Born: 1894, Prague, Bohemia
Died: 1942, Wülzburg, Germany

"I have a tremendous passion for the fashionable dances, and... this gives my creative work a phenomenal impulse…"

The career of piano prodigy Erwin Schulhoff was decided by Antonín Dvorák, who heard the boy play in 1901. After four years in the Austrian army during World War I, he resumed his career composing music influenced by the Second Viennese School and Dadaism. Schulhoff returned to Prague in 1923, where he honed a style that combined Dadaist and expressionist tendencies with direct, communicative writing. He embraced socialism after Hitler seized power in Germany, and he tried to emigrate to Russia (as well as to the West) in 1939. The Nazis arrested him in June 1941; he died, imprisoned in a Bavarian fortress, the following year.