Jazz-inspired Works

Erwin Schulhoff was a German-speaking composer who was born in Prague in 1894 and died in the Nazi concentration camp in Wülzburg (Bavaria) in 1942. In the 1920s he returned to his native Prague to teach at the local conservatory. His compositions, with their blend of traditional genres, jazz syncopations, dance rhythms and moderately expanded tonality, were fully attuned to the tenor of the times.

This edition contains five of Schulhoff’s piano cycles with a total of thirty-five jazz-inflected pieces ranging from the relatively easy “Esquisses de jazz” (1927) to the fairly demanding “Cinq études de jazz” (1926). This is the first Urtext edition of this music and draws on the original prints comparing them with the surviving handwritten sources. Errors have been corrected and distinctive traits of Schulhoff’s notation retained.