He has an audience of 20 million, more medals than a banana republic general, and enough honorary doctorates to cover half the walls in his New York City apartment.
All this he has accrued by performing a task so basic to culture in America–and elsewhere–it`s a wonder more people aren`t doing it.
Simply put, Karl Haas explains to the masses the mysteries of an exotic and sometimes forbidding world: classical music. He does this in a chummy, plain-talking way that sometimes shocks the longhairs and usually delights just about everyone else.
And after nearly 30 years of gabbing about the classics via radio, TV and concert appearances, Haas has emerged as the world`s leading point man for serious music.
”A farmer once said to me, `I listen to you every day with a transistor radio that I keep mounted on my tractor,` ” recalls Haas, whose ”Adventures in Good Music” radio program is heard in Chicago from 7-8 p.m. Monday through Friday on WNIB (FM 97.1).
” `Sometimes I don`t understand a damn thing you`re talking about,` he continued, `but I always like the way you say it.` Now that`s what I call a compliment!”
Indeed, Haas could probably charm Alice Cooper into listening to a discourse on the late Beethoven quartets. With his sing-song voice, lilting German accent and frequently fractured English, Haas would be entertaining even if he never played a note of music.
But music, after all, is what Haas is all about, so between the expansive soliloquies of his radio show, he plays musical snippets either at the piano or via recording. The programs bear such ingratiating titles as ”Frills and Trills” (on the art of ornamentation), ”Air Lift” (on ”music designed to exhilarate listeners”) and ”Love`s Labors Not Lost” (featuring works
”inspired by composers` infatuations”).
It`s not exactly the highbrow approach, and Haas has taken plenty of flak for that.
”Oh yes, I get critical mail all the time,” he says jovially, referring to only a fraction of the 1,000 letters he receives each month from around the world. ”The purists don`t like it, for instance, that I only play excerpts of works instead of whole compositions.
”Well if they want to hear a whole work, they can buy the record.
”There`s plenty of wall-to-wall music all over radio today, but I`m afraid it doesn`t accomplish anything because most of the time Beethoven is relegated to background music.”
So Haas has devoted his broadcast career to breaking up the music with reams of words. He also spreads the gospel through specials on cable TV`s Arts & Entertainment channel and his book ”Inside Music,” now in its fourth printing from Doubleday. His efforts have won him France`s ”Chevalier de l`ordre des arts et lettres,” the First Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, a Peabody broadcasting award, and honorary doctorates from more universities than he can remember, among them the University of Detroit.
Because ”Adventures” is broadcast worldwide by the U.S. Armed Forces network (as well as by Australian Broadcasting Corporation and radio stations throughout Germany and France, which pick up Haas` foreign-language versions of the show) his message reaches corners of the world in which classical music normally wouldn`t have a prayer.
”One of the most moving letters I`ve ever received came during the Vietnam War,” recalls Haas, 59. ”It was in response to a program I had done called `Mystery Composer Quiz,` in which the listener was to guess the identity of the composer through various hints I provided.
”The letter arrived in a filthy envelope; I don`t know how the post office even deciphered it. I opened it, and there was an equally filthy scrap of paper inside it, and on it was scribbled:
” `There`s a hell of a mystery as to why I should be in this filthy foxhole here in Vietnam, but there was no mystery to your composer today. I got it right away.`
”This was from a young soldier operating a radio in a foxhole in Vietnam, and that letter shook me up.”
Thus has Haas brought his beloved classical music into listeners` lives, his passion for the subject eloquently communicated to those fortunate enough to hear him. In addition to the radio program, which he tapes at his home and syndicates through WCLV radio in Cleveland, Haas perpetually works the piano recital/guest conducting circuit.
And, yes, he chats during his recitals and orchestral engagements as much as he does on the radio.
”The beauty of talking,” says Haas, who has never performed a recital in Chicago, ”is that you not only break the ice, but you can tell the listeners something you feel intensely about a piece of music that they simply would not know about otherwise.
”I don`t like it when artists go on stage, for instance, and refuse to even announce the title of their encores. It`s unconscionable!
”I don`t like it when everybody on stage sits there in tails, and everyone in the audience sits quietly in their chairs, and if somebody in the audience coughs the conductor glowers.
”I just don`t think that`s what music is all about.”
Haas speaks from experience, having taken a Ph.D. in music literature from the University of Heidelberg. In 1936, he fled Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany to come to the United States, eventually studying piano with the great Artur Schnabel in New York from 1945 to 1959.
What did Haas learn from Schnabel, widely acknowledged as the greatest Beethoven pianist of his generation?
”Simply the entire gamut of humanity,” says Haas. ”I would ring him in the morning, we would talk German, and we would walk around Central Park for an hour-and-a-half, two hours, talking about everything but music.
”Then we went upstairs to the studio. When I sat at the piano, he would not listen to exercises. He himself called the lessons `consultations,` not lessons. In other words, it was a matter of discussing interpretations. He was a brilliant mentor.”
By the late `50s, Haas was playing piano recitals broadcast throughout Canada by the CBC radio network, which asked him to double up as his own emcee. He was so smitten with the music/talk format that when WJR radio in Detroit invited him to ”come aboard and do whatever I liked” in 1959,
”Adventures in Good Music” was born.
Today, Haas cannot imagine a time when he won`t be doing the show; in fact, he hopes to expand his scope with a classics videotape series for kids. ”I`m knee-deep in trying to get funding for it,” says Haas. ”When you think about kids age 8 to 11, you`re talking about parents who are in their late 20s and early 30s. And I`m afraid there is no classical music in these homes, and there is little in school. It is sadly a fact that almost 50 percent of our public schools no longer have any music.
”So who is going to go to the Chicago Symphony 25 years hence? This is what concerns me.
”I`m not saying that we need to convert kids. I don`t care what they do when they grow up, but I think they have a birthright to know that this kind of music exists, and I am going to make sure they do.”
