[Dixielandjazz] Schulhoff - The Forgotten Jazz/Classical Pianist

[Stephen Barbone]

Not OKOM, but shows a link between classical music and jazz as done by
Erwin Schulhoff. . .Who? Read on to learn more about this fascinating
pianist/composer, whose music was silenced by the Nazis. He was
integrating jazz and classical music in the 1920s.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

April 30, 2004 NY TIMES

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK  By JEREMY EICHLER

Music Silenced by the Nazis Finds Its Voice

      The destruction wrought by World War II extended deep into the
musical landscape of the last century. Composers perished or were sent
into exile, their works were banned and eventually forgotten. Entire
chapters of music history were never written.

Recent years, however, have witnessed an amazing surge of interest in
"Art From Ashes," as one CD is titled. Often on recordings but also in
live    performance, composers are getting a second hearing, a chance
for their music to speak to a public once more.

Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein are among those
whose music has been brought to life in recent years. To this list, one
must also add Erwin Schulhoff, a German-speaking Czech Jew who had an
audacious and original musical voice and a fascinating career before
dying in a Bavarian concentration camp in 1942. His music is the focus
of a three-concert series this weekend at the 92nd Street Y and Lincoln
Center.

Reclamation projects of this nature began cropping up over a decade ago,
and amid the choruses of approval, occasional questioning can now be
heard. Is the music to be regarded as art capable of speaking on its own
terms, or as an artifact that illustrates a particularly tragic moment
of history? Can we commemorate these composers as victims of Nazism
while still listening to their music through critical ears? For the
conductor James Conlon, who leads the Schulhoff events this weekend as
the second installment of his project "Recovering a Musical Heritage,"
the primary goal is simply to put into circulation the music that was
prematurely removed. "Many of these composers did not live to maturity
and the dialogue that should have occurred among them did not take
place," he explained on a recent visit to New York. "I'm not saying that
this will replace Mozart," he added. "Over the course of decades, it
will be decided which are the pieces that really matter. But we owe it
to ourselves and we owe it to the memory of those composers whose music
was banned, to give it a profound hearing."

A sensible proposal it would seem, and all the more so with Schulhoff,
whose music requires little propping up in order to intrigue. He was a
composer and gifted pianist who thrived in Europe's burbling laboratory
of artistic experimentation between the wars. He wrote serious chamber
music and symphonies but also naughty musical pranks, a piano concerto
with a steamboat whistle, and an oratorio about a naval ship whose crew
mutinies after the admiral bans the playing of jazz.

More generally, Schulhoff had a positively Zeligesque gift for
assimilating the different styles of modern music in the air around him,
moving swiftly through Dadaism, Expressionism and neo-Classicism. To
survey his oeuvre, as audiences will have a chance to do this weekend,
is to peer into the dizzying musical kaleidoscope of his times.

Born in Prague in 1894, Schulhoff was a precocious pianist. At 7 his
mother took him to see Dvorak, who was apparently skeptical about
prodigies but affirmed Schulhoff's talent and sent him on his way with
two chocolate bars and a recommendation for a private teacher.

He had a traditional German musical education, but his early years as a
composer were cut short by World War I. He served in the Austrian Army
for almost the full duration of the war, returning massively
disillusioned like so many artists of his generation. Schulhoff's
cynicism extended to his outlook on musical tradition, and he abandoned
his former late-Romantic style as a relic of prewar artistic ideals that
had lost their currency in a world irrevocably changed.

After the war Schulhoff moved to Dresden, Germany, immersing himself in
provocative Dadaist circles and making his own memorable contributions.
His "Symphonia Germanica" of 1919 features a male singer absurdly
bellowing out "Deutschland Über Alles," the patriotic hymn that had been
sung by the kaiser's soldiers during the Great War and would become the
German national anthem. His "Sonata Erotica" of the same year calls for
a solo female actress to recreate the throes of passion, a sort of
German Dadaist version of Meg Ryan's famous diner scene in "When Harry
Met Sally."

Neither work is on the program for this weekend (they are available on
the Channel Classics record label), but Schulhoff's "Bass Nightingale"
for solo contrabassoon should convey a sense of the composer's
rebellious streak. It will be performed by Arlen Fast on Sunday
afternoon at the 92nd Street Y, and will include a monologue Schulhoff
wrote attacking all those less Dadaistically inclined: "You petty
marionettes, fops, bespectacled pseudo-intellectuals, you pathological
hothouse plants and decayed Expressionists."

