PARABLES OF THE OLD MEN AND THE YOUNG: THE MULTIFARIOUS MODERNISMS OF ERWIN SCHULHOFF'S STRING QUARTETS

Music & Letters,Vol. 95 No. 2, � The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.doi:10.1093/ml/gcu037, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

PARABLES OF THE OLD MEN AND THE YOUNG: THEMULTIFARIOUS MODERNISMS OF ERWIN

SCHULHOFF’S STRING QUARTETS

BY YOEL GREENBERG*

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men,we are crude and sorrowful and superficialçI believe we are lost.

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on theWestern Front, 1929

What we need are strong straightforward, precise works which will beforever misunderstood.

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918

INTRODUCTION

The average audience member attending the premiere of Erwin Schulhoff ’s SecondQuartet in a Berlin Novembergruppe meeting on 12 November 1925 would have beenhard to surprise. Musical meetings of this group were prestigious yet notorious events,featuring radical expressions such as Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt’s brutist piano ex-periments, one of which was to end ‘when the piano lid was let fall from a moderateheight whilst operating the pedals’,1 but also premiering leading composers of the day,including Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg, Stravinsky, Satie, Barto¤ k, Webern, Ravel,Martinufi , and Koda¤ ly. It is precisely because of their commitment to modernism thatthis self-proclaimed ‘union of radical artists, radical in their rejection of traditionalforms of expression, radical in their application of new means of expression’2 mayhave been baffled by a pair of unabashed references to the two most prominentthemes from Smetana’s overture toThe Bartered Bride in the two concluding movementsof the quartet (see Exx. 1 and 2).

*Bar-Ilan University. Email: [email protected]. I wish to thank the following for their help in writing thisarticle: Isolde von Foerster, for much valuable information on Schulhoff ’s quartets; Shari Greenberg, RuthHaCohen, Chris Hailey, Thomas Svatos, Naphtali Wagner, Bracha Nir, and the anonymous reviewers for Music &Letters, for their helpful comments on different stages of the manuscript; and most of all Michael Beckerman, for ‘shoe-horning’ me into this project, and for his helpful advice throughout. Unless otherwise indicated, music examplesfrom Schulhoff ’s quartets are taken from the following sources: Five Pieces for String Quartet (original version):� Schott, 1925; Quartet No. 1: � Universal: 1925; Quartet No. 2 � Universal: 1929. Excerpts from the new Schottedition of the Five Pieces and Quartet No. 25 are reproduced with permission. The location of Schulhoff ’s autographof the Symphonia germanica is unknown.

1 H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Zum Ho« ren geboren (Munich, 1982), 94.2 The motto on the group’s exhibition catalogue of 1919.

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The correspondences between Schulhoff ’s and Smetana’s themes are not limited to asuperficial similarity. In particular, the unique rhythmic profile of Smetana’s maintheme, its melodic contour, dynamics, unison texture, and patterns of accentuation arefaithfully reproduced in the finale of Schulhoff ’s quartet, as is the lead-in through aswift crescendo over a torrent of quavers, and the sudden dissolution of the theme to apianissimo chatter in the inner voices. As in the Smetana, the theme also serves as thebasis of a fugato (bb. 114^36 in Schulhoff; bb. 228^72 in Smetana; I must resist thetemptation of attributing any special significance to the fact that the bar numbers inSchulhoff are precisely half of those in Smetana).Those members of the audience who were also regular readers of the Musikbla« tter des

Anbruchwould have been doubly surprised, for just a couple of months earlier Schulhoffcontributed an article in honour of Jana¤ c› ek’s seventieth birthday in which he dwelledextensively upon Smetana’s music, deriding it as ‘unnatural’, ‘exaggerated’, and

EX. 1. (a) Schulhoff, Quartet No. 2, III, bb. 40^3; (b) Smetana, Overture toThe Bartered Bride,bb. 110^13

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EX. 2. (a) Schulhoff, Quartet No. 2, IV, bb. 209^16; (b) Smetana, Overture to The BarteredBride, bb. 7^15

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‘intrusive’, suitable only to the ‘unthinking listener’ and devoid of ‘dramatic credibil-ity’.3 In the light of his outspoken disdain for the old master, the fact that Schulhoffmade such explicit references to him in his quartet warrants explanation.Indeed, the references to Smetana did not pass unnoticed, and the resulting confu-

sion is evident in an otherwise enthusiastic review of Schulhoff ’s work by the criticand editor of the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, Paul Schwers, who wrote: ‘the fact that in thefinal movement good old Smetana plays his lively games in a fresh and alert manner,cannot dim the joy of this ‘‘positive’’ work. Continue on this way!’4 The confused char-acter of Schwers’s response is telling: he clearly admired the work for its modernistqualities, yet he was perplexed and evidently disappointed by the Smetana quotations,which could have, even though they ultimately did not, dimmed the joy of the quartet.What, then, was the significance of the Smetana quotations? Why would

Schulhoffça composer by then well established in radicalist circles, stronglycommitted to modernist ideology, and outspoken in his rejection of traditionalinfluencesçinclude such obvious references to a tradition from the past? And howmay we understand Schwers’s seemingly ambivalent response to these quotations,referring to the old master, in spite of his evident disapproval, as ‘good old Smetana’?These questions pertain to one of the core issues for artists in Schulhoff ’s generation,the question of their relationship with pre-FirstWorldWar culture, and hence exploringthem will shed light on the way Schulhoff ’s music and its reception situate him vis-a' -vis his musical predecessors as well as his contemporaries. Indeed, Schulhoff ’sconfusing array of styles, including expressionism, neo-classicism, jazz influences,Dadaist absurdisms, and, in the last years of his life, an austere Socialist Realism,make the question of his relationship with the past essential in understanding hisposition among his fellow artists. Was he a forward-looking composer, at the forefrontof the modern avant-garde, as suggested by works like the silent premonition of Cage,In Futurum (1919), or was he, as Robin Holloway suggested, ‘bound to his own timeswithout for a moment transcending them . . . interesting solely as a mirror of the age,beginning typical, then moving typically in response to the ebb and flow of the trend’?5

In this essay I will explore some of the essentials of Schulhoff ’s musical language andthe means with which it establishes a relationship with the culture of the past, arguingthat until the late 1920s it was strongly and consciously motivated by an ideological re-jection of pre-First World War aesthetics. Furthermore, through an exploration of theimagery employed by his contemporary critics (all too easily misunderstood in ourtimes), I will show that his music was recognized and appreciated in terms of such a re-jection. In the first part of this essay I will establish that two methods of rejectionstand out among creative artists of Schulhoff ’s generation. The one involves the use ofage- and health-related metaphorical dichotomies, such as old men versus young men,fathers versus sons, and sickness versus health; the other involves references to culturalicons, including artistic institutions (museums, libraries, etc.), past masters, and estab-lished masterworks, manipulated through the use of distance-creating techniquessuch as pastiche and collage, irony and nostalgia. In the second part of the essay Iwill show how the appreciation of these techniques contributes significantly to

3 Erwin Schulhoff, ‘Leos› Jana¤ c› ek: Betrachtungen anla« �lich seines siebzigsten Geburtstags’, Musikbla« tter desAnbruch, 7 (11May 1925), 237^9.

4 ‘Da� im Schlu�satz der gute alte Smetana frisch und munter sein Spiel treibt kann uns die Freude u« ber dieses‘‘positive’’ Schaffen nicht tru« ben. Nur weiter auf solcher Bahn!’ Paul Schwers, ‘Aus dem Berliner Musikleben:Novembergruppe’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 52 (1925), 987.

5 Robin Holloway, ‘Revival of the Fittest?’, Musical Times, 137 (Nov. 1996), 17^21 at 17.

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understanding particulars of Schulhoff ’s practice and the rhetoric of his reception.I will focus on Schulhoff ’s works for a single ensembleçthe four works for stringquartet composed in the eight years following the end of the First World Warçshowing how these works may be interpreted as exemplifying these referencing tech-niques, and enabling a renewed evaluation of their reception in the light of thesedichotomies.

SINS OF THE FATHERS

Born in 1894, Schulhoff was part of a generation whose professional development wasstymied by their conscription to active service in the First World War. Described byErich Maria Remarque as ‘a generation of men who, even though they may haveescaped its shells, were destroyed by the war’,6 those who survived returned disillu-sioned, embittered, and confused, haunted by the horrors of war, angered by its arbi-trariness, and infuriated by its futility. These angry young men looked back in anger(to borrow two formulations from a later post-war generation), squarely laying theblame for their catastrophe at the feet of the older generation. Traditional values andsystems such as religion, logical reasoning, and the rich cultural corpus of philosophy,art, and literature were viewed by many in the years immediately following the waras the representatives of the defunct system that had created their catastrophe. Freudrecognized that ‘no event had ever destroyed so much of the precious heritage ofmankind, confused so many of the clearest intellects or so thoroughly debased what ishighest’,7 and Kurt Schwitters acknowledged the sense that ‘everything had brokendown . . .and new things had to be made out of the fragments’.8 In the words of artphilosopher Bert Olivier, the post-war generation maintained that ‘the society thatcould countenance (and give rise to) the advent of something as inhuman as the FirstWorld War, was in dire need of destruction, so that it could be re-built in a radicallydifferent way’.9

Such a renewal was far from simple. Most young creative artists of this generationhad completed their formative years, but had not yet developed a style of their own,and were thus faced with a formidable challenge. Unlike established composers suchas Schoenberg, Elgar, or Strauss, who were able to fall back on their earlier styles(and reputations), the younger generation had nothing of their own to which toreturn. Furthermore, the intense period of experimentation and innovation in theyears preceding the war had led to the creation of radically new techniques andstylesçStravinsky and Schoenberg’s revolutions in music, Picasso and Braque’sCubism, Italian and Russian Futurismçleaving little space or need for further innov-ation. Younger artists found themselves in a creative cul-de-sac. They were unwillingto follow the lead of the older generation (whom they held, together with the entirehistory of Western civilization, responsible for their catastrophe), but neither was thetime ripe for another artistic revolution. They were thus in need of a language thatwould enable at once both continuity and rejection, both tradition and renewal. Inpresenting their music they had to construct an external fac� ade of radical originality,claiming novelty that was frequently unjustified. The ‘perpetrators’ of pre-war

6 All quotations from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front are taken from the translation by A. W. Wheen(Boston, 1975). This quotation is from the dedication of the book.

