Erwin Schulhoff

Erwin Schulhoff’s String Quartet No. 1 will be performed live at Plum Street Temple on June 2nd, 2024. Read more about Schulhoff below.

About the performance:
Soli Music Society and the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices join forces for a special musical collaboration, presented in partnership with Isaac M. Wise Temple. Violinists Evin Blomberg and Adam Millstein, violist Gabriel Napoli, and cellist Ilya Finkelshteyn will perform a program curated by guest artist Adam Millstein that highlights music by composers whose lives and careers were tragically cut short by the Nazi regime in Europe. This powerful program honors three important composers—Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Erwin Schulhoff and Mieczysław Weinberg—whose works have been revived through recent performances and have now become significant contributions to the world of music. 

Erwin Schulhoff (1894 - 1942)

Schulhoff was a serious Dadaist—a musical revolutionary; he also loved the bacchanalian spontaneity of dancing nights away at a local inn, feet stomping the floor, hands in the air, whirling in wild abandon. And his daffy humor often made audiences laugh, with nonsensical titles like “Alexander, Alexander, You are a Salamander”. (Makes you wonder if he was referring to an uncooperative critic, doesn’t it?) Whatever the reason, that title fit right in with his deconstructive Dadaism, a post World War I artistic movement. But unlike Surrealism, which attempted to reconstruct a new unifying mythology for a fragmented world, Dadaism celebrated the chaotic anarchy of fragmentation, likely explaining Schulhoff’s use of musical quips and quick interjections, colorful and unpredictable elements which somehow hold together as if in a benign but absurd dream.

Predictably, because he was Jewish, the Nazi regime blacklisted him. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, he was performing under a false name and barely earning enough to survive. He was approved for Soviet citizenship in 1941, but was arrested and imprisoned before he could escape. That June, he was shipped off to Wülzburg prison, where he died of tuberculosis a year later. A marble bust of Erwin Schulhoff now greets visitors at the entrance to Wülzburg, as much to honor him as to remind us.

String Quartet No. 1 (1924)

Composed nine years before the Nazis took control, this piece does not point an accusing finger at Hitler and his minions as Weinberg’s Trio does. The short first movement is dominated by the driving rhythm of a high energy Czech folk dance; Schulhoff’s exhilaration dancing to it is unmistakeable. The second movement is wistful, a little melancholy, then becomes overtly humorous at the midpoint, with a descending slapstick slide from cello and delightful pizzicato from violin as the movement ends. The third movement showcases Schulhoff’s immense creative range. The Slavonic dance returns with a full array of rhythmic and sonic adornments, merriment becoming ecstasy. In the final movement, the mood shifts dramatically—somber, pensive, uncertain, wary, even eerie at times. And true to his Dadaist roots, the piece closes with a nod to nihilism, ticking down, down, down to an unresolved stillness.

Notes written by Bill Haxton