She conceded the discomfort many may feel with a black woman willingly submitting to a white man. “It’s a struggle to say, ‘This is genuinely who I am,’” she said. But she added, “To say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist.”

Mr. Haas said that he felt liberated after what he described as a lifetime’s and three divorces’ worth of suppressing what he once considered “devilish” desires. The change has altered his music in ways both quantifiable and more ineffable. He said that his productivity had roughly doubled since meeting Ms. Williams-Haas, which will delight his fans.

And while his work has not lost its moody, queasy darkness, he identifies a new hopefulness in it. His 2015 opera “Morgen und Abend,” for example, ends with a scene of a dead father unable to communicate with his living daughter. “Before I met you,” Mr. Haas said to Ms. Williams-Haas, “this end would be very desperate. Now this end is full of ‘Yeah, we have to die, we have to leave, but the life of love still remains.’” (Michael White, writing in The New York Times, called the opera “a serious and sober, though ultimately radiant, imagining of what it might be like to die and pass into another kind of sentience.”)

Mr. Haas contrasted the effect on his style to the struggles of Schubert and Tchaikovsky with homosexuality. “What you perceive is not the fact that they desired men,” he said, “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.”



His move to New York several years ago to take the position at Columbia seemed to open up new personal possibilities. “The most important step,” he said, “was to accept, yes, I want to be dominant. Yes, I love to play with pain.” These are matters he had long considered, even if unconsciously, in his music, he said. His exacting, virtuosic style gives a whiff of the dominant-submissive to the composer-performer relationship. The same can hold true for the composer-audience relationship, particularly in works like Mr. Haas’s third string quartet, “In iij. Noct,” 50 minutes performed entirely in the dark. The JACK Quartet will play it on Wednesday at the Austrian Cultural Forum.



“The submissive person who is willingly giving over his or her agency can be getting precisely what he or she wants,” Kevin McFarland, the JACK’s cellist, said in a telephone interview. “In the darkness there’s a sub space that the audience can enter.”