7 Sigmund Freud, Reflections onWar and Death, trans. A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (NewYork, 1918), 1.8 Kurt Schwitters, ‘Kurt Schwitters’ (1930), in Kurt Schwitters: Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, 5 vols.

(Cologne, 1973^81), v. 355.9 Bert Olivier, Philosophy and the Arts: Collected Essays (Oxford and NewYork, 2009), 127.

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innovations had to be either marginalized or lumped together with the entire history ofWestern culture (preferably both).This was achieved by the development of an imagery that expressed this marginal-

ization and rejection within artistic, musical, and literary works. Through the use of avocabulary of age-related dichotomies and distance-creating techniques, artists andcritics at the time associated pre-war culture with marginalized sectors, principallythe elderly and the infirm. The image of old men was particularly prevalent. Duringand after the war, old men were described by representatives throughout Europe’s pol-itical spectrum as cruel, callous, and bereft of judgement, and were accused of havingcynically sacrificed the lives of the younger generation in order to preserve their owndefunct values. The most familiar example to music audiences is, no doubt, WilfredOwen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, written in 1918 and usedby Britten in hisWar Requiem nearly half a century later, which accuses ‘the old man’(Abram) of slaying ‘his son, and half the seed of Europe’. In holding the old man toblame for preferring to slay his young son rather than sacrifice ‘the Ram of pride’,Owen transforms the biblical story to a universal parable on the ruthless and senselessdefence of pride by the old generation, the ‘old men’, at the expense of the young, ‘theseed of Europe’. Old men also feature heavily in the post-war paintings of Dadaistartists such as Otto Dix, Otto Griebl, and particularly George Grosz. Paintings likePillars of Society (1926), Fit for Active Service (1918), and Blood is the Best Sauce (1919)present old men as incompetent and corrupt leaders, their judgement obscured byzeal for battle, content to send young men to their deaths in order to maintain theirown decadent values and principles.10

The age-related dichotomy is not the only one within Owen’s parable. Abram versusIsaac are also the father versus the son and the religious zealot (and representative ofthe establishment and of tradition) versus his victim. The image of fathers versus sonsis brilliantly exploited by Jaroslav Has› ek in a scathingly ironic episode on militarycryptography in Part III of The Good Soldier S� vejk (1921^3), a work rife with angry andirreverent utterances about Europe’s older men.11 Within this episode, a novel, signifi-cantly entitled The Sins of the Fathers, is selected as the basis of a defunct and impracticalencryption system, emblematic of the blind trust in outdated techniques and sourcesby the high command during the war at the expense of the soldiers in combat, resultingin the visitation of ‘the sins of the fathers upon the children’.12

These and other portrayals of the older generation as old men or fathers areaccompanied by a ‘self-infantilization’ of the younger generation, who present them-selves as children to underscore their helplessness and their sense of themselves asvictims. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque’s protagonist reports that thosekilled or maimed in action ‘with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs onlywhimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them. Their sharp,downy, dead faces have the awful expressionlessness of dead children.’13 Those who

10 A similar equation between old men and those responsible for the war can be found inThe Radetzky March (1932),where Joseph Roth describes at length the aging Kaiser on the eve of the war as an imbecilic old man in his dotage.

11 All references and quotations from S� vejk are taken from Jaroslav Has› ek, The Good Soldier S� vejk, trans. CecilParrott (London, 1973). For a deliciously irreverent discussion of the association of the term ‘old fart’ with figures ofauthority, see pp. 603^4.

12 The novel The Sins of the Fathers did, in fact, exist. Its author, Ludwig Ganghofer (1855^1920), would surely havequalified as an ‘old man’ for Has› ek due to his age alone. In addition, his writings during the war expressed strongand uncritical support of German politicians and high command.

13 Remarque, All Quiet on theWestern Front, 23.

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survived were ‘no longer soldiers but little more than boys’,14 their disillusionmentembodied in terms of the loss of childlike naivety. Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘simple soldierboy’ or Wilfred Owen’s ‘children ardent for some desperate glory’ are encouraged bytheir elders to enter a war from which they will emerge as ‘children, with eyes thathate you, broken and mad’.15

Through these age-related dichotomies, the younger generation were able to margin-alize the older one by associating them with a marginalized sector within society. Theyoung generation as children assume not only the attributes of the victims versus thecriminals, but also those of the generation of the future versus that of the past.Another marginalized sector frequently evoked is the infirm. Perhaps the best-known

example is Franz Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (1921), which de-scribes pre-war German philosophy in terms of paralysis, positing common sense(‘gesunder Menschenverstand’, literally ‘healthy sense’) as the embodiment of goodhealth. In his eyes, the moment German philosophy was ‘cured’, i.e. the moment anew and healthier approach gained a foothold in philosophy, was the onset of theFirst World War: ‘in August 1914 the word ‘‘fatherland’’ and all the theories of‘‘essence’’ dissolved into nothing’.16

Evoking such images of marginalized sectors thus allowed members of Schulhoff ’sgeneration to clear themselves a creative space, to position themselves as radicallynew, and to dismiss contemporary cultural competitors as irrelevant and weak. Theyused such dichotomies to identify themselves as a self-consciously distinct group,whose mission it was to become as far removed as possible from anything that wasnot entirely new, to embrace the novel, and to shun the traditional. ‘The young man’,wrote Dadaists George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, ‘digests everything. . . .Rashand unhesitating acceptance so as not to be ‘‘born yesterday’’ is the password.’17 Thepast was dead, the war had seen the ‘Extinction of each happy art and faith / bywhich the world had still kept head in air’,18 and in the aftermath the treasures of thepast came to represent at best what the art critic and Vanity Fair editor FrankCrowninshield called ‘the flat, dead and profitless spirit of bygone times’,19 and atworst, Ezra Pound’s ‘botched civilization’ for which ‘there died a myriad’.20

It was this ‘botched civilization’ that became the target of the younger generation’sire. The rejection of past culture was carried out in a variety of stylesçwe will encoun-ter some very different examples in Schulhoff ’s musicçbut the essence, callingto ‘cast out the old in favour of the new’, was common to all. Traditional values ofpre-war culture were called into question by explicit rejection of works representingthese values. Owen’s judgemental reinterpretation of the binding of Isaac is one suchexample, and another by the same author can be found in ‘Dulce et decorum est’,which rejects and ironicizes Horace’s dictum (preached ‘to children ardent forsome desperate glory’), by presenting it at the end of the horrific description of a

14 Ibid. 29.15 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ (1917); Owen, ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (1917); Sassoon, ‘Survivors’

(1918); unless specified otherwise, all poems by British war poets cited in this essay were retrieved from The FirstWorldWar Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford,5www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit4, accessed 13 Apr. 2014.

16 Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, trans. Hilary Putnam (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 56.17 Grosz and Herzfelde, Art is in Danger (1925), quoted in Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Dada (London, 2006), 229.18 Robert Graves, ‘RecallingWar’, in Collected Poems (NewYork, 1959), 121.19 Blindman No. 2 NewYork, May 1917. ‘Dead’ versus ‘alive’ was another pertinent dichotomy.20 Ezra Pound, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, pt. V (1920),5www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/1741814, accessed 13

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gas attack.21 In dismissing Horace’s verses as ‘the old lie’, Owen rejects the romanticnotions of warfare in favour of a realist view that sees horror where others had hailedheroism, suffering where others had seen sacrifice. This theme recurs in numerousliterary works of the time, frequently in the mouths of ‘old men’ who represent the es-tablishment, such as Remarque’s schoolmaster Kantorek or Siegfried Sassoon’s Bishopin the chilling poem ‘They’.But the rejection of past giants was not limited to anti-war utterances, extending

itself to the entirety of Western art, music, and religion. Even those who had not lostfaith entirely in the riches of past culture were unable to draw inspiration from themafter the war, preferring more contemporary influences in their place. In ‘DeadMusicians’, Siegfried Sassoon turns to Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart thus:

You have no part with lads who foughtAnd laughed and suffered at my side.Your fugues and symphonies have broughtNo memory of my friends who died.For when my brain is on their trackIn slangy speech I call them back.With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;22

Indeed, foxtrot, ragtime, and other jazz influences became central ingredients in post-war modernist music, in particular that of Schulhoff.23

But by far the most theatrical rejections of past culture came from the Dadaistmovement, with whom Schulhoff was closely associated in the years after the war. InArt is in Danger (1925), Grosz and Herzfelde embark on a spree of great-namedropping only to subject them to typically colourful Dadaist rhetoric:

Goethe under bombardment, Nietzsche in rucksack, Jesus in the trenches . . . it’s all the same,whether one just blustersçor gives forth with a sonnet from Petrarch, Shakespeare, or Rilke;whether one gilds boot-heels or carves Madonnas: the shooting goes on, profiteering goes on,hunger goes on, lying goes on; why all that art?24

Their solution, the Dadaist movement, was ‘a reaction to the head-in-the-cloudstendency of so-called holy art, whose disciples brooded over cubes and Gothic artwhile the generals were painting in blood’.25 Note the centrality of Cubism here: begin-ning less than a decade before Dadaism, the two movements were essentially contem-porary. But the founders of Cubismwere established artists before the war. For Dadaists,creating continuity between Cubism and pre-First World War culture (‘disciples of

21 See also part IV of Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’: ‘Died some, pro patria, non ‘‘dulce’’ non ‘‘etde¤ cor’’ . . .’,5www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/1741814, accessed 13 Apr. 2014.

