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Erwin Schulhoff: Bassnachtigal (1922)
From the album Divertissement / Concertino
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was a Czech composer of German-Jewish descent whose compositions from the 1920s represent a relatively rare musical manifestation of the Dada movement of Weimar Republic Germany. His highly imaginative works from this period include the early piano piece In futurum (from his 1919 set of piano pieces, Five Picturesques), consisting entirely of rests of varying rhythmic values (see below); the Sonata Erotica for Solo Mother-Trumpet, which features an explicitly notated fake orgasm for soprano voice; and Das Wolkenpumpe (The Cloud Pump), a set of short chamber songs based on an absurdist text by the Dada poet Hans Arp.
In 1929 Schulhoff completed an ambitious operatic tragicomedy based on the story of Don Juan, entitled Flames. Combining musical elements of 19th-century German opera, jazz, and Gregorian chant, this boldly polystylistic work flopped in its premiere and disappeared from the repertoire until a 1995 revival. In 1932, Schulhoff wrote a massive cantata on the text of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, a work that signaled his adoption of the doctrine socialist realism propagated in the Soviet Union under Stalin. A simplified, monumental mode of composition would characterize the remainder of his music, in which programmatic symphonies featured prominently. Doubly damned as a socialist and a Jew, Schulhoff was imprisoned by the Germans in 1941 and died the following year in a Bavarian concentration camp.
Schulhoff’s 1922 composition Bassnachtigal (Bass-nightingale) entrusts a virtuosic birdsong to the voice of the typically unlyrical contrabassoon, a gesture at once absurd and touchingly sincere in its attempt to transcend conventional musical associations. The composer penned a short prefatory poem to accompany the score, beginning with the lines, “The divine spark may be present / in a liver sausage or in a contrabassoon.”
Schulhoff’s “silent piece” In Futurum
Played 80 time(s).
May 14, 2011, 5:26pm
