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Erwin Schulhoff (; 8 June 189418 August 1942) was an Austro-Czech composer and pianist. He was one of the figures in the generation of European musicians whose successful careers were prematurely terminated by the rise of the Nazi Germany and whose works have been rarely noted or performed beyond Czechoslovakia until the 1980s.
Antonín Dvořák encouraged Schulhoff's earliest musical studies, which began at the Prague Conservatory when he was ten years old. He studied composition and piano there and later in Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne; where his teachers included Claude Debussy, Max Reger, Fritz Steinbach, and Willi Thern. He won the Mendelssohn Prize twice, for piano in 1913 and for composition in 1918.Derek Katz, The Orel Foundation, "Erwin Schulhoff"
He was one of the first generation of classical composers to find inspiration in the rhythms of jazz music.Peter Demetz, Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939–45 (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 108 Schulhoff also embraced the avant-garde influence of in his performances and compositions after World War I. When organizing concerts of avant-garde music in 1919, he included this manifesto:
Schulhoff occasionally performed as a pianist in the Prague Free Theatre.Holzknecht, p. 305 He also toured Germany, France and England performing his own works, contemporary classical compositions, and jazz.Donald L. Niewyk and Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2000), 395
His 1921 Suite for Chamber Orchestra, in one critic's words, "is stylistically mixed, with jazz-like numbers...encompassing two slow affecting ones...as if the clown of Die Wolkenpumpe has let the mask slip as he recalled the horrors and absurdities of the trenches." He wrote in a letter to his friend Alban Berg in 1921:Chris Woodstra, Gerald Brennan, Allen Schrott, All Music Guide to Classical Music: The Definitive Guide to Classical Music (All Media Guide, 2005), 1213
Olin Downes praised a Salzburg performance of his Five Pieces for String Quartet in 1924:
Downes reported that following the performance Schulhoff played American ragtime numbers on piano at a local inn "till the walls tottered".
In 1928, the Flonzaley Quartet played the String Quartet No. 1 at their farewell New York concert between works of Beethoven and Brahms, and it was greeted enthusiastically. A 1930 performance of Schulhoff's Partita by Walter Gieseking proved to be the audience's favorite work of the recital "to judge from the applause and laughter" wrote one reviewer, "which greeted the sections bearing such titles as 'All Art is Useless' and 'Alexander, Alexander, You Are a Salamander'."
He composed his Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra in 1930, which provides, in one critic's estimation, "a fascinating inversion of the traditional concerto grosso style, with winds providing the framework of the piece as a whole, within which the string quartet appears as contrast and solo." The Boston Symphony gave the U.S. premiere on 23 February 1995 with the hawthorne String Quartet.
In the 1930s, Schulhoff faced mounting personal and professional difficulties. Because of his Jewish descent and his radical politics, he and his works were labelled "degenerate music" and blacklisted by the Nazi regime. He could no longer give recitals in Germany, nor could his works be performed publicly.
His Communism sympathies, which became increasingly evident in his works, also brought him trouble in Czechoslovakia. In 1932 he composed a musical version of The Communist Manifesto (Op. 82). Taking refuge in Prague, Schulhoff found employment as a radio pianist, but earned barely enough to cover the cost of everyday essentials. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had to perform under a pseudonym. In 1941, the Soviet Union approved his petition for citizenship, but he was arrested and imprisoned before he could leave Czechoslovakia.
In June 1941, Schulhoff was deported to the Wülzburg prison near Weißenburg, Bavaria. He died there on 18 August 1942 from tuberculosis.