22 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Dead Musicians’, Counter-attack, and Other Poems (NewYork, 1918), 58^9. Copyright SiegfriedSassoon by kind permission of the Estate of George Sassoon.

23 The turn to styles atypical of high art has an artistic parallel in the caricaturist style of George Grosz, and inJosef Lada’s cartoon-like illustrations to S� vejk.

24 Grosz and Herzfelde, ‘Art is in Danger’ (1925).The incompatibility of religion with the horrors of the FirstWorldWar, signified here by the image of Jesus in the trenches, is also a common theme. The use of the Binding of Isaacwas discussed above, and other examples include Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘They’, a bitter commentary on the clergy’s en-couragement of young men at war; or Has› ek’s image of ‘a stone cross with a headless Christ’ who had ‘lost his headwhen the track was blown up’. S� vejk, 610.

25 Grosz and Herzfelde, ‘Art is in Danger’.

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holy art’) allowed them to assert their independence from older artists and their innov-ations. This is also apparent in the manifesto Dada Excites Everything, published by agroup of Dadaist artists in 1921:

cubism constructs a cathedral of artistic liver pasteWHAT DOES DADA DO?

expressionism poisons artistic sardinesWHAT DOES DADA DO?

simultaneism is still at its first artistic communionWHAT DOES DADA DO?

futurism wants to mount in an artistic lyricism-elevatorWHAT DOES DADA DO?

unanism embraces allism and fishes with an artistic lineWHAT DOES DADA DO?

neo-classicism discovers the good deeds of artistic artWHAT DOES DADA DO?

paroxysm makes a trust of all artistic cheesesWHAT DOES DADA DO?

ultraism recommends the mixture of these seven artistic thingsWHAT DOES DADA DO?

creationism vorticism imagism also propose some artistic recipesWHAT DOES DADA DO?

WHAT DOES DADA DO?50 francs reward to the person who finds the best

way to explain DADA to us26

The spirit of tomfoolery present in this manifesto is a central feature in Dadaist art,frequently expressing itself in acts of cultural vandalism and artistic mischief againstmasters of the past, whom Dadaists enjoyed imagining in the most mundane circum-stances they could possibly conjure up. In the USA, Marcel Duchamp painted agoatee and moustache on the Mona Lisa, in Switzerland Hannah Ho« ch’s imaginarypainter Gotthold Heavenlykingdom is plagued with visions of ‘Michelangelo washingup the cups’,27 and in Berlin, Russian Dadaist composer Yefim Golyshev introducedhis Antisymphonie with a diatribe against ‘Herr Johann Sebastian Bach’s . . .well-tempered trash’.28 Art, music, and philosophy, from Bach to Braque, from Palestrinato Picasso, and from Horace to Nietzsche were all part of the irrelevant, old, and sickpast. Much of this spirit was to find its way into Schulhoff ’s music.In sum, in the years following the war, artistic and literary gerontophobia and patri-

cide were the name of the game, shared by many of Schulhoff ’s contemporariesthroughout the world, and expressing the wish to destroy that which was alreadyextant in order to rebuild from the start. The arsenal of this ‘mainstream avant-garde’consisted of strongly modernist imagery, the preference for popular over traditional‘high art’ (e.g. fox-trot and rag-time in music, and caricature in the visual arts),

26 ‘Dada Excites Everything’, Dada Collective (1921). Quoted in MaryAnn Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lin-coln, Nebr., 2001), 290.

27 Hannah Ho« ch,The Painter (1920).Translation byAnne Halley taken from Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife:TheWeimar Photomontages of Hannah Ho« ch (New Haven and London, 1993), 216^18.

28 Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada (Steinbach/Giessen,1970).Translation fromMel Gordon, ‘Dada Berlin: AHistory of Performance (1918^1920)’, Drama Review, 18/2 [‘Rehearsal Procedures Issue and Berlin Dada’] ( June1974), 114^24 at 118.

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ironic allusions to past culture through explicit reference or quotation, collage andmontage-related techniques (allowing decontextualization of pre-existing traditionalmaterials), and an all-pervading spirit of irreverence towards institutional art. Addedto this was a rejection of the romantic and heroic connotations of war, replacing high-flown slogans such as Dulce et decorum est or war-associated genres such as marches orhymns with harsh realism and a direct appeal to emotion and humanist values.It is in the light of this post-war climate that I propose to interpret Schulhoff ’s music

and letters, focusing on the four works for string quartet written in the years followingthe First World War. At a superficial glance, these four works cover four distinctstyles: post-romanticism in an early-Schoenbergian vein in the first two movements ofthe Op. 25 String Quartet (‘no. 0’) of 1918; a form of neo-classicism in the last twomovements of the same work; a suite of dance movements with some Dadaist elementsin the Five Pieces of 1923; and a modern nationalist style a' la Jana¤ c› ek or Barto¤ k in thetwo numbered string quartets of 1924 and 1925. As a group they largely encapsulateSchulhoff ’s multiplicity of styles up until (but not including) his final phase of socialistrealism. They also illustrate much of the problem of Schulhoff ’s reception, for each ofthem has been evaluated as non-provocative, relatively conformist, and even deriva-tive.29 In the light of the artistic techniques discussed above, each of these worksassumes a new, more polemical significance, intimately connected to their relationshipwith pre-war musical traditions. Furthermore, awareness of the system of dichotomiesreviewed above enables a renewed understanding of reviews of these works, which,rather than dismissing them for their triviality, were actually praising them for theirmodernity. Each of these quartets responds to the dissonance between war and culturein its own way, yet taken together they present a coherent narrative, understood andresponded to by Schulhoff ’s contemporaries, leading from rage and rejection to recon-struction and renewal.Like many of the artists and writers quoted above, Schulhoff participated in the

fighting in the First World War and returned a changed man. His diary entriesexpress his anger at the perpetrators of the war, his sense of disillusionment, and hismission to reject the past and start anew. The war, Schulhoff wrote, was ‘the lowestpoint ever to have been attained by mankind’; it left him ‘wretched and defiant’, andled him into rejecting the old world in order to create ‘the country of the future’.30 Inanother entry he uses typical images of youth versus age to describe his emotionalodyssey: ‘I am told I was once an eager-eyed boy. How I must have changed! . . . Ihave lost passion and sensitivity to eventsçI am getting older! I have become rock-hard and see things coolly and dispassionately, as they are!’31 Despite this, his outputin the last months of the war (which he spent on leave) and in the months that imme-diately followed it is written largely in a traditional, post-romantic expressionist vein.

29 In the preface to the new Schott edition of the Op. 25 quartet, the editor comments that ‘the prevailing historicalcompositional technique and stylistic devices . . . could [not] have been appropriate instruments of expression for com-posers of his generation’; the Five Pieces with their assumed triviality were dismissed by Eberhard Preu�ner as ‘cutedance trifles . . .nice and peppy dance pieces and no more’ (‘niedliche Tanzbagatellen . . .Also alles in allem: netteund schwungvolle Tanzstu« cke und nicht mehr’; Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 52 (1925), 581) and only excused by ErichSteinhard because ‘a dance suite is no requiem!’ (‘Eine Tanzsuite ist kein Requiem!’ Auftakt, 5 (1925), 34); of thenumbered string quartets of 1924^5, Edwin Evans surmised that Schulhoff ‘studies his contemporaries too assidu-ously’; ‘Venice Festival’, Musical Times, 66 (1925), 920.

30 Diary entry 2 Dec. 1918. He was also alert to the problems that might be caused by his Jewishness, likeninghimself to the wandering Jew: ‘I begin the eternal life of Ahasver!’ See Josef Bek, Erwin Schulhoff, Leben und Werk(Hamburg, 1994), 42.

31 Diary entry, 13 Jan. 1918, quoted ibid. 41.

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Works like the Fu« nf Grotesken Op. 21, and the Fu« nf Burlesken Op. 23 may suggest a spiritof irony and wit, but they are strongly indebted to Mahler, Strauss, and most of allReger (e.g. the Sechs Burlesken Op. 58 of 1901).

SCHULHOFF’S ANABASIS: STRING QUARTET OP. 25

The String Quartet Op. 25, composed in the summer of 1918, stands out among theseworks. Robin Holloway described it as a work which ‘queerly grafts an idiom of mockHaydn/Mozart with dissonant mocking grimaces and moments of Frenchifieddressing onto the native stem of late romantic grand gestures and Reger/early Schoen-berg tonal meltdown’.32 While one may disagree with Holloway’s negative evaluationof the Op. 25 Quartet, the hodgepodge of styles within the work is undeniable. Andyet the styles are not consistently confused throughout. The first two movements (withthe curious exception of the first theme itself) are comfortably nestled in an idiombest described as post-Romantic, fitting snugly into Schulhoff ’s style of the period. Butthe last two movements anachronistically revert to themes and gestures more typicalof Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Despite this discrepancy of styles, strongthematic connections between the movements leave little doubt that the work was care-fully planned in its entirety from the start. In particular, the opening seven bars ofthe first theme of the first movement (bb. 5^11) provide the motivic material for thetwo main themes of the finale (see Ex. 3).33 The theme marked a is presented in bothmovements by the second violin, doubled a sixth below by the viola and above aquaver pedal point in the cello. Motif b (it is more a motif than a theme) featuresprominently in the second theme of the Finale.34 These thematic relationshipsbetween the two movements enable the return of the opening theme of the quartet inthe middle of the Finale (as a temporary surrogate for the first theme), and later thereturn of the opening unison statement at the close of the quartet.35

This shows that these cyclic gestures are not merely afterthoughts, superficialgestures to late Romantic practices, but were instead carefully prepared from the verystart of the work, and woven into its thematic substance throughout.36 But this onlymakes the discrepancy of styles all the more odd. A cyclic structure is normallyassociated with the ‘methods of establishing a tighter cohesion in multi-movementforms’37 yet here any such cohesion is undermined by the stylistic variety betweenmovements, suggesting that Schulhoff ’s use of cyclic structure is insincere. A similarinsincerity can be recognized in the manner in which Schulhoff invokes Classical

32 Holloway, ‘Revival of the Fittest?’, 17.33 That these bars stand out within the first movement in their retrospective style is further evidence that the styl-

istic diversity was part of the work’s original conception.34 Some listeners have suggested that this theme may be a reference to the finale of Mozart’s ‘Hunt’quartet.The re-

semblance is not, in my view, a smoking gun (the resemblance to the finale of Haydn’s ‘Clock’ Symphony is greater),but it does fit in nicely with the resemblance of the motif in b. 53 of Schulhoff ’s finale to that in b. 17 of Mozart’s.Likewise, it complements the quote of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet in Schulhoff ’s Menuetto (see below). In anycase, the similarity to both Haydn and Mozart illustrates that Schulhoff ’s theme is overtly classical in style, even ifit is not a direct reference to a specific work.

