Kaun, Hugo, 1863-1932

German composer and choral conductor.

Hugo Kaun, composer and choral conductor, was born on March 21, 1863 in Berlin, Germany. Although born into a merchant family, he composed prolifically as a youth. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin (1879-80) and in 1881 began a determined study of the piano with Oscar Raif. At the same time he attended the composition classes of Friedrich Kiel at the Prussian Academy of Arts. Kaun busied himself with piano teaching, composition and conducting a mixed chorus, but following his father's death in 1886, he went to the USA, settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there was a large German community; while there, Kaun associated with, among others, the music theorist Bernhard Ziehn. A hand injury forced him to give up thoughts of a career as a pianist, and so he spent his years in the USA teaching, composing and directing a choral society, the Milwaukee Liederkranz. Some of his works were performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Theodore Thomas, who was one of the early champions of Kaun's music.

Kaun returned to Berlin in 1902, and by the 1920s his fame as a composer had spread throughout German-speaking Europe. In 1912 he was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and in 1922 he joined the composition staff of the Berlin Conservatory. Kaun was a prolific composer whose output embraces most genres. Of his four neo-Wagnerian operas, Der Fremde (1920) was regarded as the most significant, though in the more radical cultural climate of the Weimar Republic, it quickly disappeared from the repertory, and attempts to revive it during the Third Reich faltered. Although Kaun died one year before Hitler came to power, his nationalist choral works, particularly those for unaccompanied male chorus, enjoyed great popularity throughout Germany after his death.

Hugo Kaun died on April 2, 1932 in Berlin.