Eduard Erdmann

Eduard Erdmann (5 March 1896 – 21 June 1958) was a Baltic German pianist and composer.

Erdmann was born in Wenden (Cēsis) in Livonia. He was the great-nephew of the philosopher Johann Eduard Erdmann. His first musical studies were in Riga, where his teachers were Bror Möllersten and Jean du Chastain (piano) and Harald Creutzburg (harmony and counterpoint). From 1914 he studied piano in Berlin with Conrad Ansorge and composition with Heinz Tiessen. In the 1920s and early 30s his name was frequently cited among Germany’s leading composers. Moreover, Erdmann had an international reputation as an outstanding concert pianist whose repertoire encompassed Beethoven and the advocacy of contemporary music. From 1925 he was professor of piano at the Cologne Academy of Music but was forced to resign from his post by the Nazis in 1935 and became an 'inner exile', composing almost nothing until after the end of World War 2. He resumed teaching as Professor of Piano at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg in 1950, but died of a heart-attack in 1958. There has been little revival of interest in his own music and all his post-World War 2 works remain in manuscript; considering his inter-war eminence he has received remarkably little attention up to the present day, but in 2006 the cpo label began issuing a series of CDs of his orchestral works.

Erdmann came to critical notice as a composer with the sensational success of his First Symphony (dedicated to Alban Berg) in 1919. He was also close friends with Busoni's pupil Philipp Jarnach, as well as Ernst Krenek, Artur Schnabel and Emil Nolde. Like Tiessen and Schnabel, he was deeply impressed by Schoenbergian and Bergian Expressionism but did not adopt the twelve-note method, preferring a freely and often totally chromatic vocabulary with little or no sense of key. His total output is quite small, and surprisingly contains very little piano music: but it came to include four symphonies, Nos. 3 and 4 dating from after World War 2 and thus still unpublished. As early as 1920 Erdmann issued a credo in which he declared himself opposed to the extreme individualism in music from Beethoven to Schoenberg, and dedicated instead to the creation of a more objective music characterized by what he called the 'third-person forms' created by composers from Schütz to Bruckner.

List of Works

"An der Frühling" for violin and piano, op.1

"Am Gardasee", tone poem, op.4 (destroyed)

7 Bagatelles for piano, op.5

5 Little Piano Pieces, op.6

Fox Trot in C (dedicated to Ernst Krenek)

Rondo for Orchestra, op.9

Symphony No.1, op.10

Sonata for solo violin, op.12

Symphony No.2, op.13

"Der entsprungene Insel", operetta, op.14 (never scored)

Ständchen for small orchestra, op.16

String Quartet, op.17

Concertino (Rhapsody & Rondo) for piano and orchestra, op.18

Symphony No.3, op.19 (unpublished)

Symphony No.4, op.20 (unpublished)

Capricci, op.21 (unpublished)

Monogramme - eine kleine Serenade, op.22 (unpublished)