125TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF JOSIP HATZE

Josip Hatze The Croatian composer and conductor Josip Hatze was born in Split on March 21, 1879. After his studies in Pesaro with the well-known Italian operatic composer Pietro Mascagni, Hatze started his music career as choir director of the choral association Zvonimir in Split. He found himself on the Albanian front in the Fist World War, and since 1919 he was back in Split where he took over as choir leader of the choral association Guslar (Fiddler). In the Second World War he was leading the mixed singing choir of the Yugoslav refugee camp in El Shatt with whom he had had numerous performances. After the year 1945 he came back to Split where he died on January 30, 1959. Josip Hatze belongs to the generation of artists – musicians, painters, writers – who have constituted the Croatian Modernism with their work (the period between approximately 1890 to 1918). In the plurality of styles of that time, Hatze participated in harmony with his personal artistic temperament and natural talent, without making a radical break with tradition, but making it richer by introducing new themes and nuances of expression. His greatest contemporaries in Croatian music creative endeavour, Blagoje Bersa and Dora Pejačević, each of them cultivating the so far neglected music varieties (primarily the ones of the classic-romantic tradition like symphonies, concertos, chamber pieces) and striving to investigate new possibilities on the field of the orchestral symphonic poem (Bersa), piano miniatures and solo songs. Hatze’s position in this context is a specific one: as a typical Mediterranean he was pronouncedly sweet-sounding in expression, so the emphasis of his creative work lay in the field of vocal pieces where he reached highest achievements in the solo song, choral music, cantata and opera. It was expressly on the field of the opera that Hatze recognized some of the contemporary aspirations in the music-and-stage art, achieving in his opera Povratak (Return) the Croatian variant of the then current verismo. The opera was based on the drama written by Srđan Tucić and first performed in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1911. In his second operatic work, the lyrical opera Adel i Mara (Adel and Mara) (1932), Hatze was inspired by the romantic epic written by Luka Botić. On the stage he revived the tragic division of the Christian and Islamic world in these parts. Hatze was most prolific in the first decades of the 20th century, when most of his 55 solo songs were written: the collections Romance i melodije (Romances and melodies), 1900, Proljetni lahori (Spring Breezes), 1903, Novo cvijeće (New Flowers), 1907, and numerous single editions published between 1020 and 1921. There were also the cantatas Noć na Uni (Night on the Una River), 1902, Exodus, 1912, Golemi Pan (Huge Pan) (1917, and Resurrexit, 1920, as well as the opera Povratak (Return). This time of his creative work, when foundations of new Croatian music were being laid, is characterized by a freshness of his musical expression, a luxurious, supple and always inspired melodiousness that helped establish new, high standards of professionalism and artistic sincerity. He was not inclined to experimentation that thoroughly transformed musical creative endeavour. But he had excellent knowledge of the situation in contemporary music, and he formulated his theoretical expertise in a number of works from the area of musical instrumentation, counterpoint, the fugue, and others. At the time of its creation, Hatze’s music represented a veritable breath of fresh air in Croatian music, remaining permanently popular in the best sense of the word. Its technical excellence never overshadowed the genuine inspiration that helps it reach the audiences of out time.