Virile Morawetz Art Survives Nazi Horrors
When Oskar Morawetz was at high school in Prague, he used to study music scores behind his botany and geology books; when he
came to Toronto - via Italy, North Africa, Spain, and the Canary Islands, after war had broken out -
he had scores with him in the one suitcase he was allowed for nearly a year's highly
uncomfortable
travelling. The
Nazis took over his library of 1,000
scores and all
the music he
had written until Munich,
but since then
Mr. Marowetz [sic] has been building his collection again and writing more music. Two of his compositions
have won prizes from the
Composers, Authors and Publishers
Association of Canada - the latest, this year, went to his Sonata Tragica, which
he will play himself over the air Sunday evening - and, at 29, Oskar Morawetz is one of
Canada's rising composers.
He wrote the Sonata Tragica last summer. It is, he says, "an expression of extreme sadness about the fate of so many innocent people
who disappeared without trace, and make my past seem like one big cemetary." All of his relations, and a
large number of his friends, in Czechoslovakia were lost in a holocaust of shootings, hangings,
tortures and gas-chamber deaths.
Mr. Morawetz, who is brown-eyed, brown-haired, and a vivid conversationalist, is happy
about two things just now: One, that he lives in Canada; the other, that he is at last able to give his whole time to music. He feels that a
lot of his time has been wasted.
For instance, though he began to play the piano when he was six, the local teachers of Southwest Bohemia
were so bad that his music progress for the next three years was slow, and it wasn't until hi parents - Mr. and Mrs. R. Morawetz, who now live at 17 Dewbourne Ave. - moved to Prague that things
got rolling. The young Oskar became a private pupil of the director of the State Conservatory, and
he went to many of the operas and great concerts which made Prague's musical
life of those prewar days so brilliant.
But school work kept holding up his music. At high school there was so much homework that he only had half an hour a day for music and, as he liked sight-reading much better than technical exercises, his piano technique didn't develop so quickly as it might have. At Prague University he had to study agriculture and forestry.
All the same, Mr. Morawetz couldn't have been quite so backward as he makes out, for George Szell recommended him to the
director of the Czech State Opera in 1938, and if it hadn't been for Munich he'd be a conductor there today. But instead he had to
chase halfway around the world; decided again on the advice of Szell, to concentrate on composition, and won his Bachelor of Music degree in
18 months at the University of Toronto. It was his thesis, a string quartet, which won him his
first prize from CAPAC, then the Canadian Performing Right Society.
