The DaPonte String Quartet is performing a six-part series of online concerts. Part one and two: Beethoven String Quartet No 5 and Schulhoff String Quartet No 1 are now available at  onstage.daponte.org

Filmed at the beautiful Rockport Opera House in January 2021, the March 13 concert release was a work by the 20th century Czech composer, Erwin Schulhoff. Schulhoff’s String Quartet No 1 is a powerful piece with elements of jazz influence, dance rhythms, and grotesquely melancholy strains. Schulhoff was influenced by the Dada movement, and believed that “absolute art is revolution”. Once the Nazis began to rise to power, the Jewish composer was no longer able to perform in Germany, his compositions were verboten. He was labeled a degenerate, his music blacklisted. After his return to Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), his life was threatened by the German occupation. Schulhoff was granted Russian citizenship, which would allow him to emigrate to relative safety. Before he could leave, he was arrested and deported to a German concentration camp. Approximately one year later, he died of tuberculosis in Wulzburg camp, in 1942.

This quartet is a 4 movement work. It contains interesting harmonies and requires unusual techniques of its performers. It is powerfully rhythmic, and forcefully driven. Parts of the second movement are ethereal and wispy, giving way to the shocking and sudden elements of the third movement. The final movement may represent a foreshadowing of Schulhoff’s death. The foreboding music sounds a bit like a clock winding down, indicating the impending madness, leaving the silence of having nothing left.

A prolific and unusual composer, Schulhoff’s chamber music works may be his most intense and innovative compositions.

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