Erwin Schulho
Suppressed by the Nazis, the jazz-loving Jewish composer’s originality and brilliant wit deserve to find a new audience, says Simon Broughton
Erwin Schulhoff, born in Prague in 1894, was a close contemporary of Martin , a fellow Czech, and Milhaud and Poulenc in France. They were all working at the same time and wrote a considerable amount of music of similar quality. So why are these other names fairly well known, while Schulhoff isn’t? The sad truth is that he was silenced, dying in a Nazi prison camp in 1942, and subsequently unjustly forgotten by musical history. It was a similar story for his fellow Jewish Czech composers Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein, who were in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto where at least there was the opportunity to be musically creative before they were transported to Auschwitz and killed.
Schulhoff was an energetic enfant terrible in the first decades of the 20th century, fascinated by jazz and writing music in an original if not consistent style. His works include six completed symphonies (plus one in piano score and another unfinished), a Don Juan opera called Flammen (Flames), a lot of piano and chamber music, and several very inventive concertos – some for unusual combinations like a Double Concerto for Flute, Piano and Orchestra and a Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra. There’s also the Hot Sonata for alto saxophone and piano, and the Sonata Erotica for female voice in which the singer performs an orgasm – 70 years before Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. ‘This is a full-blooded musician, blessed with wit, who meets the most sophisticated expectations,’ wrote Erich Steinhard, the editor of Der Auftakt, a Prague music journal in 1926.
At the time of Schulhoff’s birth,
Prague was a major cultural centre in the Habsburg Empire, described by Max Brod, Kafka’s biographer and Janá ek’s translator, whom Schulhoff knew, as ‘100 per cent Czech, 100 per cent German and 100 per cent Jewish’. This could equally be a description of Schulhoff himself. He was born into a prosperous Jewish merchant family who, with encouragement from Dvo ák no less, arranged a comprehensive musical education starting at the Prague Conservatoire when he was ten. He went
‘Schulho is a full-blooded musician who meets the most sophisticated expectations’
on to Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne and became a very accomplished pianist, for which he won the Mendelssohn Prize in 1913. He wrote piano music and completed a Piano Concerto at this time.
In 1914, Europe went to war and Schulhoff served on the Russian and Italian fronts. ‘It is nothing less than a flood, a destructive force threatening to destroy the entire culture of European humanity,’ he wrote in his diary in 1916. ‘I can only place the years 1914, 1915, 1916 on humanity’s lowest rank; they make a mockery of the 20th century.’
The First World War brought a decisive change in Schulhoff’s outlook and music. He moved to Dresden, living with his sister Viola, an artist, and got to know other artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz, who vividly depicted decrepit war wounded, low-life bars and jazz bands
in a style they called ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (New Objectivity). Their pictures are the defining images of the Weimar Republic.
George Grosz in his autobiography describes his first encounter with jazz in Berlin and a band leader pretending to be out of control, hurling drinks and instruments around. ‘What I had just seen was a parody of what would one day be a reality,’ he wrote; ‘one in which another mad band-leader would conduct a dance of death, snatching instruments from his musicians’ hands and belabouring their heads until they collapsed, to ovations that would far surpass the applause lavished upon his harmless predecessor.’
Schulhoff seized upon jazz as a way of cutting himself off from a conventional past devalued by the horrors of WWI. His first jazz-inspired pieces, Fünf Pittoresken, were written in 1919 and dedicated to Grosz. With titles like ‘Foxtrot’ and ‘Ragtime’, they have a kinship with Stravinsky’s rag-inspired pieces of this same period. More substantial is his sixmovement Suite for Chamber Orchestra of 1921. Originally called Suite in the New Style, its movements have titles like ‘Ragtime’, ‘Tango’, ‘Shimmy’ and ‘Jazz’, and the percussion section includes football rattle, xylophone, swanee-whistle and car horn. In a letter to composer Alban Berg about the piece he says: ‘There are times when I dance night after night with the girls in the bars, purely for the rhythmic enjoyment of it and the sensual undercurrents; this is a phenomenal spur to my creativity, since my personality is very earthy, almost bestial!’
Since 1920, Schulhoff had been teaching piano in Saarbrücken, a city he hated for its petit-bourgeois mentality. In 1921, he married and, early the following year, moved to Berlin where his son Peter was born. He returned to Prague in 1923. The Czech capital was culturally divided, with a Czech and a German opera house and most Jews leaning towards German culture. Schulhoff, at home with both, declared: ‘I would like to be a cultural intermediary here in Prague between the Czechs and the Germans.’ This included jazz-inspired music for a production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Czech National Theatre.
This next decade, until Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, was the