Robert Kahn (composer)

[2] Although Kahn declined the invitation out of diffidence, Brahms's music would exert a profound influence on his compositional style throughout his career.

His students include the pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Wilhelm Kempff, the conductor Ferdinand Leitner, the composers Theodore Holland, Nikos Skalkottas and Günter Raphael, and the violinist Karl Klinger.

While Kahn was composing and teaching in Berlin he also was active as chamber musician and Lied accompanist in concert with leading soloists and singers of his time, ranging from Joseph Joachim and Richard Mühlfeld to Adolf Busch, from Johann Messchaert to Ilona Durigo and Emmy Destinn.

In 1916, Kahn was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, a membership he held until 1934 when the Nazi regime ordered him to resign because he was Jewish.

This drove him, at the age of 73, to leave Germany for England in 1939 with his wife Katharina, where (as with many émigré musicians of the period) he spent the last years of his life in relative obscurity but composing prolifically.

[4] Kahn composed a vast quantity of chamber music, writing in an intimate, lyrical style that is reminiscent of Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Brahms.

74 for piano and orchestra in E-flat minor, he mostly avoided the large scale orchestral forms and emotional extravagance of late Romanticism.

The unconventionally scored Quintet in C minor of 1911 (for piano, violin, cello, clarinet and horn, the same combination used by Vaughan Williams in 1897), has been recorded.

Hans von Bülow conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the world première of Kahn's orchestral serenade in 1890.

These took the form of a musical diary, the Tagebuch in Tönen, begun in 1935, with Kahn writing several short piano works per week until his death in 1951.