Erich Itor Kahn (1905 – 1956)

Lyrisches Konzert

from Duineser Elegien one and ten
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

For Lyrisches Konzert Kahn has chosen sections from the Duino Elegies one and ten by Rainer Maria Rilke. This selection is touching, because here Rilke finds words for the most refined complexity of feelings in a striking way.

To oppose the beautiful and the dreadful in one breath takes courage. A similar complexity is approached in the tenth Elegy, when grief on the one hand and transcendence on the other hand embrace one space.

Why has Kahn chosen these two passages? And how does he deal with it compositionally?

The specific form of Lyrisches Konzert stirs our attention: The piece resembles a solo piano work with insertions of the voice. The sung parts are followed by wordless sound spaces sustained only by the piano. This large-sized form creates a dense atmosphere of deep listening and contemplation.

Kahn makes the voice repeat particularly haunting statements often and thus increases its intensity. He gives the voice and the piano not one single duplication of tones; while constantly and strictly rhythmically coordinated they never meet in unison. Thus they are rhythmically intertwined, but never really in connection with each other. Only by experiencing the whole form does a third space come into being which integrates voice and piano on a higher level. In this space comprehension beyond pain can begin.

Lyrisches Konzert has remained a fragment. The second movement has been lost, and the third movement breaks off shortly before the end.

Schlaflied (1942)

Hans Sahl (1902 – 1993)

Kahn already composed Schlaflied (lullaby) in 1942 to a text by Hans Sahl. With a slightly modified piano accompaniment and a poem of his own he used it later for the second song in Four Nocturnes.

Quite hidden we hear a popular tone in Kahn’s highly complex music. There are not only all the assonances in his atonal music, findings of earlier times taken out of context. There is the 6/8 beat typical for lullabies, however so slow that it is difficult for the performing musicians to depict it and for the listeners to recognize it. Yet there are as well the many short repetitions of voice and piano, often only two notes or one single interval. They pervade the whole piece and remind us from afar of nursery rhymes with their two- and three-tone signals (and completely independent of the here used twelve-tone method).

Quatre Nocturnes (1954)

Rondel
Tristan Corbière (1845 – 1875)

Schlaflied
Johann Peter Worlet (E.I. Kahn)

Les Djinns
Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885)

Elegy
Percy B. Shelley (1792 – 1822)

For the Four Nocturnes, composed in 1954, Erich Itor Kahn chose poems written in the three languages connected to the countries of his escape and his exile: German, French and English.

The four large-scaled songs address the night on different levels:

  • With Rondel from Les amours jaunes of the Breton writer Tristan Corbière Kahn chose a poet who at that time, compared to Paul Verlaine and Victor Hugo, wasn’t known in Germany at all. In his poem the writer, who died very young, sings of the darkness as a site of sleep beyond earthly weight.
  • Schlaflied (lullaby), written under the synonym Johann Peter Worlet on a text of Kahn himself, follows it: Sleep as a saving place, as a dreamless refuge, relief for the one who prefers the nightly sleeplessness to sliding into nightmares and who is longing for transition away from paralyzing depression into beneficial silence.
  • Les Djinns (The Djinns) after the poem by Victor Hugo is the longest and wildest of the four songs and describes expressively as well as excessively the ride to hell of the djinns who sweep over the nightly scenery; a colourful, tremendously vital accompaniment supports the voice, which – like the texture of the poem – extends more and more dramatically out of nowhere and disappears again into the void.
  • The poem Stanzas – April, 1814 by English writer Percy B. Shelley refers to the contract of Fontainebleau and the resignation of Napoleon: dying and evanescence are inevitably waiting, even at the end of a life shaped by power and violence.