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120th anniversary

Marita Berg / gswJune 7, 2014

Composer and pianist Erwin Schulhoff - born in Prague on June 8, 1894 - was a musical daredevil more likely to discover his music in a local tavern than in respectable concert halls.

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Erwin Schulhoff
Image: Terezin Music Foundation

A pianist and composer in the European avant-garde, Erwin Schulhoff was celebrated in his day as one of the most talented young musicians in Central Europe. His music sounded refreshingly new, thanks in part to his disregard for convention. Current and radical artistic trends from expressionism to Dadaism were his sources of inspiration. Schulhoff was also one of the first European composers to become seriously engaged with jazz as it made its way from the US across the Atlantic.

Despite his promise, his story ended in tragedy; the Jewish composer died of tuberculosis in a Bavarian detention center in 1942.

'Miserable and defiant'

Erwin Schulhoff was recognized as a genius early on. When Antonin Dvorak heard the seven-year-old playing piano, he was so impressed that he immediately wanted to enroll the boy at a conservatory in Prague. At age ten, Schulhoff did indeed begin his piano studies there and discovered his talent for composition soon afterward. Four years later, he was admitted into Max Reger's renowned composition course in Leipzipg. In 1913, he received tutelege from Claude Debussy in Paris.

Erwin Schulhoff, sitting at a piano
Schulhoff was also in demand as a concert pianistImage: gemeinfrei

Schulhoff's first concert tour in 1911 was hailed as a "colossal success."

But the outbreak of the World War I interrupted the young talent's career. Drafted as a soldier, Erwin Schulhoff ultimately suffered a severe injury to his hand and frost bite. In 1918, he wrote in his journal, "An utter deluge has come crashing in - a destructive element that is threatening to destroy the culture European people have achieved. And now I am standing at the gateway to the frontier of the future, miserable and defiant!"

'Grotesque, burlesque, humoresque'

The war changed Schulhoff. He suffered depression, confiding in a journal entry that he was in a mood "in which one loses faith in oneself."

The composer didn't recover until he followed his sister to Dresden in 1919. There, he got to know young Dadaist artists, who were creating a form of protest against the senselessness of the war, their provocative texts and images holding up a mirror to polite, bourgeois society.

Painter George Grosz
Artist Georg Grosz inspired Schulhoff's workImage: picture-alliance/dpa

Schulhoff had found his new frontier - particularly in the pictures by Georg Grosz, who became an artistic role model. Schulhoff also wanted his music to provoke and shake people up.

"There are horrible tensions in our current state of being," he wrote. "Terrifying chaos everywhere! Can't you all see that my work - drawn from these heaps of rubble in Europe - is just mockery?"

Discovering jazz

Schulhoff discovered jazz as a means of musical provocation. At the time, the genre was vilified as the downfall of the West. He joined the Gruppe 1919, a group of artists that had formed around painter Otto Griebel, and founded a series of progressive concerts in Dresden. Presenting modern music to audiences, he invited representatives of the avant-garde to the city and introduced his own jazz-inspired compositions.

Particularly fascinated by the refined rhythms of new dance styles such as the foxtrot, shimmy and ragtime, the musician found inspiration visiting jazz clubs.

"Head to the bars and you'll find more music than in the concert halls of this world," he wrote. "I have an incredible passion for sophisticated dance, and there are times when I dance night to night with barmaids, solely out of enthusiasm for rhythm and a subconscious sensuality. That gives me a phenomenal source of inspiration because my consciousness is unbelievably grounded - even almost animalistic!"

Scores by Schulhoff
Schulhoff, like many other creative figures, was banned as a "degenerate" by the NazisImage: picture-alliance/dpa

Pursued by the Nazis

At the time, Schulhoff's compositions were highly popular. Paul Hindemith premiered some of his chamber music pieces, and his orchestral works regularly sounded at concerts in Prague and Berlin. After the world premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, the press hailed his "explosive musicality," with one critic writing, "His new piano concerto is some of the most spirited music we have. For Schulhoff, the wildest possible sense of rhythm is at the core of composition."

Due to his Jewish heritage, his love of jazz and his communist sympathies, Schulhoff was unable to continue his career in fascist Germany after 1933. He returned to Prague, but after the Nazi occupation, he could only work as a jazz pianist and arranger by using a pseudonym. On June 23, 1941, he was arrested in Prague by the Gestapo and sent to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria.

It was there that he died on August 18, 1941, of tuberculosis at age 48.