Prague 8/6/1894 - Wulzbourg 18/8/1942

Ervin Schulhoff’s political ideology was inseparable from his music. The dramatic course of his life took him from the home of his wealthy Jewish merchant parents, to an encounter with Dvorak who recognised the extraordinary ability of the seven year old pianist and encouraged his studies, to a Marxist ideology and finally, death in a Concentration Camp.

Shulhoff enrolled in the Prague conservatoire in 1904, studied afterwards in Vienna, and in 1908 in Leipzig, finally completing his studies in Cologne in 1918, studying with, among others, Reger and Debussy.  He won the coveted Mendelssohn Prize for piano in 1913, and again in 1918 for composition. 

In 1916 Schulhoff served on the front as a soldier in the Austrian army, an experience which greatly influenced his political and musical ideology.

In 1919 Schulhoff underwent a radical stylistic metamorphosis.  His propensity for embracing extremes characterised his life.  After the war, a convinced pacifist and radical socialist, Schulhoff aligned himself with the artists Klee and Grosz and the Dadaists, protesting against the degeneracy of the bourgeoisie and attempting to eradicate from his own work anything he might perceive as having been inherited from his background.  Thus he swapped the romantic impressionism of his early works for jazz, folk idioms and the absurd.

Now living in Dresden, motivated by a vision of a political and aesthetic revolution, Schulhoff  featured music by Berg, Skriabin, Schönberg and Webern in his “Improving Concerts” series.  During this period he wrote the opera “Flammen”, a psychoanalytical re-working of the Don Juan story, supporting himself by a punishing performing schedule as a piano soloist throughout Europe.

In 1929 Schulhoff returned to Prague where he taught piano, composition and lectured in addition to performing and composing.  In 1931 he reinvented himself calling himself “proletarian internationalist”, condemned capitalism and embraced communism.  He  set the Communist Manifesto to music in the form of a cantata.  The music of this period reflects his preoccupation with social reform, inspired by his war experiences, the events taking place in Germany the Slovakia hunger riots and the Spanish civil war.  This politicisation of music put Schulhoff out of alignment with his contemporaries and his overt approval of the collapse of the old order taking place throughout Europe further distanced him from Prague society.  Hoping to save himself from the Nazis he became a Soviet citizen at the time of the Munich Agreement, but his plans to emigrate there came to nothing and hope of an escape from Hitler’s racial purification by that means came to an end when the German army invaded the Soviet Union.  From 1933 he was no longer able to pursue his career as a piano soloist, and, rejected as a composer, Schulhoff eked a living working as a radio pianist and journalist, writing under a pseudonym.  As both a Jew and a communist, transportation was inevitable and in June1941 he was transported to Wulzbourg where he died fourteen months later of malnutrition and typhus.