Famed classical music scholar and radio educator Dr. Karl Haas has died at age 91. His programs were always informative and fun at the same time. He'll be missed.
[F]or Haas... the greatest joy was sharing his passion for classical music with the dentists, shopkeepers and other everyday folk who made up the audience for "Adventures in Good Music," the music and commentary program he started in Detroit in 1959 on radio station WJR. The program, which still airs daily in reruns on 110 stations in America and Australia, reached millions of listeners and cut across classical music stereotypes.Haas loved to tell the story of a recital and commentary he gave once in Ft. Wayne, Ind.
"One of the members of the audience who came up to greet me after the program was a tall man with a windblown face -- obviously a man of the soil," Haas wrote in a Public Radio newsletter. "As I shook hands with him, he said, 'Dr. Haas, I listen to your program every day on my tractor while I'm plowing fields. I don't always understand what you're talking about, but I sure do like the way you say it. And the music ain't bad either.'
"I've always treasured that meeting because it proved that if audiences weren't quite getting what I had to say, they weren't running away either. I was getting through with the music."
Haas' program cut an idiosyncratic path through the forest of music appreciation, seducing listeners through his humanistic exploration of music and ideas, his irrepressible enthusiasm and gentle humor. His melodious German accent -- he was born in the city of Speyer and settled in Detroit in 1936 after fleeing the Nazis -- carried Old World authority. But he cut against professorial stuffiness by adopting a casual manner: chatty, anecdotal and off-the-cuff.
Haas won prestigious awards, among them two Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence, and was elected to the Radio Hall of Fame. But it was the responses from listeners that most warmed his heart. In 1987 he told the Chicago Tribune that the most moving letter he ever received was from a soldier in Vietnam responding to a mystery composer quiz.
The letter arrived in an envelope so filthy that Haas had no idea how the post office deciphered the address. The soldier wrote, "There's a hell of a mystery as to why I would be in this filthy foxhole here in Vietnam, but there's no mystery to your composer today. I got it right away."
Haas marveled at the power of music and the resiliency of the human spirit: "That letter," he said, "really shook me up."
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