NEW YORK — An article in the Music section of the NYTimes.com titled “A Composer and His Wife: Creativity Through Kink” profiles Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas and how his dominant-submissive power dynamic with his wife, sex educator Mollena Williams-Haas, positively influences his work.
Williams-Haas was among the speakers of January’s Sexual Health Expo in Los Angeles, where she hosted the workshop “Knowing Yourself, Knowing Your Kink.” She is an acclaimed writer, actress, BDSM educator, and storyteller. Her books include “The Toybag Guide: Taboo Play,” and “Playing Well With Others: Your Guide to Discovering, Exploring, and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities,” which she co-authored with Lee Harrington.
The couple met on OkCupid in 2013. “The writer was Georg Friedrich Haas, whose powerfully emotional, politically charged music and explorations of microtonality make him one of the world’s leading composers,” says Zachary Woolfe in his article. “His work had brought widespread acclaim, but his personal life was troubled, with three failed marriages in his wake, when he met Ms. Williams, a writer and sex educator who specializes in alternative lifestyles. Shortly after he messaged her, the two began a relationship and were married last fall.”
Considering the influence that personal struggle has on the work of music composers, the article says Haas is now going public about his dominant role in his marriage to “embolden younger people, particularly composers, not to smother untraditional urges, as he did.”
Haas told the New York Times that meeting Williams-Haas liberated him after a lifetime of suppressing “’devilish’ desires; and has changed his music in various ways, including making him twice as productive.
“What you perceive is not the fact that they [composers Schubert and Tchaikovsky] desired men,” Haas told NYT, “but the sadness about the impossibility to make love a reality. And I think that has been part of my music. The fundamental pessimism. You never will get what you want because it’s not possible to get it. That is how my life has changed so intensely.”
To read the article in full, click here.
