16 Facts About Erwin Schulhoff

Erwin Schulhoff was an Austro-Czech composer and pianist.

Erwin Schulhoff 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.

Erwin Schulhoff's father Gustav Schulhoff was a wool merchant from Prague and his mother Louise Wolff from Frankfurt.

Erwin Schulhoff 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.

Erwin Schulhoff won the Mendelssohn Prize twice, for piano in 1913 and for composition in 1918.

Erwin Schulhoff served on the Russian front in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I Erwin Schulhoff was wounded and was in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp when the war ended.

Erwin Schulhoff lived in Germany after the war before returning in 1923 to Prague, where he joined the faculty of the conservatory in 1929.

Erwin Schulhoff was one of the first generation of classical composers to find inspiration in the rhythms of jazz music.

Erwin Schulhoff occasionally performed as a pianist in the Prague Free Theatre.

Erwin Schulhoff toured Germany, France and England performing his own works, contemporary classical compositions, and jazz.

Downes reported that following the performance Erwin Schulhoff played American ragtime numbers on piano at a local inn "till the walls tottered".

Erwin Schulhoff died there on 18 August 1942 from tuberculosis.

Later, during his Dadaist phase, Erwin Schulhoff composed a number of pieces with absurdist elements.

Erwin Schulhoff thought of jazz as a dance idiom and in a 1924 essay expressed the view that no one, including Stravinsky and Auric, had yet successfully blended jazz and art music.

Also important to Erwin Schulhoff was the work of the Second Viennese School, though Erwin Schulhoff never adopted serialism as a compositional tool.

The papers of conferences in Cologne and in Dusseldorf focused on Erwin Schulhoff's work have been published.