Schulhoff's Dada phase was temporary, but the more enduring influence
from that period was American jazz, which the composer first heard on
recordings owned by the painter George Grosz. He quickly integrated jazz
into many of his own compositions, including his Suite for Chamber
Orchestra of 1921, which Mr. Conlon has just recorded on the Capriccio
label, and which the Juilliard Orchestra will perform tonight under his
baton in Alice Tully Hall. Also on the program will be Schulhoff's
jazz-inflected piano concerto of 1923, with the Juilliard pianist David
Greilsammer as the soloist.

While Schulhoff took a leading role in integrating jazz with classical
music, he also became a formidable jazz pianist himself. In 1924, the
same year that George Gershwin performed the premiere of his "Rhapsody
in Blue," Olin Downes of The New York Times described a Salzburg
performance of Schulhoff's chamber music after which the composer
"betook himself to a certain inn and played American ragtime on the
piano till the walls tottered."

But Schulhoff's probing for the sound of musical modernity did not end
with either jazz or Dadaism. In works from the same period, he delved
into the 12-tone territory of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese
School. Schulhoff's remarkable String Sextet, which will be performed
tomorrow evening at the 92nd Street Y, shows that he was capable of
writing rigorous atonal music with his own distinctive stamp, though
evidently not with much enthusiasm. The composer put aside the piece
after writing just one movement. Mr. Conlon puts it simply: "He was not
in harmony with that kind of music."

By the time he picked up the Sextet again, he had returned to Prague,
his quest for innovation having brought him to a folk-influenced
neo-Classicism. The remaining movements of the Sextet are written in
that vein, with haunting string effects and at times a rugged Bartokian
style.

Where Schulhoff would have ultimately settled aesthetically is anyone's
guess. In the early 1930's his outlook went through one last
transformation, the most radical of all, when the composer placed his
faith in the Soviet Union, judging it to be the best bulwark against
fascism and the gathering threat of war. Remarkably, after more than a
decade of advocating progressive modern music, Schulhoff voluntarily
embraced the ideals of Socialist Realism and renounced all his previous
experiments. He launched a new phase of Marxist-inspired music, going as
far as writing a cantata based on the "Communist Manifesto."

Also dating from this period is Schulhoff's strident Fifth Symphony,
which Mr. Conlon will perform tonight with the Juilliard Orchestra. The
conductor is fascinated by the genuine idealism behind the symphony, or
what he calls "Marxism as muse." With its blustery tunes and bombastic
march rhythms, the work certainly makes for a striking contrast with
everything that came before, though it is hard to avoid lamenting the
self-censoring of such a creative musical mind.

Moreover, Schulhoff's newfound political faith was tragically tenacious.
He was convinced that his Soviet allegiance would protect him in
Nazi-occupied Prague while he made plans to emigrate to the Soviet
Union. But before he could leave, Hitler broke the German-Soviet
Nonaggression Pact, and Schulhoff was rounded up with his son and taken
to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of
tuberculosis within a year. A survivor remembered the sound of him
playing piano in the guard room. One imagines it was probably jazz.

The major events of the war are clear in hindsight, but Schulhoff's
story is a poignant reminder of the inscrutability of history as
experienced by those who lived it in the present. Indeed, examining
Schulhoff and other composers like him can be worthwhile not only as an
exercise in honoring the memory of victims, or as a means of discovering
unduly neglected music, but also as a way of correcting the stories we
tell to explain the 20th century.

In particular, Schulhoff's life challenges the idea that the 1920's were
one long and steady march toward a catastrophe whose true nature should
have been foreseen by all. His music invites us to consider the cultural
richness of a period whose political tumult coexisted with a sense of
radical artistic possibility as composers grappled like never before
with the struggle to find music's modern voice.

Among the competing paths being forged, Schoenberg's version won out
after the war, and serial music became synonymous with modernism. As Mr.
Conlon and others have argued, the dominance of serialism allowed it to
define the story of its own victory, making its triumph seem like a
preordained conclusion. This meant that the modernist alternatives that
once existed were brushed aside; composers who had not renounced
tonality came to be viewed as reactionary. This may well have
contributed to Schulhoff's lingering obscurity.

In the broadest sense, then, considering the music of Schulhoff and
others of his period may be a crucial way of restoring a sense of the
breadth, vitality and diversity of the original modernist experiment,
and by extension, the true legacy it has bequeathed to us today. Surely
not all of the recovered music will stay in circulation, but in the
process of sorting through it, one illuminates a once-bright artistic
period between the wars, a chapter of cultural history that has too
often been obscured by the implacably dark shadow of its own future.