Erwin Schulhoff
| Erwin Schulhoff | |
|---|---|
Composer Ervin Schulhoff and dancer Milča Mayerová, ca 1931
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| Born |
8 June 1894 Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) |
| Died | 18 August 1942 (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; 8 June 1894 – 18 August 1942) was a 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 regime in Germany and whose works have been rarely noted or performed.
Schulhoff was born in Prague into a German-Jewish family. His father Gustav Schulhoff was a wool merchant from Prague and his mother Louise Wolff from Frankfurt. The noted pianist and composer Julius Schulhoff was his great-uncle.
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. 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. He lived in Germany after the war until returning to Prague in 1923 where he joined the faculty of the conservatory in 1929.
He was one of the first generation of classical composers to find inspiration in the rhythms of jazz music. Schulhoff also embraced the avant-garde influence of Dadaism in his performances and compositions after World War I. When organizing concerts of avant-garde music in 1919, he included this manifesto:
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