35 In the preface to the Schott edition, it is conjectured that these thematic parallels are the result of late changes inthe score, designed to satisfy the supposed preferences of the jury of the Berlin Mendelssohn Prize. However, thenear identity of themes between the movements shows that Schulhoff had planned the cyclic structure well in advance.

36 This was entirely lost on the critic of the Dresdner Anzeiger, who, in the Apr. 1919 issue, conjectured that themixture of styles in the piece was the result of Schulhoff ’s having composed it piecemeal while studying each style ata different time (‘so stellt das ganze Stu« ck ein merkwu« rdiges Stilgemisch dar, das sich vielleicht dadurch erkla« renla« �t, da� die einzelnen Sa« tze zeitlich sehr wesentlich voneinander als Ergebnisse jeweiliger Studien entstanden sind’).

37 Hugh Macdonald, ‘Cyclic form’, Grove Music Online, accessed 18 July 2013.

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gestures and phrase structures in the Menuetto (Ex. 4). This movement begins with a Dmajor theme whose seductive Viennese Gemu« tlichkeit would have been perfectly at easein an early Schubert quartet. After repeating this theme verbatim in the mediant,Schulhoff inserts a Haydnesque rustic gesture in C major (c.f. Op. 33 No. 2, Op. 20

EX. 3. Schulhoff, Quartet Op. 25: (a) I, bb. 5^11; (b) IV, bb. 1^4; (c) IV, bb. 46^9. � SchottMusic, Mainz

(a)

(b)

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No. 2, and many others), which is then repeated in G. A variant of this theme thenfeigns an approach to E flat major, only to be deftly deflected at the last moment to aclosing theme in A, which is none other than a transposed quotation of the minuetfrom Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, K. 465 (Ex. 5).Like the cyclic gestures in the Finale, Schulhoff ’s use of such historical style appears

far from sincere. It is more plausible to understand it within the context of the ironicreferences to past masters discussed above, a tongue-in-cheek gesture involving anaivety of style that is but presumed. Indeed, as Holloway suggested, the referencesare not acts of great reverence and homage, but of mockery and ridicule. By thedouble bar, Schulhoff ’s minuet has already made reference to three types of classicalminuets, stringing them together with no obvious thematic coherence and with a seem-ingly random harmonic order, sounding like a harmonic blind man’s buff butsomehow making the standard sixteen-bar journey from D to its dominant A via thebizarre route of F, C, G, and E flat. Normally, the purpose of a typical Classical sym-metric phrase structure would be to assist in coherently articulating the tonal motionof a given section (in this case the modulation from tonic to dominant). Yet here,Schulhoff sidesteps this purpose with parodic effect. One is reminded of S� vejk’sBude› jovice anabasis, a parody on Xenophon (another post-war mockery of a classicheroic text), consisting of a bizarre and tortuous journey from Ta¤ bor to C� eske¤Bude› jovice, which included a trek in the opposite direction, a circular march fromP|¤sek to P|¤sek, and finally a brief train journey to C� eske¤ Bude› jovice (Fig. 1).38

Schulhoff ’s last step in particular, involving a shift of the harmonic context by atritone (from E flat to A), is achieved with such complete nonchalance that to take it

EX. 3. Continued

(c)

38 This is not to suggest any direct influence between the two works. (Although Schulhoff probably later read S� vejk,his quartet pre-dates Has› ek’s novel by three years, and it is not too likely that Has› ek knew Schulhoff ’s quartet.) Imerely wish to point out the shared spirit of irreverence towards the Classics (Mozart and Xenophon) in the twoworks, as well as the similarity in the way this is achieved: an overcomplicated parody of a path that could havebeen traversed with utmost simplicity.

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seriously would demand considerable effort. This piecemeal thematic sequence andharmonic discontinuity between the segments gives the music an impression of acollage of ready-made (and pseudo ready-made) materials slapped together inpseudo-haphazard manner, reminiscent of Dada founder Tristan Tzara’s method for

EX. 4. Schulhoff, Quartet Op. 25, III, bb. 1^16. � Schott Music, Mainz

1.

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the creation of Dadaist poetry: ‘Take a newspaper, take scissors, choose an article, cutit out, then cut out each word, put them all in a bag, and shake gently.’39 The irreverentyet explicit quotation of what may be considered ‘the Mona Lisa of string quartets’,Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet,40 foreshadows Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (‘the moustacheon the Mona Lisa’) created the following year. In sum, therefore, Schulhoff ’s resort tostylistic and formal anachronisms is nestled comfortably in the context of ironic refer-ences to past figures and historic stylistic devices that were in vogue at the time. Andinstead of representing a conformist aesthetic, as these movements have previouslybeen viewed, they are an irreverent and mischievous pastiche.The quotes and the clas-sical gestures debunk rather than pay homage, vilify rather than admire, creating notan act of tribute, but one of sacrilege.

‘COLONEL SCHULHOFF, MUSIKDADA’: THE FIVE PIECES

In early January 1919, Schulhoff moved to stay with his sister,Viola, an artist active inDresden and well acquainted with the Dadaist circles there. The ironic spirit alreadyapparent in the Op. 25 Quartet quickly helped Schulhoff establish connections withlocal Dadaists, who had been through similar experiences and were at similar stagesin their careers. He befriended the painters Dix and Griebel as well as the BerlinDadaist, George Grosz, the first to expose him to jazz. Schulhoff viewed the musicalexperiments that followed as musical Dadaism, characterized by vehement attemptsto challenge traditional notions of musical practice, and by strongly anti-military andanti-national sentiments. None of Schulhoff ’s works for string quartet is strictlyDadaist, but as we will presently see, they are indebted to Dadaism, and can only befully understood through an appreciation of his Dadaist works. His best knownDadaist piece is the third of the Fu« nf Pittoresken, a movement consisting entirely of

EX. 5. Mozart, Quartet K. 465, III, bb. 17^20

39 Translation taken from EddieWolfram, History of Collage (NewYork, 1975), 77. Tzara’s own literary style in theperiod was remarkably similar, according to Rhonda Garelick ‘making overt use of myriad other texts’, which resultin ‘more of a collage than a coherent drama’. His 1924 play Mouchoir de Nuages is ‘liberally sprinkled . . .with referencesto Symbolist poetry, nineteenth-century melodrama, Huysman’s novel La-Bas, and, of course, Shakespeare’. SeeRhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, 2007), 218.

40 The iconic status enjoyed by Mozart’s work today, akin to that of Leonardo’s masterpiece, dates back to the early19th c. An example contemporary with Schulhoff is Schoenberg’s analysis in his Zusammenhang, Kontrapunkt, Instrumen-tation, Formenlehre (1917).

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FIG. 1. The Anabases of S� vejk and Schulhoff

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rests, the debt of which to Futurism is clear both from its title, In Futurum, and from itsprobing of the limits of the definition of music (Pl. 1).41 Despite this, Schulhoff clearlyassociates the movement with Dadaism rather than with the militant futurists: thework is dedicated to ‘Painter and Dadaist George Gro�’42 and features a Dadaistpoem by Grosz as an epigraph. Also, In Futurum includes some anti-military mischief:the General Pause that follows the cadenza-like bar (frantic hemidemisemiquaver restsin the right hand above long rests in the left hand) towards the end of the movementis marked Marschall Pause. Marianne Betz has suggested that this play on words refersto Grosz, who used to parade around in the uniform of a field marshal with a hugecardboard cross, thus earning the nickname ‘Marschall Grosz Metamusiker’, given tohim by ‘Colonel Schulhoff, Musikdada’.43

The anti-nationalist and anti-war Dadaist agenda is even more obvious in theSymphonia germanica of the same year (‘for the use of all the limbs of the body’),44 inwhich the singer belts out (‘as in a state of trance’çwie imTrancezustande) a bastardizedversion of the future hymn of theWeimar Republic, Deutschland u« ber Alles (concludingwith the verse: ‘if once, we hope, should Wilhelm return, flourish the black, white,and red flag, and we all [in highest ecstasy!], German men die so happy, oh the hero’sdeath!’), to the accompaniment of randomly placed mechanical noises (Pl. 2). Out-spoken criticism of Weimar values was a strong feature of Dada, verbally stated inRaoul Hausmann’s Pamphlet gegen die Weimarische Lebensauffassung (‘Pamphlet againstthe Weimar Way of Life’), and visually in Hana Ho« ch’s painting from the same year‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly CulturalEpoch of Germany’. The latter has some remarkable parallels with the Symphoniagermanica, depicting the Kaiser, Hindenburg, and the Crown Prince dressed as chorusgirls, Ebert and Schacht, the new leaders of Weimar, flying across the collage alongsideacrobats and sports stars, all in the midst of paraphernalia of exploding machineparts.45 Thus, like his contemporaries, Schulhoff ’s Dadaism was heavily motivated byanti-war and consequently anti-nationalist sentiments, presumably stemming from hisexperiences in theWar.

