Erich Itor Kahn (1905 – 1956)

Erich Itor Kahn was born in 1905 in Rimbach, Germany. He spent his childhood in Königstein in an open-minded and artistically alert atmosphere. His father was a teacher and cantor, his mother a gifted amateur singer. At the age of about thirteen Kahn discovered Arnold Schönberg whose aesthetics should play a key-role in his own work. At the age of sixteen he entered the conservatory in Frankfurt against the resistance of his parents. When he completed his studies at the conservatory in 1928, he found an employment as a musical director at Radio Frankfurt, where he met artists like Hans Rosbaud, Arnold Schönberg, Igor Strawinsky, Anton Webern, Béla Bartók, Alban Berg and Vladimir Horowitz.

With the seizure of power through the Nazi regime Erich Itor Kahn lost his job in 1933 and emigrated with his wife, the pianist Frida Kahn, to Paris, where he was capable of establishing himself anew as a teacher and interpreter. Again he was haunted by the disaster, this time by the invasion of the Nazi in France. After different internments in French concentration camps the Kahns managed last-minute to finally escape to New York. There, in 1941, they had to start anew. When Erich Itor Kahn died after a stroke in New York in 1956, he was primarily well-known as a chamber musician of outstanding creative power and sensitivity. However, his vital concern was composing.

Erich Itor Kahn left a small, highly concentrated oeuvre: works for piano, songs and chamber music in varied orchestrations. Although the dodecaphony method played a central role in Kahns musical thinking, his application of Schönbergs principle was remarkably free.

During his years in France Kahn began to work with elements of traditional Jewish music (e.g. in Les Symphonies bretonnes, Petite Suite bretonne, Trois Chansons populaires as well as in Drei Madrigale and Chassidische Rhapsodie). To the disaster of National Socialism he reacted with works as Ciaccona dei tempi di guerra (for piano), Nenia Judaeis qui hac aetate perierunt (for violoncello and piano) or Lyrisches Konzert (for soprano and piano). All his life Kahn exchanged letters with his friends Erich Schmid in Zürich and René Leibowitz in Paris –  this network was life-saving for friends and acquaintances in two ways, artistically and personally.

It may need a temporal distance in order to recognize the genuineness of Kahns music. It combines highly compositional skill with a remarkable drive. This music demands high standards from interpreters and listeners. And yet, even listening to it for the first time, it persuades on the immediate level of sound.