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1. Erwin Schulhoff – THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
In order to understand the context of this choral setting of extracts from The
Communist Manifesto, one must look at the life of its composer in detail.
Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942) was a Czech-Jewish composer whose creativity
was brought to life in the post-First World War Weimar Republic.1
He was a
child prodigy at the piano, and at the recommendation of Dvorak, he entered
the Prague Conservatory at the age of ten in 1904.2
He spent the next ten years
moving around Europe learning with great masters until 1914, when he was
conscripted into the Austrian army.3
He served all four years in the conflict and
was wounded twice. After the war, he went to Berlin and immediately
immersed himself in the artistic scene there. He founded a club called Die
Werkstatt der Zeit – literally ‘The Workshop of Time’ – among whose members
were the Dadaist painters Otto Dix and George Grosz.4
In 1919, he produced
three Surrealist works of particular note for their distinct avant-garde character:
Symphonia Germanica – a piece for solo voice and unnamed accompaniment is
a grating satire of German militarism, achieved by the soloist’s harsh braying of
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles while the player strikes their instrument in a
random and cacophonous fashion.5
Fünf Pittoresken (dedicated to his friend,
George Grosz) is a suite of five short piano pieces, four of which take the form
of popular dances/styles of the time, namely: a Foxtrot, a Ragtime, a One-Step,
1
Bek, J. (2001). Schulhoff, Erwin. Grove Music Online. from
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/97815
61592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000025128.
2
Ibid
3
Ibid
4
Ibid
5
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources ed. Daniel Albright, University of Chicago
Press 2004, p.327

2. and a Maxixe. Its central movement however, is a single page of oddly notated
rests with irrational time signatures (3/5 and 7/10), inverted clefs, question and
exclamation marks, and even primitive ‘emoticons’ made out of musical
printing type! It is considered by some to be one of the first examples of a piece
of notated silence.6
And finally, the Sonata Erotica is a piece for solo female
voice, “in which a soprano spends several minutes faking a carefully notated
orgasm.”7
Throughout the 1920s Schulhoff toured Europe as a pianist and was witness to
the alarming rise of nationalism across the continent.8
Along with many other
artists, he turned to the Socialist ideals of the Soviet Union. The idea of setting
The Communist Manifesto came sometime in 1931 spurred on by the suffering
of the working classes he saw in Europe following the Wall Street Crash of
1929. Mass unemployment was leading to greater fighting spirit among the
workers.9
He studied songs of the French Revolution, the songs of the Hussites
as well as the old and new songs of the workers of the Soviet Union.10
Helped
by the Silesian poet Rudolf Fuchs, the text was libretticised for the musical
setting, and the work, scored for double choir, four soloists, children’s choir
and large wind orchestra was completed in September 1932.11
On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1933 he became a committed believer in the
Stalinist doctrine of socialist realism. 12
After the Nazi invasion of
6
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources ed. Daniel Albright, University of Chicago
Press 2004, p.327
7
Ibid
8
Bek, J. (2001). Schulhoff, Erwin. Grove Music Online.
9
Musil, Vlastimil Erwin Schulhoff: The Communist Manifesto, Schott 1976, p.12
10
Ibid
11
Bek, J. (2001). Schulhoff, Erwin. Grove Music Online.
12
Ibid

3. Czechoslovakia in 1939, he attempted to emigrate to the Soviet Union, but
before he was able to ‘arrange all the formalities’ was imprisoned in Prague in
1941 following the Nazi invasion of the USSR.13
He was later sent to the
Wülzburg concentration camp where he died of tuberculosis the following
year.14
Schulhoff had sent the only copy of the full score to the Leningrad
Conservatory in 1940, keeping a copy of the vocal score. The full score is
presumed lost in the devastating siege of Leningrad during the war.15
In 1976, the work was revived from the remaining vocal score and performed
in a new Czech translation by Pavel Šoltész by the Czechoslovak Radio
Orchestra and Choir.16
The idea to put on a performance of this work arose from the desire to
explore pieces written by composers who were victims of the Holocaust. I was
exploring the chamber music of various composers listed on the OREL
Foundation and came across Schulhoff’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for winds,
brass, percussion and piano. I was particularly taken with the playfulness of the
instrumentation and the writing and wanted to conduct extracts from it for my
December recital. All that limited me in the end was the hire cost of the parts
of around £300. Sadly, following this quote, I had to abandon the idea of that
work. But now having been introduced to the composer’s work, I was curious
to learn more about him and his other compositions. In a catalogue of works I
saw a work titled Das Kommunistiche Manifest, which intrigued me. It did
indeed transpire to be a full oratorio-style setting of extracts from the great
13
Bek, J. (2001). Schulhoff, Erwin. Grove Music Online.
14
Ibid
15
Musil, Vlastimil Erwin Schulhoff: The Communist Manifesto, Schott 1976, p.13
16
Correspondence with Schott Publishers - Feb 15th
2018

4. political essay by Marx and Engels. Almost more because of the novelty of the
idea, than anything else, I decided that this was the piece I had to do for my
final recital.
The practical aspects achieving this were many; it was likely that a quote
for parts would be well outside anything affordable, so a new arrangement had
to be made. Having bought a copy of the vocal score, (including a piano
reduction) I began scoring the work for brass, piano and percussion. I chose
this ensemble because I had conducted a large brass group in another recital in
December and had made a number of useful contacts to call upon. Then I
could substitute the wind parts with piano, so I would not need to fix a full
wind orchestra. Then I had to consider the rehearsal process for the choir I
would be working with. The Chapel Choir is well accustomed to singing in
other languages, but the vocal score’s principal text was in Czech (a notoriously
difficult language to sing in) with the original German in smaller text
underneath. So it was clear a new vocal score had to be made too, but I also
made the decision to translate it into English. This served the duel purpose of
making the singing of it easier, and also, making the message that the work is
trying to convey more intelligible to its audience. I used Samuel Moore’s 1888
translation of the original Marx and Engels text, and analysed the way in which
Rudolph Fuchs had libretticised the work in German. For each section, I
would do a rough translation of the libretto, and then hunt through the original
for the part that had been extracted. I would then re-libretticise the English and
put it back with the music. Most of the process of ‘libretticising’ involved
simply changing ‘The Communists’ to ‘we’. Often, many rhythms would have

5. to be changed to accommodate the English text, but as this is the case in many
translated works, I was untroubled by this. On occasion, there were problems
that could only really be solved by adding musical material to the melodic lines.
For example, at the end of the third movement, the only satisfactory way I
could find to set the text was to completely alter the vocal lines in bb345-349,
but this was done as accommodatingly as possible to the harmony of the
accompaniment. There was only one instance in which I could find absolutely
no satisfactory way to set a bit of translated text; b354-end of the third
movement would have been “Yes, these layers of society will be blown up!” I
decided to choose a suitable alternative from elsewhere in the Manifesto “Yes,
we will win the battle for democracy”.
At the point of writing, two movements have been rehearsed with the
choir, and it has become clear (as it was from the process of arranging) this the
stamina that will be required for this work will be intense for all involved.
Much of the rehearsal process will have to incorporate continual reinforcement
of good practices in singing and playing so that the performers find themselves
unable to give their all in the later stages of the piece.
Schulhoff’s setting of The Communist Manifesto is quite an
overwhelming entity. But I have become convinced over the past months that it
is indeed, a sincere one too. I have grown only but fonder of the work too, of
its powerful message, and how so powerfully it makes it. A harsh and angry cry
at a world consumed by greed and self-interest, by hatred and nationalism. If
ever there were a time to perform a piece that reflected this sentiment, written
by a man who died for its ideals, then it would probably be now.