The Art Songs by Erich Itor Kahn, Philip Herschkowitz and Leopold Spinner

The opinion that relevant art will assert itself at some time may be true in the long term, but for the timespan of a human life unfortunatly it is wrong. As the Lied-duo Eva Nievergelt and Tomas Bächli we have performed outstanding compositions created half a century ago in recent years. These are songs for voice and piano by Erich Itor Kahn, Philip Herschkowitz and Leopold Spinner. Until today they have been performed far too rarely, some of them are even first performances.

Their works originated in the isolation of exile, for the three composers had fled the National Socialists and emigrated to London, New York and Moskau. However, even after 1945 perfomances of this music were rare, and if they took place, then mostly due to coincidences. We, too, owe our interest in this music to a series of often astonishing coïncidences:

It began with the fact, that since childhood Tomas was acquainted with the Chilean composer and music theorist Juan Allende Blin. Born in 1927 in Chile, he stayed in continuous contact with the emigrants who had fled the National Socialists to Chile throughout his youth. When he emigrated to Germany after the war, he became interested in the music of the generation in exile.

He wrote a monograph on Erich Itor Kahn, and in the 1980s and 1990s he organized concert series with composers of the generation in exile. In these concerts Tomas took part as a pianist and thus came in touch with Erich Itor Kahn’s music.

Tomas moved to New York in 1996 for three years, where he met Frida Kahn (1905 – 2002), who was more than 90 years old at that time. She was Erich Itor Kahn’s widow and after his death she advocated for her husband’s work with unprecedented power, organizing perfomances and editions of his oeuvres. In 1933, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Frida and Erich Itor Kahn fled to Paris immediatly, in 1941 they succeeded to escape to New York at the very last moment. In New York, Kahn was a much sought-for pianist; but hardly anybody knew that he was a composer, too.

Frida Kahn died in 2002 and in her testament she had distributed her assets to all the musicians who had performed works by Erich Itor Kahn. With the sum Tomas received he organized a concert together with Eva in which they performed the Quatre Nocturnes and Lyrisches Konzert for voice and piano. This was the beginning of the dedication of the Lied-duo with Kahn’s works. Listening through all the melodic lines and the hamonies opened up an exceptionally multilayered and unique world to us, although time and effort for this first concert had been enormous. It became clear that we would dedicate ourselves to this music again in future.

We came upon Philip Herschkowitz through the composer Klaus Linder who handed over a number of songs to us, among them a cycle of settings of poems by Paul Celan which we performed in 2007. Herschkowitz was of Romanian origin, had studied with Alban Berg and Anton Webern in Vienna, until he had to flee from the National Socialists, at first to Moldova, later to Taschkent. As the only representative of the Viennese School he lived in Moskow from 1946 onward. He was rather isolated and worked as a private teacher; among his composition students were Alfred Schnittke and Wassilijewitsch Denissow. His desire to return to Vienna was accomplished only in 1987, two years before his death.

Through Philip Herschkowitz we came across Leopold Spinner by another conïncidence. In 2017 we visited Vienna in order to take a look at the estate of Herschkowitz which was kept in the Vienna City Library. On this occasion we met a group of musicologists planning a symposium on Leopold Spinner, amongst them emeritus professor Reinhard Kapp and the music researcher Regina Busch. Until 1938 Leopold Spinner had been a student of Anton Webern. In 1939 he escaped to England. There he worked at first as a factory worker in the locomotive production (war-employment), later he became chief editor of the London Music Publisher Boosey & Hawkes, where among other things he was responsible for the works of Igor Strawinsky. Even though his own compositional oeuvre was published by Boosey & Hawkes, it remained without resonance.

Erich Itor Kahn, Leopold Spinner and Philip Herschkowitz were working, individually and separately, on the further development of modernity. Contrary to the representatives of the post-war generation they didn’t abandon the expressiveness of their music. This may be a reason for the Lied to play a central role in their work, because the voice provides direct expression already. The Lied as a carrier of language information has a specific role to play by linking the unspeakable and the speakable.

The works were composed in the new tone language discovered by Arnold Schönberg and the Second Viennese School. The latter was not yet established and for the major part of the concert audience it sounded completely foreign and incomprehensible. In a peculiar way it mirrors the situation of exile and of isolation: On the one hand it had developped from the tradition of the past centuries, on the other hand it embodied the radical break with this very tradition. It’s not a coïncidence, then, that the extension of the tonal system by Schönberg paved its way at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the great turmoils in Europe: the farreaching spiritual changes in art always are an expression of an awakening of society.

Schönbergs Method of Composition with twelve tones related only to one another had extended the tone system and given space to completely new compositional creativity. The twelve-tone method facilitated creating correlations without submitting to superior principles such as tonality. Each one of the three composers went on developping the New Viennese School technique in their own sound language.

In transition from a familiar to an unfamiliar tone and sound reception a blank space was emerging and therein a great potential not only in handling tones and sounds, but also text and content. With his choice of text and his personal approach to the new sound language, each composer established a distinct space extending far beyond the conventional tradition of word and sound.