and introverted, at least with the students,” says Klartag. “In New York, he really opened up, was very outgoing and outspoken.”
In 2022, Haas published a memoir in German detailing his past, “Durch vergiftete Zeiten: Memoiren eines Nazibuben” (“Through Poisoned Times: Memoirs of a Nazi Child”). His grandfather, architect Fritz Haas, joined the Nazi Party in 1934, when the organization was still illegal in Austria. Haas's father tried to educate young Georg in the same ideology. While studying in Graz from 1972 to 1979, Haas realized that some Austrian composers still harbored Nazi sympathies. He described physical abuse at the hands of his family and sexual abuse at the hands of his schoolmates.