41 Luigi Russolo’s ‘The Art of Noise’, the Futurist Manifesto of music, classifies all varieties of noises, but is thunder-ingly silent about silence. It is tempting to interpret Schulhoff ’s movement as a reaction to Russolo’s essay, withwhich Schulhoff was likely to have been familiar. However, it is important to bear in mind that Schulhoff ’s piece isstrongly anti-militaristic, while Russolo finds delight in weaponry and the sounds of war. For an interesting study ofthis movement and its cultural context see Marianne Betz, ‘‘‘In Futurum’’ ç von Schulhoff zu Cage’, Archiv fu« rMusikwissenschaft, 56 (1999), 331^46.

42 Grosz onlyAnglicized the spelling of his name upon his move to the USA in 1933.The inconsistency between theEnglish spelling of his private name and the German spelling of his surname is present in the original publication ofthe score.

43 Betz, ‘‘‘In Futurum’’’. See also Tobias Widmaier, ‘Colonel Schulhoff, Musikdada ç Unsinn als Ausdruck vonLebendigkeit’, Neue Zeitschrift fu« r Musik, 3 (1994), 14^21.

44 There is a curious tendency towards literary dismembering in the post-war period, perhaps following the all toocommon sights of dismembered veterans. In addition to Schulhoff ’s score for head, left arm, right leg, left leg, rightarm, and nose, we have Tzara’s play Le C�ur a' Gaz (a conversation between Mouth, Ear, Eye, Nose, Neck, andEyebrow); Rupert Brooke’s ‘Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body’; and Hugo Kersten’s ‘Made in Germany’:‘A belly that is busy guarding its property cannot be made to recognize the foundations of reason or humanity. Andsince no head is available, the bellies join forces and acclimate themselves to what they call the German Revolution.Long Live the Belly of the Revolution! In that case there are, thank God, no heads to be knocked off. To a stomachone can administer a purgative, but not send it to the guillotine. And safer is better, and readiness is all!!’, DerEinzige 1, no. 27/28 (1 Nov. 1919), 325. Translation from Brigid Doherty, ‘Figures of the Pseudorevolution’, October, 84(1998), 64^89. Some years later, the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms dismembered the protagonist of his vignetteThe Red-Haired Man (1937) out of existence.

45 See5www.dreamcollage.com/hannah-hoch.htm4, accessed 24 Apr. 2012.

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www.dreamcollage.com/hannah-hoch.htm


Schulhoff continued to write Dadaist music until 1923, producing works such asthe Bassnachtigall (for solo double bassoon, with its farcical reference to a Bachfugueçanother moustached Mona Lisa!) and Die Wolkenpumpe to Dadaist texts byHans Arp, as well as works with jazz and ragtime-inspired movements. Coming at

PL. 1. Schulhoff, In Futurum, No. 3 of the Fu« nf Pittoresken

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the tail-end of this period is Schulhoff ’s Five Pieces of 1923, designed in the tradition ofthe dance suite, including a Viennese Waltz (alla breve!), a Czech dance, a LatinAmerican Tango, an Italian Tarantella, a Serenade of unclear nationality (perhapsHungarian?), and a sixth Napoletana movement, ultimately discarded by the composer.This kind of harmonious unification not only of Europe but (with the Tangomovement) of the whole world within the traditional framework of the suite appearsat odds with Schulhoff ’s post-war ironies and his anti-traditionalist approach. Further-more, the work incorporates isolated Dadaist moments, which belie its otherwise in-nocuous framework. In what follows I will argue that the changes in the work’s layoutas well as its Dadaist vestiges are best understood if it is appreciated as a transitionalwork, conceived originally as a Dadaist response to the war and subsequently toneddown to fit a new and more constructive conception of post-FirstWorldWar music.The Five Pieces went through a series of changes before reaching the final five-

movement form. They were first performed as a collection of six pieces, including the

PL. 2. Schulhoff, autograph of the first page of the Symphonia germanica

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later-discarded, highly dissonant Napoletana movement. Two reviews of the perform-ance at the 1924 IGNM festival at Salzburg refer to it as Four Pieces without mentioningwhich of the original six were performed. Schulhoff also originally intended to includea seventh movement, Alla marcia militaristica in modo europaico, for which there exist twosketches. There is no documentation of the reasons for the exclusion of the Napoletanaor the abandonment of the march in Schulhoff ’s final version. Nevertheless, recon-structing the original conception of the work provides some insight into the reasonsfor the considerable distance between the first and final versions. The first movementis a Viennese Waltz, absurdly notated in cut time (Ex. 6), and thus consistent withSchulhoff ’s other Dadaist gestures of incongruity such as the Bassnachtigal’s incorpor-ation of a Bach-like fugue in a work for solo contrabassoon. The discarded AllaNapoletanamovement would have added to the mischief through this movement’s radic-ally dissonant and practically minimalist language. Finally, the very inclusion of aEuropean military march could hardly have been construed in any other way than asa response to the war. The march would have been likely to either open or concludethe set (possibly both, in the tradition of serenades like Beethoven’s Op. 8 or Dohna¤ nyi’sOp. 10), and within this framework, the use of the traditional genre of the dance suitewould not have been understood as a harmonious musical unification of Europe.Instead, Schulhoff ’s work may be interpreted as suggesting that tradition unites theworld not through music, but through war.The extensive first fragment of the march exemplifies Schulhoff ’s interest in unifica-

tion through strife and discord. The movement presents the march rhythm with thethree top voices unified rhythmically, but a semitone apart. The march theme is thenpresented by the violin and the viola a seventh apart (Ex. 7). The ‘European mode’thus consists of the S� vejkian image of a major mode (viola) and a Lydian mode(violin) marching side by side but in total discord, and speaking different languages(or modes).46 Interestingly, on the score the two instruments appear in perfect unison.They look the same, but due to the different clefs, they sound different both in pitchand mode, producing a discordant result from a harmonious-looking text. Thisexample of twentieth-centuryAugenmusik marches hand in hand with the visible but in-audible alla breve notation of the Waltz, and the intricately notated yet completelysilent In Futurum, providing another link between this work and Schulhoff ’s musicalDada. With the square waltz, the discordant Alla Napoletana, and the European modemarch, the work in its seven-movement form would therefore have been another ofSchulhoff ’s extreme Dadaist provocations.With the march incomplete and the Napoletana discarded, most of this is, however,

absent from the final, published version of the Five Pieces. A number of writers havenoticed the general ironic spirit of the work,47 but this is no more than a shadow ofthe provocativeness of the original, projected version, nor does the final versionmanifest any anti-militaristic sentiments. Both in his last-minute decision to cut theAlla Napoletana movement and in having left the march incomplete, Schulhoff appearsto have mollified his initial Dadaist approach in favour of a less provocative one. In

46 The comic potential inherent in the mixture of nationalities and particularly of languages in the Austro-Hungarian army is repeatedly exploited in S� vejk. It is interesting to note that about 250 years earlier, Heinrich Ignazvon Biber in his Battalia made a musical reference to the same comic qualities in an army of mercenaries: in themovement Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor (‘The profligate society of common humour’), all the instrumentsconcurrently play folksongs of different nationalities, creating a humorous effect of total cacophony.

47 Holloway, ‘Revival of the Fittest?’, 17; Christian Utz, ‘‘‘Aller Ernst ist Verblo« dung’’: Ironie und Montage in derMusik Erwin Schulhoffs’ (MA thesis, Universita« t fu« r Musik und darstellende KunstWien, 1995).

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this he is once again entirely in tune with his fellow Dadaists. In the two yearspreceding the composition of the pieces, the Dadaist movement had been beset by aseries of disagreements, culminating in a final break between Andre¤ Breton andTristan Tzara after the former provoked a riot at a performance of Tzara’s Le C�ur a'

EX. 6. Schulhoff, Alla Valse viennese, No. 1 of the Five Pieces for String Quartet, bb. 1^16

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Gaz on 6 July 1923. Dadaists dispersed in different directions, seeking new and moreconstructive avenues of expression: Marcel Janco, Hans Richter, and Kurt Schwittersturned to Constructivism; Breton and Francis Picabia founded Surrealism, publishingits first manifesto in 1924; and in the same year, Tzara published his last Dadaistwork, the ‘ironic tragedy’ Mouchoir de nuages, which was ‘an attempt at theatrical

EX. 7. Schulhoff, Alla marcia militaristica in modo europaico. Incomplete sketch for the Five Pieces,bb. 1^14. � Schott Music, Mainz

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renewal rather than theatrical demolition’.48 Schulhoff moved to Prague in October1923, shortly after the break between Breton and Tzara, and he completed the manu-script of the Five Pieces the following December. It is probable that the disintegrationof the Dadaist movement as well as Schulhoff ’s move away from its hub (Dadaismnever really caught on in Czechoslovakia) encouraged him to tone down his originalintentions, resulting in the Five Pieces as we now know them.Yet it would be an injustice to the Five Pieces to consider them as no more than a

watered-down version of the original. Within the remaining movements of this worklay the kernel of Schulhoff ’s most enduring style, characterized by a profusion ofdance rhythms, and a direct and deliberately unsophisticated musical language. ForSchulhoff, this was to be the foundation of a new phase, in which he sought a construct-ive mode of rejecting old, pre-war principles, and proposed a ‘young’ style instead.This was not lost on his contemporaries. In particular, the Prague critic ErichSteinhard, one of Schulhoff ’s staunchest supporters, makes repeated use of the ingredi-ents discussed aboveçmodernist imagery, dismissive references to past masters, andage-related imageryçwhen writing about Schulhoff ’s work. Steinhard’s first review ofthe Five Pieces, published in Auftakt following the successful premiere at the SalzburgFestival, evaluates the ‘electrifying pieces for string quartet’ as pieces that ‘do not wantto be more than they areçthoroughly healthy, entertaining and brilliantlycreated music’.49 Steinhard’s choice of words reflects his distinctly modernist evaluationof the work: ‘electrifying’ has unmistakably modernist connotations,50 while‘healthy’, as we have seen, was practically synonymous with ‘young’ and hence‘modern’. Accordingly, Schulhoff ’s detractors, the sticklers for tradition, were depictedas unhealthy and old: Steinhard’s second review of the Five Pieces, following a badlyreceived performance in Prague, is entitled Arteriosclerosis in the Chamber Music Societyand is of an unmistakably polemic tone. Following is an extensive quotation from thereview:

