Erwin Schulhoff

If classical music is supposed to be refined and respectable, Erwin Schulhoff never got the memo. A prodigy endorsed early on by Antonin Dvořák, Schulhoff decided that traditional European classical composition was dreadfully stuffy and proceeded to blow it wide open. He was among the first European composers to seamlessly integrate American jazz, Dadaist absurdity, and biting political satire into his orchestral works. One of his pieces famously consisted entirely of rests and rhythmic instructions—yes, John Cage, you were half a century late.

Schulhoff was born into a prominent German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. His great-uncle Julius Schulhoff had been a renowned pianist, giving Erwin royal keyboard lineage. Uninterested in sticking to traditional boundaries, Schulhoff spent the roaring twenties in Germany and Prague bouncing between Dada cabarets, Communist sympathies, and composing music featuring sirens, saxophones, and explicit erotic recitations set to flute. He was avant-garde in the truest sense: impossible to pin down, endlessly inventive, and thoroughly modern.

Naturally, possessing avant-garde tendencies, communist leanings, and Jewish blood was a lethal trifecta in 1930s Central Europe. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, Schulhoff was blacklisted as "degenerate" (Entartete Musik). He managed to obtain Soviet citizenship in 1941, hoping to flee east, but was arrested before he could leave Prague. Deported to the Wülzburg internment camp in Bavaria, he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1942. For decades his extraordinary body of work was overshadowed by tragedy, but modern classical audiences have finally caught on to the fact that Schulhoff was decades ahead of his time.