Centenaries are ten a penny, but here’s one you might not know about: 1919 saw the premiere in Breslau of Hans Gál’s first opera, Der Arzt der Sobeide (“Sobeide’s doctor”). Why does this matter, and who in any case was Gál? We begin with a story.
In Edinburgh, in the early 1940s, there was a young student midwife who was also a decent amateur violinist. As musical networks have ways of connecting people, she was invited to play quartets at the house of an Austrian exile. This was Hans Gál: a distinguished composer and scholar who in 1938 had been obliged to flee his country on the familiar absurdist grounds of his Jewish origin.