The pieces . . .burst, as is proper, with temperament and rhythmic life. . . .One would notwish to look for cramped music in dances, with worried grimaces, as had become almostfashionable throughout the world in the post-war period. On the other hand, with modernmusic, one would not wish to long for an epigonic Romantic world either. There still is,thank God, merry and cheerful music full of brio! But this is what a mostly antedilu-vian audience did not want to understand. For years, people have been used to Haydn,Mozart, and Romanticism . . .and fight against new things with every possible sound theyare capable of. . . . Stay at home if contemporary artists drive you mad. A dance suite is noRequiem!51

48 DavidWhitton, ‘Tristan Tzara’s Mouchoir de nuages’,Theatre Research International, 14 (1989), 271^87 at 271.49 ‘elektrisierenden Streichquartettstu« cken, die nicht mehr sein wollen, als sie sind’. Erich Steinhard, ‘Das

Salzburger Musikfest’, Auftakt, 4 (1924), 216.50 In Jack Stewart’s witty formulation: ‘Electricity was a prolific generator of futurist imagery.’ See Jack Stewart,

‘Futurism’, in Encyclopaedia of Literary Modernism, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, Conn. 2003), 153.51 ‘Die Stu« cke . . . strotzen wie sichs geho« rt, von Temperament und rhythmischem Leben. . . .Man wird doch in

Ta« nzen nicht verkrampfte Musik suchen wollen mit vergra« mten Grimassen, wie die Nachkriegszeit sie in derganzen Welt beinahe modern werden lie�. Man wird andererseits bei moderner Musik doch nicht epigonenhaftesRomantikertum ersehnen wollen. Es gibtçGott sei Dankçnoch heitere, musikantische, freudebringende Musik!

Das wollte ein gro« �tenteils verzopftes Publikum nicht begreifen. Die Leute sind seit Jahren an Haydn, Mozartund die Romantik gewohnt . . .wehren sich mit allen mo« glichen Gera« uschen, deren sie fa« hig sind[,] gegen Neues undblamieren sich dabei unsa« glich. So wertvoll und so modern waren die Ta« nze gar nicht, liebe Pfeifer, Zischer undLacher, da� es zum bu« rgerlichen Anstand gepa�t ha« tte sich aufzuregen. Bleibt doch zu Hause, wenn Euch dieZeitgenossen rasend machen. Eine Tanzsuite ist kein Requiem!’ Steinhard, ‘Arteriosklerose im Kammermusikverein’,Auftakt, 5 (1925), 34.

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For Steinhard, Schulhoff ’s ‘healthy . . .music, sparkling with life’52 is the antithesis ofthe aging (‘antediluvian’) and unhealthy (‘arteriosclerotic’) Prague audience. By con-trasting a dance suite and a Requiem in his closing sentence, Steinhard was not dis-missing this work as trivial or insincere but was recognizing it as a living rather thana dead one, belonging to the young, healthy generation, and not to the old, sickly one.The principal distinction at the heart of Steinhard’s review is thus between an olderversus a younger generation, a decrepit and sick generation versus a healthy androbust one, a dead generation versus one bursting with life. Thus, in keeping with thespirit of its original Dadaist version, the final version of the Five Pieces was viewed as awork rejecting an old style, albeit not through a destructive nihilism, but through afresh and constructive approach, which was to come to full fruition in the twonumbered quartets.

GOOD OLD SMETANA AND JANA¤ C� EK THE YOUNGEST OF THE YOUTHS:

THE NUMBERED QUARTETS

The following years, 1924 and 1925, saw the composition of Schulhoff ’s last works forquartet, the two numbered string quartets, the second of which featured in theopening of this essay. Some vestiges of Schulhoff ’s Dadaism carry into the works ofthis period, including his partiality to jazz (e.g. the Tempo di Fox in the secondmovement of the Second Quartet), his predilection to wit and to ironic devices (e.g.the mock-operatic viola solo in the second movement of the First Quartet), and hisgeneral conviction that old values must be replaced with new ones. Nevertheless, thereis little of the harsh provocativeness of his earlier works in this period, which representsan altogether calmer phase in his compositional career. For this reason it is easy tooverlook the polemical nature of Schulhoff ’s works of the mid-1920s, to de-problematizethem as attempts to produce an attractive, energetic yet ultimately naive musicalstyle. However, as in the case of the final version of the Five Pieces, Schulhoff ’s worksat this time were anything but naive. They were driven by an ideology stemmingfrom the very same roots as those that gave rise to his Dadaist style. It is in this lightthat I propose to interpret the two numbered string quartets, and particularly the ref-erences to Smetana in the Second Quartet, presented at the opening of this essay.Before discussing the significance of the Smetana references, indeed in order to givemy interpretation of these quotes greater credibility, I will establish two crucial points.The first, in which I will draw from Schulhoff ’s writings, is that despite his mollifiedmusical language, Schulhoff ’s aesthetics in this period were still shaped largely by hispost-war sensibilities with the rejection of pre-war culture serving as the chief drivingforce behind his music. The second, in which I will draw from reviews of Schulhoff ’sworks, is that his audience fully appreciated his music, in particular the two stringquartets, as epitomizing those aesthetics.Schulhoff did not theorize much about his methods of composition in this period,

but he wrote a number of essays about contemporary musicians that reflect his ownaesthetics at the time. Particularly revealing is his 1925 essay in the Musikbla« tter desAnbruch in honour of Jana¤ c› ek’s seventieth birthday. Designed as an appraisal of theolder composer’s style and his significance to modern music, the essay is in reality amusical manifesto, laying out the direction ‘new’ Czech music is to take. Correspondingwith the Neue Sachlichkeit tone of the essay, Schulhoff ’s language abounds in post-war

52 Steinhard, ‘Das Salzburger Musikfest’, Auftakt, 4 (1924), 216.

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rhetoric and content, using the standard imagery of age and health to describe the re-jection of past masters. With the 70-year-old Jana¤ c› ek ostensibly belonging to the pre-war generation, Schulhoff has his work cut out to define him as a ‘young’ composer,and he devotes large portions of the beginning and the end of the essay to arguingthat the septuagenarian is, so to speak, one of the boys. The essay opens thus:

One who would look up Leos› Jana¤ c› ek’s name in Hugo Riemann’s Musiklexikon of 1919 wouldsearch in vain. He has only found his way into it along with the younger generation, and (asamazing as it may seem), as a septuagenarian Jana¤ c› ek counts among the youngest generationof composers, whose battles he has also fought out. But while many of these younger com-posers surrender or become pessimistic due to a lack of stamina or for other reasons, this as-siduous septuagenarian with his iron determination is unique. Anyone who beholds him,with his powerful, leonine head, marvels at these eyes ablaze with the fire of a young man, be-traying no symptoms of old age, nor any signs of physical or mental fatigue. A lively gait,animated speech, ideas permeated with unlimited youthful optimismçthis is Leos› Jana¤ c› ekas the septuagenarian and youngest of the young, the most steadfast of the steadfast!53

It is only after continuing for a while in a similar vein in order to establish that Jana¤ c› ekis ‘strictly kosher’ that Schulhoff finally expounds his significance for a new Czechmusic, one liberated from the shackles of the past. Specifically, Schulhoff credits theolder composer for having freed Czech music from the Wagner^Smetana legacy,which, as described at the opening of this article, suffered from verbosity, excess ofemotion, and unnatural length. Instead, Jana¤ c› ek strove for a ‘natural impact’, anincreased dramatic pace, and a more effective psychological development of themes.The image of Jana¤ c› ek as an intrepid youth challenging the decrepit dictates of trad-ition pervades the entire essay.54

As suggested by Josef Bek, Schulhoff ’s appraisal of Jana¤ c› ek provides a key to under-standing his own aesthetics at the time.55 Schulhoff ’s mention of Jana¤ c› ek’s Musiklexikondebut in the 1922 edition was surely the result of Schulhoff ’s having made his owndebut in the same issue (alongside the existing entry for his uncle, Julius), and betraysa sense of kinship that he must have felt. The stylistic traits of Jana¤ c› ek’s musicenumerated in the essay are also characteristic of much of Schulhoff ’s music in thisperiod, not least the two quartets, in the interim between which the essay was written.Schulhoff ’s quartets were composed between Jana¤ c› ek’s two (1923 and 1928), andalthough I have not found any explicit evidence as to whether Schulhoff was familiarwith the older master’s first quartet, it is likely that he was. In any case, the similarities

53 ‘Wer noch in Hugo Riemanns Musiklexikon aus dem Jahre 1919 nachschlaegt, wird den Namen Leos Janacekvergeblich suchen. Er ist erst mit der jungen und ju« ngsten Generation da hinein gekommen und Janacek zaehlt, (soerstaunlich es auch klingen mag) als Siebzigja« hriger zur ju« ngsten Komponistengeneration, deren Kampf er auchauszufechten hat. Wa« hrend aber viele der Juengsten in diesen Kampfe versagen und teils durch Mangel anNervenkraft, teils durch sonstige Zusammenbru« che, vielfach zu Pessimisten werden, ist dieser siebzigja« hrigeMusikbeflissene in eiserner Konsequenz ein einzigartiger Fall. Wer ihn sieht, diesen Maechtigen, lo« wenhaften Kopf,staunt u« ber diese Augen mit dem Feuer eines Ju« nglings; nichts, was nur im geringsten greisenhaft erscheint, nichts,was irgendwie psychische oder physische Muedigkeit verraet. Beschwingte Bewegung, beseelte Sprache, seineGedanken von unbegrenzt Jugendlichem Optimismus erfu« llt . . .çdas ist Leos Jana« cek als Siebzigja« hriger undJu« ngster unter den Jungen, als Eisernster unter den Eisernen!’ ‘Leos› Jana¤ c› ek: Betrachtungen’, 237^9 (my translation)

54 In 1884^8, as editor of the periodical Hudebn|¤ listy, Jana¤ c› ek himself had waged war on Smetana’s andWagner’smusical style. Interestingly, by 1924, one year before Schulhoff ’s essay, Jana¤ c› ek had adopted a more reconciliatoryapproach to Smetana, as expressed in an article about the cycle Ma¤ vlast, published in Lidove¤ Noviny. See MichaelBeckerman, Jana¤ c› ek as Theorist (NewYork, 1994), 26, 31^3, and Mirka Zemanova¤ , Jana¤ c› ek’s Uncollected Essays on Music(London and NewYork, 1989), 188^91. I am grateful to Michael Beckerman for pointing this out.

