The story of Erwin Schulhoff is a tragic one. Born to a German Jewish family in Prague, his musicality was obvious at an early age. Encouraged by Dvořák, and later one of the few students of Debussy, he burst onto the avant-garde scene in the post WW1 years. His early works were modernist, and like several European contemporaries (such as Milhaud and Martinů) he was strongly influenced by jazz. 

Schulhoff

Schulhoff was a virtuoso pianist, who maintained a jazz trio throughout his life: his extant piano recordings reveal a brilliant technique and irresistible energy. The rise of Nazism forced him out of Berlin and back to Prague, where his strong communist sympathies were not appreciated. When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he was granted Russian citizenship but was imprisoned before he could escape and died in Wülzburg Prison of tuberculosis in 1942.

Schulhoff’s early music shows great imagination; however, as he embraced communism he simplified his style (or to be blunt, dumbed it down). His late works, such as his Symphonies Nos 4 and 5, are bland and dry, purged of his former intricacy and personality. The difference is...