Schulhoff's Middle Finger: The Composer Who Wrote Sex Sounds, Silences, & Socialism Before Hitler Killed Him
Susie Bright on Erwin Schulhoff - A radical music review
My lover Jon Bailiff went to see an Erwin Schulhoff tribute concert at our local German Cultural Center, and upon his ecstatic return, I said, “Who’s that?” —Boy, did I get an education.
Jon’s excitement was infectious, and I wondered how such a revolutionary composer had escaped my notice. That evening, I fell down a rabbit hole searching for recordings, performances, anything I could find about this “erased” figure. Schulhoff was born in 1894, and died at age 48 in 1942. Yes, that timing is as tragic as you may surmise.
Erwin was an avant-garde musician and radical who did things at the turn of the 20th century that would still blow minds today.
He was one of the first classical composers to find inspiration—and a reason for living, really— in American musical innovation: jazz. He refused to countenance European musical snobbery. He danced all night long.
The personal risks he took politically, aesthetically, sexually — he paid the price without remorse. His genius and vision have only been recently re-championed.
I found an extraordinary documentary series (see clips below) produced by the Colburn School, in the course of their devotion to “lost music.” Schulhoff was the first composer they wanted to turn their attention to. It’s top notch.
Stele in memory of Erwin Schulhoff in the Wülzburg Fortress in Weißenburg in Bavaria.
Erwin was Czech, a Jew, a musical prodigy at 7, a protégé of Dvořák. As a young man, he served on the Russian front in WW1 and ended up wounded in an Italian POW camp. He travelled to Dresden, where he befriended painters Otto Dix and George Grosz, whose grotesque aesthetic response to war’s brutality echoed his own.
Erwin joined the Dada movement, and threw all the rules out the window. He “broke” classical music, and then resurrected his own avant-garde serenade.
His embrace of Dada was existential necessity—how could one compose square “sonatas” after witnessing industrial-level slaughter?
Imagine this upheaval!—from classical prodigy to shell-shocked soldier, to avant-garde revolutionary. Trauma became radical innovation in Schulhoff's hands.
He was not a nihilist; he did not retreat. —Which would have been understandable. Instead, Schulhoff pushed into territory so experimental it wouldn't be fully appreciated for decades.
In 1919, he composed a formal “silent piano concert” — before John Cage was a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
Thirty years before Cage's notorious 4′33,″ Schulhoff composed “In futurum,” a silent work composed entirely of rests, outrageous notation, and a specific interpretative instruction:
In his instructions to “In Futurum,” he wrote:
Tutti il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al fine
“The whole piece with free expression and feeling, always, until the end.”
The audacity of his gesture—silence as composition and performance—thrills me a century later. To conceive of absence as presence, to formalize emptiness as expression!— it was a time when no one else was even close to these ideas.
Perhaps this is why Erwin’s work sounds contemporary to our ears—he wasn't just responding to his historical moment but also intuiting the artistic page no one had even flipped to yet.
Erwin also wrote for every instrumental voice. He delighted in it. Once, he composed for the double bassoon, with a spoken word prelude. —As if it were done all the time!
Schulhoff wrote an erotic sonata in the early teens, composed of pages and pages of carefully-noted sex sounds. Rapturous. Female orgasm-centric.
In an era when female pleasure was not discussed in society, let alone acknowledged in 'serious' artistic venues— what a thrill. The Dada-ists were an oasis of sexual liberation. Even today, classical music rarely engages directly with feminine eroticism— not to mention avant-garde art.
And yes, Schulhoff wrote classical traditional symphonies of majestic proportions.
At one point, during his social realism period, he put The Communist Manifesto to familiar symphonic music — and then the score was lost, for years!
I can't help wondering what other visions we've lost to such systematic erasures.
In the 1930s, the Nazis called his works "degenerate"— you saw that coming.