55 Bek, Schulhoff, 74.

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between the quartets by both composers attest to a similarity of purpose. Like Jana¤ -c› ek’s quartets, Schulhoff ’s two numbered quartets are terse, brief works (each lastingless than twenty minutes in performance), comprising four movements. The firstmovement of the first quartet is a frenetic perpetuum mobile medley of dance rhythmscoupled with primitivist sonorities such as the unison pentatonic opening with itsclearly defined rhythmic profile in bars 1^6, the parallel motion in fifths in bars 7^14,and frequent simple ostinato accompaniments to repetitive rhythmic top voices(Ex. 8). Thus, in both its form and its soundscape this movement shuns the traditionalsonata form opening movement. The use of similar features in the third movement,Allegro giocoso alla Slovaca, is less surprising in place of the traditional dance-derivedmovement, as is the tripartite form of this movement. This is compensated for bySchulhoff ’s dazzling array of sparkling sonorities in the middle section of thismovement (e.g. the harmonics evoking folk instruments in b. 28, and Schulhoff ’s trade-mark left-hand pizzicatos from b. 35), which mark it as one of his most idiomatic move-ments (see Ex. 9).The second and last movements are the most unusual in the first quartet in style,

form, and function. The title of the second movement, Allegretto con moto e con malinconiagrotesca, suggests its debt to Schulhoff ’s Dadaist phase, although his humorous theatri-cality in this movement is altogether more benign. Most striking are the two mockoperatic episodes where, after a lackadaisical start, the viola gets carried away into animpassioned recitative, only to be cut short and escorted out after a brusque interrup-tion by the rest of the instruments (Ex. 10). This delightful episode mocks not only itsown daydreaming violist, but also one of Beethoven’s most revered and imitated trade-marks: the philosophical recitative-like moments in instrumental music. Another re-markable feature of this quartet is its conclusion with a slow movement, the spiritualAndante molto sostenuto, which invokes the spirit of Barto¤ k’s ‘night music’. Following therobustness and humour of the first three movements, the finale provides the workwith an ethereal conclusion, with a murmuring accompaniment to an impassionedyet remote theme (pp dolce, molto espressivo, presented by cello above the viola in theirhighest registers), eventually dissolving into silence (Ex. 11). Thus, although using astraditional an ensemble as a string quartet, and despite including the regular numberof movements within the piece, the content of the movements is highly unconventional,replacing the traditional thematic work of the first movements with modernist simpli-city of style, and shunning the customary lightness of spirit or dramatic drive of thefinale in favour of a slow and eerie departure.The Second Quartet abounds in elements featured in the first and third movements

of the First Quartet: energetic dance rhythms, abrupt and forceful explosions ofenergy, and above all simplicity of style and predominance of melody. All these arementioned by Schulhoff as essential elements necessary to achieve a departure fromSmetana’s legacy and create a Czech music of the future. Such characteristics werenot lost on contemporary critics, who admired Schulhoff ’s quartets as much for thequalities present in them as for those they deliberately avoided, thus recognizing theirimportance as works of rejection and renewal. Just as Schulhoff applauded Jana¤ c› ek’sbrevity, the English critic Edwin Evans found Schulhoff ’s First Quartet ‘commendablyshort’ and the Prague critic Erich Steinhard praised it as ‘aphoristic’ (aphoristisch).Schulhoff ’s use of the metaphor of health in describing Jana¤ c› ek’s music (gesundenMusikempfindens) is echoed by Steinhard’s similar description of Schulhoff ’s music(kerngesunde, quoted above with reference to the Five Pieces), and by Paul Schwers’spraise of Schulhoff ’s ‘healthy musical instinct’ (gesunder musikalischer Instinkt) in his

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review of the Second Quartet.56 Schulhoff extols Jana¤ c› ek’s ability to thwart the expect-ations of over-philosophical listeners by compelling them ‘to experience the music’selemental force’ (empfindet ihre elementare Wucht), while Steinhard foresees thatSchulhoff ’s exhilarating first quartet ‘will cause discomfort to the over-serious

EX. 8. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 1: (a) I, bb. 1^14; (b) I, bb. 33^40

(a)

56 The metaphor of health and youth appears in numerous other reviews, including one by the later notoriousZdene› k Nejedly¤ . See ‘Aus der Kammermusik (Scho« nberg, Schulhoff, Ostrc› il)’, Rude¤ pra¤ vo, 7 (1926), reprinted inZdene› k Nejedly¤ , ‘Aufsa« tze zur Musik des 20 Jahrhunderts’, Beitra« ge zur Musikwissenschaft, 28/2 (1986), 130^8.

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brooders’ (das schwerfa« lligen Gru« blern Unbehagen bereiten wird).57 The same critic singles outthe immediacy of effect in Schulhoff ’s works, echoing Schulhoff ’s praise of Jana¤ c› ek’sintensification of the psychological effect through the shortening of musical events.Finally, Schulhoff characterizes the Wagner^Smetana tradition as ‘effusive, almost tothe point of obtrusiveness’ (u« berschwenglich und fast bis zurAufdringlichkeit), just as LudwigUnterholzner praises Schulhoff ’s quartets as ‘devoid of excessive gestures of emotionalconflict’ (ohne u« berma« �ig nennenswerte Gefu« hlskonflikte auszutragen).58

Furthermore, contemporary criticisms of Schulhoff ’s quartets abound in images ofyouth and health. The previous paragraph already enumerated some health-relatedones, and the review by Paul Schwers, part of which was quoted at the opening of thisessay, is also permeated with such imagery:

This new opus represents a quite remarkable commitment to living, i.e. non-speculative, art. Itis the harbinger of considerable hope in its clear, undisguised, and robust melody, executed

EX. 8. Continued

(b)

57 Schulhoff ’s evaluation of Jana¤ c› ek’s music and the language used by his critics in describing Schulhoff ’s musicare astonishingly similar to Rosenzweig’s evaluation of the state of modern philosophy in Understanding the Sick andthe Healthy (1921). Schulhoff and his critics were probably not familiar with Rosenzweig’s ‘little book’, which was sup-pressed by the author and only published forty years later, but they were certainly part of the same cultural climate.

58 Evans, ‘Venice Festival’, 920; Erich Steinhard, ‘Tschechoslowaken’, Musikbla« tter des Anbruch, 7 (1925), 427;Schwers, ‘Aus dem Berliner Musikleben: Novembergruppe’, 987; Ludwig Unterholzner, ‘Musikfest der InternationalenGesellschaft fu« r zeitgeno« ssische Musik’, Neue Musikzeitung, 47/2 (1926), 41.

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through felicitous handling of musical form. The fact that in the final movement good oldSmetana plays his lively games in fresh and alert manner cannot dim the joy of this ‘positive’work. Continue on this way!59

EX. 9. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 1, III, bb. 28^37

59 Schwers, ‘Aus dem Berliner Musikleben’, 987.

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Schulhoff ’s music is ‘living’ and not dead, ‘robust’ and not sickly, ‘new’and not old (likeSmetana), and it is this that makes it ‘the harbinger of considerable hope’. In a similarvein, reminiscent of the Dadaist rejection of museums and other cultural establishmentsas representatives of past culture, Steinhard describes Schulhoff ’s first quartet as ‘a curi-osity cabinet in the museum of German music’ (ein Rarita« tenkabinett im Museum derdeutschen Musik),60 contrasting its lively eclecticism with the rigid academicism ofmusical tradition. Through the use of such imagery, Schwers, Steinhard, and theirfellow critics present Schulhoff as the herald of a new trend, as a dedicated modernistcommitted to artistic renewal. Schulhoff ’s quartets were therefore perceived not onlyas fine works within their own idiom, but also and perhaps chiefly as an active,youthful, and healthy rejection of a defunct tradition, in exactly the same way asSchulhoff perceived Jana¤ c› ek’s works. The closing sentence from Steinhard’s 1926review of the second quartet summarized this comparative mode of criticism suc-cinctly: ‘By God! This is certainly preferable to dense philosophizing!’ (All dies istaberçbei Gottçbesser, als dickflu« ssige Philosophie).61

In sum, there is much to commend reading Schulhoff ’s article about Jana¤ c› ek as astatement of his own aesthetic values when composing his quartets, and assuming thathis contemporaries appreciated them in the same light. Despite its external simplicity,his style in the 1920s was consciously designed and explicitly recognized by audiencesas an antithesis to the pre-war style epitomized in the Czech musical tradition bySmetana.Which brings us back to the Smetana quotations: why were they incorporated, and

how were they understood? Why was Schwers so disappointed to hear echoes ofSmetana, nevertheless betraying his sympathy with the old master in the words ‘goodold Smetana’? Theories of influence do not seem contribute any significant insightshere: T. S. Eliot’s model of influence as homage is unsuitable in view of Schulhoff ’sopinions of Smetana voiced in the Jana¤ c› ek article, which was written only two

EX. 9. Continued

60 Steinhard, ‘Erwin Schulhoff: 1. Streichquartett’, Die Musik, 19 (1927), 438, and in a slightly different version inAnbruch, 10 (1928), 289.

