Erwin Schulhoff

Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was among the most talented of the European composers who were victims of the Holocaust. An excellent pianist with a voracious appetite for jazz, Schulhoff first fused jazz and classical music in his suite Fünf Pittoresken, Op. 31, (1919) and embraced the Dadaist aesthetic of his friend, painter George Grosz. After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1933, Schulhoff became an ardent communist and his musical style changed accordingly. In 1939, Schulhoff was arrested and later died in the Würzburg forced labor camp; his reputation has been steadily growing since being rediscovered in the 1990s.