Michael Haas, Recording Producer, Historian, Academic and Exhibition Curator
Michael Haas was born Benjamin Michael Haas in Charlotte North Carolina on October 23, 1954 to the novelist Ben Haas and costume designer Douglas Haas-Bennett (née Taylor).
He spent his early childhood in Raleight North Carolina and Vienna Austria. When in North Carolina, he spent nearly every summer at one of the summer music courses offered at Chapel Hill and Duke University. In 1972 he entered Vienna’s Music Academy (now Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts, shortened to “mdw”) to study composition and from 1974 entered Vienna’s Conservatory to study piano performance. From 1973, he worked as a student “studio gopher” for the Decca Record Company whenever they were in town recording the Vienna Philharmonic and in 1977, he accepted a full-time position with Decca/London as a trainee producer. The first CD he produced was Radu Lupu recording Schubert Sonatas released in 1982. Over the next years he went on to produce recordings with nearly all of Decca/London’s house artists winning four Grammys for recordings with (variously) Sir Georg Solti, Jessye Norman and Placido Domingo.
In 1993 he moved briefly to Sony Classical and in 1993/94 he was made Vice President of Classical in New York. During his period at Sony, he produced recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado.
He returned to Decca/London in 1995 and continued to work with the conductors Riccardo Chailly, Christoph von Dohnányi and the singers Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Cecilia Bartoli, Ute Lemper, Matthias Goerne and many others. A full list of Haas recordings can be found here.
In December 1999, the London Evening Standard listed Michael Haas as one of London’s 300 movers and shakers of the millennium. The reasons they gave were his support for the signings of András Schiff to Decca, his Solti productions and latterly, his signings of Ute Lemper and Matthias Goerne, the re-discovery and recording of operas by Berthold Goldschmidt along with Haas’s initiation and production of the recording series “Entartete Musik” the first retrospective of major works lost during the Nazi years. The first recording in the series was Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau and Symphony in B-Flat from the mid-1980s with Riccardo Chailly and Berlin’s DSO. From 1990, there followed a further thirty recordings of large-scale operas, symphonies, oratorios, operetta, chamber music and cabaret conducted by John Mauceri and Lothar Zagrosek and using orchestras in Vienna, Berlin and Leipzig. The series came to an end in 2000, but was singled out over the preceding decade by every major recording award.
From 2000, Haas went freelance and was made director of the Jewish Music Institute’s “Suppressed Music Forum”. In 2002, he was appointed as Music Curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum where he mounted and curated exhibitions on a number of Viennese composers who were persecuted by the “III Reich”, including Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz, Erich Zeisl, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Toch as well as providing historic and logistic assistance for exhibitions on Lorenzo da Ponte, the International Gustav Mahler Society and a major exhibition titled Quasi una Fantasia – Jews and the Music Metropolis Vienna.
In 2010, he left the Museum but continued to work as a freelance producer, making recordings with Semyon Bychkov (Elektra and Daphne with Renée Fleming), as well as working as a consultant for Vienna’s Municiple Library’s Music Collection. In 2006, mdw theory professor Dr Gerold Gruber invited Haas to join him as co-chair of the exil.arte Society, an organisation Gruber had founded in order to re-establish Austria’s musical legacy lost during the Nazi years.
Haas came to the view following his work with Vienna’s Municiple Library that there were no archives in Vienna with the personnel or structures to absorb, preserve and disseminate the still “orphaned” musical estates strewn across the globe. He and Gerold Gruber put together a plan to convert the exil.arte Society into a research center and dedicated archive. Gruber put the plan to the mdw president Ulrike Sych who replied, “If there is to be an archive for musicians who were driven out of their homelands, persecuted or murdered by the Nazis, then sadly, it needs to be in Austria. And if it’s in Austria, then it needs to be in Vienna and if it’s in Vienna, it needs to be at our institution where so many of them studied.”
In 2016, two floors of the historic building of the former Music Academy in its 1913 wing of the Konzerthaus were handed over with its storage unit converted into a state of the art vault for valuable manuscripts. The Exilarte Research Center and Archive (its name now officially changed from exil.arte to Exilarte) was officially opened in 2017 with an exhbition called “When I Compose, I’m Back in Vienna” featuring the students and faculty of the Music Academy who were Nazi victims after Austria’s annexation in March 1938. Just prior to its opening Barry Humphries made a Sky Arts Documentary featuring Haas and the Exilarte Center.
It was agreed by Haas and Gruber that the center would not be exclusive to Austrian musicians and composers but take in all genres from all countries that fell under Hitler’s control after 1933. Nor would any evaluation be placed on the significance or the perception of “importance” of the individual. It has meant many of the musicans who would have been forgotten such as teachers or composers of popular music have found their way into the Exilarte Archive. There are now musical estates from Yugoslavia, Poland, the Czech Republic and France as well as from Austria and Germany. The estates have come from as far away as Lima Peru, to Wellington New Zealand to Shanghai and of course many from the UK, Canada and the United States. It was also decided to take material from anyone who was active in the music industry, leading to the daughter of the music publisher Hans W. Heinsheimer sending a copy of her father’s history of the Publishing House Universal Edition (UE), latterly published as part of their centenary. Estates have been included of performers, conductors and singers, making the Exilarte Center the first archive and research center dedicated exclusively to Hitler’s many varied musical victims.
Haas has published two books. 2013: Forbidden Music – the Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, (Yale University press 2013) and Music of Exile (Yale University press 2024). Following publication of Forbidden Music, Prof. David Cesarani put Haas forward for a PhD which Haas completed at London’s Middelsex University in 2016. In his disseration, Haas places Music as a cultural good in need of restitution: a restitution to audiences who had cultural goods stolen and a restitution to composers who lost audiences. This removal of music and audiences resulted for various reason in a cultural vaccum exending several decades. Haas had previously been Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Hebrew and Jewish Studies Faculty as well as being a Research Fellow at Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Centre.
He has contributed to many anthologies and essay collections on music and exile as well as to the Cambridge University Handbook series on Conducting and Recording. He was also editor and advisor on the accompanying catalogues for the music exhibitions mounted at Vienna’s Jewish Museum from 2002-2010.
Haas lives in England with his husband Kevin Bell and keeps a flat in Vienna’s Ninth District, next to the historic “Strudlhof Steps” – made famous by the novel of the same name by Heimito von Doderer. He is bilingual in German and English, but also speaks Italian, Spanish, French and rather basic Russian.
Over the years Haas has believed that the classical repertoire was far broader than its present narrow canon. From his earliest days of working with Berthold Goldschmidt, a composer who taught Haas a good deal, he has focused on many composers who for various reasons have been sidelined. Since working at the Exilarte Center he has been instrumental in the re-discovery of a number of composers forgotten of wilfully suppressed such as Walter Arlen or Hans Winterberg. Haas and the Exilarte Center have been able to establish publishing relationships with Schirmer Music and Bossey & Hawkes for many of the composers held by Exilarte.
Haas is an Austrian and British citizen and can be contacted via email either at michaelhaas@coralfox.com or haas-m@mdw.ac.at. His Facebook page is Benjamin Michael Haas.