61 Erich Steinhard, ‘Tagebuch’, Auftakt, 6 (1926), 82.

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months before completion of the quartet; and Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’ is consid-erably too subtle after the radical and highly self-conscious expressions of rejectionpractised by Schulhoff only a few years before.62 We are in need of an explanation

EX. 10. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 1, II, bb. 10^23

62 Also, as Richard Taruskin has observed, Bloomian models of influence are questionable where the influence isintentional and intended to be recognized. See Taruskin, review of ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence byKevin Korsyn’ and Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition, inJournal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 114^38 at 118, 138.

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that takes into account both the verbal rejection of Smetana at the time the quartet waswritten and the softening of style vis-a' -vis Schulhoff ’s Dadaist phase.I suggest that such an explanation can be found in Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘re-

flective nostalgia’, which played an important part in post-war arts and literature,again placing Schulhoff well within the context of contemporary literary and artistictrends. As opposed to restorative nostalgia, which according to Boym attempts a trans-historical reconstruction of the lost home and thinks of itself as truth or tradition, re-flective nostalgia is one which ‘does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place calledhome’, and is instead ‘enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself ’. As such it ‘isironic, inconclusive and fragmentary’, and has ‘elements of both mourning and melan-cholia’.63 The essence of reflective nostalgia is therefore the very unattainability of thereferent, the sense of loss and bereavement.In the mid- to late 1920s, the blind anger that characterized the years immediately

following the war was gradually replaced by reflective nostalgia. According to the his-torian Samuel Hynes, ‘men and women looked back at their own pasts as one mightlook across a great chasm to a remote, peaceable place on the other side’.64 This wasa poignant reaching back into the past that served not so much as a form of comfort-able escapism, but more as a means of highlighting the remoteness of that past andthe futility of evoking it. The past was as beautiful as it was untouchable, as desirableas it was distant. In art this shift from anger to wistfulness or from irony to nostalgiawas exemplified by the move from the nihilism and biting wit of Dada to Surrealism,‘the overriding sensibility of [which] is nostalgia . . . a pervading Sehnsucht, that vagueand unfulfillable longing’, in the words of Charles W. Millard.65 In literature of themid-1920s, reflective nostalgia abounds. Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front,

EX. 10. Continued

63 Svetlana Boym,The Future of Nostalgia (NewYork, 2001), 50 and 55.64 Samuel Hynes, AWar Imagined:The FirstWorldWar and English Culture (NewYork, 1991), p. xi.65 CharlesW. Millard, ‘Dada, Surrealism, and the Academy of the Avant-Garde’, Hudson Review, 22/1 (Spring1969),

111^17 at 112.

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after recounting a brief childhood memory, speaks of such untouchable nostalgia, or‘silent memories’, with chilling poetry:

It is strange that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always com-pletely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they becomeso. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, withoutany word. . . .They are quiet in this way, because quietness is so unattainable for us now.66

Written in the depressed atmosphere of the crumbling Weimar republic of the 1920s,Remarque’s nostalgia is a mute, despairing one. In other places the economic boomthat followed the war or simply being on the victorious side allowed for a more com-fortable form of reflective nostalgia. Elgar’s wistful post-war works such as the StringQuartet, Piano Quintet, and most of all the Cello Concerto (all composed 1918^19)seem to express such a spirit of longing for a long-gone romanticism. And Sassoon’sMemoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) paints a beautifully wistful picture of idle pursuits

EX. 11. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 1, IV, bb. 1^5

66 Remarque, All Quiet on theWestern Front, 57.

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in the verdant countryside of England in the decades preceding the war, populated bykindly parsons, jovial colonels, and bungling captains. Beautifully evocative as it is,Sassoon’s ‘chronicle of simple things’ depicts a paradise lost, an irretrievable memory,and age of innocence no longer attainable after the war.67 These instances of reflectivenostalgia convey an ideological chasm by the juxtaposition, whether implicit orexplicit, of the past with the present, emphasizing the distance between them. The re-sulting incongruence eloquently expresses the urgency of the need for renewal, forwhile the past is no longer bad, it is achingly irrelevant.The references to Smetana in Schulhoff ’s Second Quartet are superb examples of re-

flective nostalgia in music. The second theme of The Bartered Bride is both scored andset up in the third movement of the quartet in a manner designed to create a sense ofdistance and juxtaposition (Ex. 12; see b. 40). Its appearance is coupled with anabrupt drop in dynamics in all instrumentsçfrom fortissimo to subito mezzo piano in themelody, and from forte to subito piano in the accompaniment. At the same momentSchulhoff also abandons the previously predominant primitivist sonorities and tech-niques in the accompaniment, including ostinato motion in parallel fifths and martellatoarticulation, in favour of an ethereal leggiero accompaniment in more traditionalparallel thirds. We are thus given an immediate sense of distance, enhanced by thedreamlike setting of the quotation. With its altered modality, its recasting in polytonalrather than tonal context, and its transferral from a festive, jubilant tone to an eerieand mysterious one, we find ourselves reminded of something familiar yet ungraspable,standing out in sharp relief against the violent primitivist and thoroughly modernistcharacter of the entire movement. The sense of distance is even greater at the close ofthe movement when, after a fortississimo outburst (marked jubilante), the Smetanatheme reappears only to end the movement by dissolving rapidly, leaving the listenerlost in memory (Ex. 13).In the finale, Schulhoff manipulates memory in a different manner. The connection

to Smetana is at first unclear and unlikely to be recognized, especially as the move-ment’s musical language is so distinctly modernist. But with each subsequent appear-ance, the correspondence to Smetana becomes clearer until, upon its appearance inbar 148, it is unmistakable. Schulhoff thus makes the music increasingly familiar, butthe near identity of themes serves more to highlight the distance between Schulhoffand Smetana’s aesthetics than to create any sense of homage. Interestingly, after theentire quartet has pounded out the Smetana theme in unison (fortississimo moltomartellato), Schulhoff recapitulates, repeating the entire musical sequence from thesonorous slow introduction, through the embryonic versions of the Smetana theme,culminating in its final unison appearance. We are thus able to listen again to themusic, this time with awareness of its mnemonic telos, to appreciate, like Schwers,Schulhoff ’s ‘robustness of melody’ and ‘commitment to the living’, while all the timethinking of good old Smetana, thus creating within the process of listening a sense ofdistance between the two.68

67 Siegfried Sassoon, The Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,Sherston’s Progress (New York, 1937), 248. For more on nostalgia and Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man see RobertHemming, Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon,Trauma and the SecondWorldWar (Edinburgh, 2008), 60^5.

68 The unique form of Schulhoff ’s first quartet evokes nostalgia (but without a clear subject) by placing the slowmovement at the end of the work. Unlike most other works with a slow finale (see Michael Talbot,The Finale inWestern Instrumental Music (Oxford, 2001), 111^124), Schulhoff ’s last movement is a true slow movement, presagingShostakovich in its ‘farewell through exhaustion’ (ibid. 123). The effect is of a reversal of the listener’s sense of time, acentral feature of all forms of nostalgia.

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Under the spell of Schulhoff ’s gestures of reflective nostalgia, Schwers is at once ableto long for good old Smetana and to find himself enamoured of the distance fromhim. Smetana’s overture was joyous, positive, and welcome, but its quotation in amodern work had the opposite effect, threatening to dim the work’s joy by remindingSchwers that it was predominantly something old, a ghost of the past. Like Schulhoff ’sDadaist quotations, therefore, the Smetana quotation exploits the distance inherent inthe act of quotation, the sense of displacement arising from the discrepancy between

EX. 12. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 2, III, bb. 28^46

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the quoted material’s original and new contexts. But in the Second Quartet thisdistance is a nostalgic rather than ironic one, expressing Schulhoff ’sçand that ofmany of his contemporariesçreconciliation with tradition without succumbing to it,allowing for a constructive departure from the past.

ççççççççç

EX. 13. Schulhoff, Quartet No. 2, III, dissolution of the Smetana theme at the end of themovement

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Through Schulhoff ’s four post-war works for string quartet we have traced the waysin which the composer examined and re-examined his relationship with pre-warculture. Despite his immensely variegated styles, embracing neo-classicism, Dadaistnihilism, radicalist experimentation, and modernist nationalism within the space ofjust eight years, Schulhoff emerges, and was recognized, as an artist seriously engagedin an attempt to come to terms with the consequences of the First WorldWar on con-temporary culture. Together with the leading creators of his time, Schulhoff followsa varied yet clear trajectory leading from rejection to renewal and from irony tonostalgia. With his modernist simplicity of style, Schulhoff was an important voice increating a new post-war aesthetic where ‘everything that is torn is exchanged fornew . . . everything is new and brave’,69 and rising, in the words of Rupert Brooke,‘disentangled from humanity / strange whole and new into simplicity’.70

EX. 13. Continued

69 Remarque, All Quiet on theWestern Front, 201.70 Rupert Brooke, Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body (1911). 5www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1908-1911/

thoughts_on_the_shape_of_the_human_body/4, accessed 13 Apr. 2014.

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www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1908-1911/thoughts_on_the_shape_of_the_human_body/

www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1908-1911/thoughts_on_the_shape_of_the_human_body/


ABSTRACT

The traumatic experiences of the First World War forced Erwin Schulhoff and manyartists of his generation to re-evaluate their relationship with the culture of the past.Focusing on his works for string quartet, I discuss the means through which Schulhoff ’sworks are preoccupied with artistic renewal and the way his goals are expressed in hisreception. I establish that two methods of rejection stand out among creative artists ofSchulhoff ’s generation, and that the appreciation of these contributes significantly tounderstanding Schulhoff ’s music and its reception. The one involves the use of age-related metaphorical dichotomies and the other involves references to leading figuresof the past manipulated through distance-creating techniques. Viewed in this light,Schulhoff ’s multiple styles emerge as part of a process leading from anger and rejectionthrough irony to renewal through reconciliatory nostalgia.

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Documents

PARABLES OF THE OLD MEN AND THE YOUNG: THE MULTIFARIOUS MODERNISMS OF ERWIN SCHULHOFF'S STRING QUARTETS