His early works exhibit the influence of composers from the preceding generation, including Debussy, Scriabin, and Richard Strauss. Later, during his Dadaist phase, Schulhoff composed a number of pieces with absurdist elements. Anticipating John Cage's 4′33″ by more than thirty years, Schulhoff's In futurum (part of Fünf Pittoresken for piano, written in 1919) is a silent piece composed entirely of rests, with the interpretative instruction "tutto il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al fine" ("the whole piece with free expression and feeling, always, until the end"). The composition is notated in great rhythmic detail, employing bizarre time signatures and intricate rhythmic patterns. Schulhoff's work is itself predated by humorist Alphonse Allais's nine-measure silent work of 1897 Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man. A 1923 report of a Bochum performance puts Schulhoff in the context of his contemporaries:
Schulhoff's third period dates from approximately 1923 to 1932. The pieces composed during these years, his most prolific years as a composer, are the most frequently performed of his works, including the String Quartet No. 1 and Five Pieces for String Quartet, which integrate modernism vocabulary, neoclassicism elements, jazz, and dance rhythms from a variety of sources and cultures. He thought of jazz as a dance idiom and in a 1924 essay expressed the view that no one, including Stravinsky and Auric, had yet successfully blended jazz and art music. Performers of his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 (1927) have described how it "draws liberally on the composers interests and abilities as a bona fide jazzman, acerbic wit and dance aficionado" and said its andante has "the kind of expressivity you find in the music of Berg". One critic has written that "Schulhoff's notion of what constitutes jazz is as surreal as some of the Dadaist texts he set...; some of the music is rather more indebted to de Falla and Russian Orientalism than ragtime or anything trans-Atlantic." He thought that innovations like an entire movement of the Suite for Chamber Orchestra (1921) for percussion alone and the use of the siren in another "would have seemed outlandish enough in 1921, even if it all sounds a bit tame now 1995." A New York Times critic in 1932 called the Duo for violin and cello (1925) "long-winded and even insincere", while a performance in 2012 noted it was dedicated to Janáček, evokes Maurice Ravel's Sonata for Violin and Cello and "blends folk and contemporary elements" while employing "a range of sonorities and effects like dramatic pizzicatos" while "vivacious Hungarian fiddle playing enlivens the Zingaresca movement".
His jazz oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak is based on the true story of the " Royal Oak affair", in which two Royal Navy officers were court-martialled for writing letters of complaint about the conduct of their Flag Admiral. Schulhoff casts his oratorio as the tale of a mutiny breaking out when a superior officer prohibits jazz on board.Demetz, Prague in Danger, 109
The final period of his career was dedicated to socialist realism, with Communist ideology frequently in the foreground.
In general, Schulhoff's music remains connected to Western tonality, though—like Sergei Prokofiev, among others—the fundamentally triadic conception of his music is often embellished by passages of intense dissonance. Other features characteristic of Schulhoff's compositional style are use of Musical mode and quartal harmonies, dance rhythms, and a comparatively free approach to musical form. Also important to Schulhoff was the work of the Second Viennese School, though Schulhoff never adopted serialism as a compositional tool.New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed.
The papers of conferences in Cologne (1992) and in Düsseldorf (1994) focused on Schulhoff's work have been published.
/ref> He served on the Russian front in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He was wounded and was in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp when the war ended.Patricia Ann Hall, Berg's Wozzeck (Oxford University Press, 2011), 40–1 He lived in Germany after the war before returning in 1923 to Prague, where he joined the faculty of the conservatory in 1929.
Musical style
Schulhoff went through a number of distinct stylistic periods, ranging, in Anne Midgette's words, "from the endearing self-consciousness of talented youth in the Suite for Chamber Orchestra to the fierce somber aggression of the Fifth Symphony." She found that even as his style changed there was a certain commonality, so that even the "angular, forceful, even raw style" of the late Fifth Symphony reflected "the late Romantic tradition of orchestral color".
Personal life
In August 1921 he married Alice Libochowitz. The following year he moved to Berlin in an effort to write musical parallels to the work of George Grosz.Derek Katz, The Orel Foundation, "Erwin Schulhoff"
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Selected works
See also
Notes
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1894 Births, 1942 Deaths, Austro-hungarian Military Personnel Of World War I, Ballet Composers, Czechoslovak Classical Composers, Czech Classical Composers, German Male Classical Composers, German Opera Composers, Czechoslovak Civilians Killed In World War Ii, Czech Male Opera Composers, Czech Jews, Czech Male Classical Pianists, Czech People Who Died In Nazi Concentration Camps, Jewish Classical Composers, Jewish Classical Pianists, Mendelssohn Prize Winners, Musicians From Prague, Prague Conservatory Alumni, Tuberculosis Deaths In Germany, 20th-century Czech Classical Pianists, 20th-century German Composers, 20th-century German Male Musicians
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