Five Pieces for String Quartet

Emphatic rhythms dominate these pieces. Like many of his contemporaries, Schulhoff explores the dance suite, infusing new ideas into this relic of the renaissance and baroque periods. The presence of a tango among the pieces marks this composer as one of the stylish voices of his era.

The musically prodigious son of a German-Jewish family, Schulhoff was encouraged to explore his talent at an early age: at 10, in the Prague Conservatory; at 12, in Vienna; at 14, in Leipzig, where his composition teachers included Max Reger. By the time he was 19, Schulhoff was in Cologne, receiving honors as both composer and pianist. He served as an Austrian soldier in World War I. He spent 1919 through 1923 in Germany, hot on the trail of the radical new music scene. Schulhoff explored the worlds of atonality and expressionism, and fell deeply in love with jazz. The Berlin Dadaist painter George Grosz became his friend. The two shared a passion for amassing large collections of jazz recordings, and Schulhoff dedicated a 1919 jazz cycle, Picturesques for Piano, to Grosz. His prolific 1923-1930 period in Prague includes a “jazz oratorio” called H.M.S. Royal Oak, Rag-music, Cinq Etudes de Jazz, and a piece for alto saxophone and piano called Hot Sonata.

Socialist politics swept in to capture Schulhoff’s creative imagination in the 1930s: in addition to half a dozen symphonies, he composed a “manifesto on words by Marx and Engels” for choirs and winds in 1932-33. Not only did his compositional style change to reflect socialist doctrines, but also his political commitment brought him into conflict with the deadly forces at work around him. In demand all over Europe as a pianist, Schulhoff’s work, including the planned Berlin premiere of his opera Flammen, was banned from Germany after 1933. He performed under a pseudonym as a jazz pianist on Prague Radio after 1939. An effort to emigrate to the Soviet Union as a Soviet citizen led to his arrest in Prague in June of 1941. He died of tuberculosis in the Wülzburg concentration camp, in Bavaria, a little over a year later. The Five Pieces for String Quartet was premiered in 1924 at the International Society for New Music Festival in Salzburg. It is recorded on Music of Remembrance’s CD, Art from Ashes, Vol. I, with violinists Mikhail Shmidt and Leonid Keylin, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, and cellist Mara Finkelstein.