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Erwin Schulhoff was born on 8 June 1894 in Prague. Thanks to a
recommendation by Antonín Dvorák, he was accepted into the piano class
at the Prague Conservatory at the young age of 10. He continued his
musical studies in Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. Passing his exams with
distinction, he also won the Felix Mendelssohn Prize twice: as a
pianist in 1913 and as a composer in 1918. After serving in the
Austrian army during World War I, he lived in Germany until 1923.
There he devoted himself to the radical streams of the avant-garde,
dadaism and jazz, composing a jazz oratorio, "HMS Royal Oaks" and his
best-known work, the "Hot Sonata", during this period. Other
influences on Schulhoff's work included impressionism, expressionism
and neo-classicism. As a gifted pianist, he specialized in jazz and in
the quarter-tone repertoire of Alois Hába and his pupils. Returning to
Prague in 1923, he was highly successful as a composer and was in
demand internationally as a pianist. Despite his success in Germany,
his career there was cut off after 1933 due to his Communist
sympathies. The world premiere of his opera "Flammen" in Berlin was cancelled.
In the 1930s Schulhoff changed his artistic direction. Instead of
symphonic jazz, he composed symphonies in the style of socialist
realism. This stood in sharp contrast to his activity as a jazz
pianist for the Prague Radio in Ostrava, where he continued to work
under a pseudonym after being banned from his profession in 1939. In
1941 he took on Soviet citizenshhip and applied for a visa to the
Soviet Union in April. The visa was granted on 13 June, but it was too
late: Following Germany's declaration of war against the Soviet Union,
Schulhoff had become a citizen of an enemy state. He was interned in
Prague on 23 June 1941 and subsequently deported to the Wülzburg
concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died on 18 August 1942.
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