Erwin Schulhoff facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Erwin Schulhoff
Schulhoff and dancer Milča Mayerová, (Catalan) 1931
Born	(1894-06-08)8 June 1894 Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic)
Died	18 August 1942(1942-08-18) (aged 48) Weißenburg, Bavaria, Greater German Reich (now Federal Republic of Germany)
Nationality	Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union
Occupation	Composer, pianist

Erwin Schulhoff (Czech: Ervín Šulhov) was a talented composer and pianist from Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was born on June 8, 1894, and died on August 18, 1942. His successful music career was cut short because of the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. Because of this, his amazing works are not as well known or performed today.

Erwin Schulhoff's Life

Schulhoff was born in Prague, which was then part of Austria-Hungary. His family was German-Jewish. His father, Gustav Schulhoff, was a wool merchant. His great-uncle, Julius Schulhoff, was also a famous pianist and composer.

Early Music Studies

When Erwin was just ten years old, the famous composer Antonín Dvořák encouraged him to start music lessons. He began studying at the Prague Conservatory. There, he learned about composing music and playing the piano.

He continued his studies in other cities like Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne. Some of his teachers were very famous, including Claude Debussy and Max Reger. Erwin was very good at music. He won the Mendelssohn Prize twice. He won it for piano in 1913 and for composition in 1918.

World War I and After

During World War I, Schulhoff served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front. He was hurt during the war. When the war ended, he was held in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp.

After the war, he lived in Germany for a while. In 1923, he moved back to Prague. He started teaching at the conservatory there in 1929.

Jazz and Performances

Erwin Schulhoff was one of the first classical composers to be inspired by jazz music. He loved its rhythms and energy.

He sometimes played the piano at the Prague Free Theatre. He also traveled around Germany, France, and England. He performed his own music, other modern classical pieces, and jazz.

One of his pieces, the Suite for Chamber Orchestra (1921), mixed different styles. It had jazz-like parts and also some sad, slow parts. After one performance, Schulhoff played American ragtime music on the piano at a local inn. People said he played "till the walls tottered," meaning he played with great energy!

In 1928, a famous group called the Flonzaley Quartet played his String Quartet No. 1 in New York. The audience loved it. In 1930, another pianist, Walter Gieseking, played Schulhoff's Partita. The audience enjoyed it a lot, especially the parts with funny titles like 'All Art Is Useless'.

In 1930, he composed his Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra. This piece was special because it flipped the usual way concertos were written. The wind instruments created the main sound, and the string quartet played solo parts.

Challenges and Later Life

In the 1930s, Schulhoff faced many problems. Because he was Jewish and had strong political beliefs, the Nazi government called his music "degenerate" and banned it. He could no longer perform in Germany, and his music could not be played publicly.

His support for communism also caused him trouble in Czechoslovakia. In 1932, he even wrote a musical version of The Communist Manifesto. He found work as a radio pianist in Prague, but he barely earned enough money to live.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he had to perform using a different name. In 1941, the Soviet Union agreed to let him become a citizen. However, he was arrested and put in prison before he could leave Czechoslovakia.

In June 1941, Schulhoff was sent to the Wülzburg prison in Bavaria, Germany. He died there on August 18, 1942, from tuberculosis.

Erwin Schulhoff's Music Style

Erwin Schulhoff's music changed a lot over time. It went from sounding like a talented young person's work to being very strong and serious. Even as his style changed, his music always had a certain feel to it.

Early Influences

His early works were influenced by composers like Debussy and Scriabin. Later, during a period called Dadaism, Schulhoff wrote some very unusual pieces. For example, his piece In futurum (1919) is completely silent! It's made up only of musical rests, meaning no notes are played. This was many years before John Cage created his famous silent piece 4′33″.

Jazz and Modernism

From about 1923 to 1932, Schulhoff wrote many of his most popular pieces. These works often mixed modern sounds, classical elements, jazz, and dance rhythms from different cultures. He saw jazz as a dance style.

His Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 (1927) shows how much he loved jazz and dance. One critic said that Schulhoff's idea of jazz was sometimes "surreal," meaning very strange or dreamlike. He used unusual instruments in his music, like slide whistles and car horns in his Suite for Chamber Orchestra (1921).

His jazz oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak tells the true story of a naval mutiny. This happened when a commander banned jazz music on board the ship HMS Royal Oak.

Later Style

In the last part of his career, Schulhoff focused on socialist realism. This meant his music often included ideas about communism.

Overall, Schulhoff's music usually stayed connected to traditional Western music. However, he often added parts that sounded very different or "dissonant." He also used different musical scales and rhythms, especially dance rhythms. He was also interested in the music of the Second Viennese School, but he never used their method of composing with rows of notes.

Selected Works

Images for kids

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  This bust of Erwin Schulhoff is in the Wülzburg fortress near Weißenburg in Bayern. It was made by Reinhart Fuchs and unveiled on October 2, 2004.

See also

In Spanish: Erwin Schulhoff para niños

• Eye music