Biography (read more)
Monique Haas was born in Paris on 20 October 1909. She studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Joseph Morpain and Lazare Lévy, taking a Premier Prix in 1927, and afterwards worked with Rudolf Serkin and Robert Casadesus. She married the French-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici.
Her career was built on the music of her own century as much as on the French tradition she came from. She played Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto shortly after its premiere and was a persistent advocate of Paul Hindemith, taking part in sessions the composer himself conducted. Her repertoire also reached back to Couperin and Rameau, which she treated as continuous with Debussy and Ravel rather than separate from them.
She recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and Erato. Among her recordings are both Ravel piano concertos with the Orchestre national de l’ORTF under Paul Paray — she set down the G major concerto twice, in 1948 and again in 1965 — and Debussy’s then-neglected Douze Études, which won a Grand Prix du Disque. She died on 9 June 1987.
Haas is remembered above all as an interpreter of Ravel; Henri Dutilleux described her in those terms, and her recordings of the two concertos remain the centre of her discography. Francis Poulenc’s remark that she played ravishingly points to the quality contemporaries valued in her, a warmth of tone joined to precision.
Her manner was in fact a deliberate break with what came before her. She rejected the brittle, dry style associated with an earlier generation of French pianists, and presented twentieth-century French music as connected to the classical tradition rather than opposed to it. That reading of the repertoire has largely become the standard one.
Her recording of Debussy’s Douze Études, made when the set was still neglected, did a good deal to establish it in the repertoire, and her early championship of Bartók and Hindemith placed her among the French pianists most committed to contemporary music of her time.
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