Karel Reiner was born on 27 June 1910 in the small town of Žatec (Bohemia) into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied composition at Prague Conservatoire
with Josef Suk, alongside theory and quarter-tone composition with Alois Haba – a pioneer of new musical trends. Reiner was much sought after to play Haba’s specially built quarter-tone piano and performed his final examination piece (Piano Sonata No. 1) at the Vienna Contemporary Music Festival in 1932. He continued to compose, including music for the influential avant-garde theatre in Prague. Still, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he could not perform or publish any of his music. However, his works were played at many “underground” concerts, and the compositions continued to be written.
From the middle of 1943 to September 1944, Reiner was a prisoner in Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp close to Prague. He was allowed to give concerts, played much contemporary music, and also gave many music lessons, alongside writing theatre music for children and adults. In September 1944, he was sent from Terezín to the Osvětimi death camp and then to Dachau, surviving a deadly typhus epidemic in Dachau. He was the only Jewish composer to survive the atrocities of the Second World War.
Reiner returned to Prague and believed that his music should now communicate and be available to everyone. Between 1950 – 1954 his work slowly changed and evolved, and he successfully combined traditional composition with contemporary musical expression. After the end of the war, Reiner joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and composed a number of political songs, which didn’t meet the
Party’s expectations. Doris Grozdanovičová, a fellow Terezín inmate, remembers:
He met increasing resistance from the authorities: his style was too individualistic, too “formalist,” it didn’t conform with socialist prescriptions… And so he fell into a
kind of isolation that had considerable consequences for his music… I think that the tragedy which explains why Reiner has remained unknown has to do above all with the fact that political developments meant that he couldn’t be played in public any more. His musical language was largely rejected by the authorities and so there were only a very few performances… In the aftermath of the “Prague Spring,” he left the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1970 and had to renounce all his official positions and performances of his music were banned.
Karel Reiner was a prolific composer, was liked by the musicians he worked with and wrote in almost every genre, and his music is certainly worthy of revival in the 21st- century. He died in Prague on 17 February 1979.