Alto Saxophone Bassoon Trumpet Trombone 1 Four Handed Piano 1 Two Handed Piano Harmonium
Roles
Synopsis
In a kind of dramatic palindrome, a tragedy unfolds involving jealousy, murder and suicide, which is then replayed with the lines sung in reverse order to produce a happy ending. Robert, returns home unexpectedly, and finds that his wife Helene has received a letter from an unnamed lover. He flies into a jealous rage and shoots her. After her dead body is carried off by the Professor and the Ambulance Man, Robert throws himself out of his window. A wise man enters the stage, and deplores the tragedy. He then causes time to run backwards, causing the music and the text to also run backwards, ending the opera happily before Helene was killed.
Musical style and structure
The opera is notable for its structure, which has the music of the opera run backwards halfway through the opera. The piece uses the idea of retrograde overall throughout the piece but does not use it in individual phrases of text or music. For example the first line of text in the opera "Guten Morgen, liebe Tante," does not get reversed as "Tante Liebe, Morgen Guten," but remains the same. Rather it is the order of phrases that is reversed so that "Guten Morgen, liebe Tante" is both the first and last lines of the opera. The also keeps the internal syntax of sentences. With regards to musical phrases, musicologist Alexandra Monchick notes that:
"A literal palindrome of the music would have ramifications for the quasi-tonal. A few years later Alban Berg produced an exact palindrome for the movie sequence in his opera Lulu. Since Lulu was a twelve tone opera, not dependent on tonal hierarchies, Berg was able to replicate an exact palindrome at the pitch class level, without a breakdown of logical musical language. However this was not possible for Hindemith in this instance. As in most of his works, Hindemith's musical language in Hin and Zurück is tonally centered without being diatonic. The piece is based around A, the key in which the overture begins... The musical numbers also form a palindrome. Hindemith divides the opera into baroque-like short numbers: Prelude, Ariette, Duett, Terzett and their recapitulations after the Sages Monologue."
The tonal scheme of the opera is:
A
E
A-flat
E
G-Sharp
Prelude
Terzett I
Sage's Monologue
Terzett II
Prelude II
During the first Terzett, the harmony gradually moves by minor thirds from the key of E to the distant key of A-flat for the sages monologue. During the recapitulations, the music returns to E for the second Terzett, but instead of returning to the key of A for the second Prelude, the music instead goes to the key of G sharp, which is the leading tone to A. "Instead of forming a satisfying dramatic circle back to the tonic, the resolution is more of a dramatic spiral. This perhaps signifies that people's actions can never be completely undone...Also, the ending in the G-sharp key area is an enharmonic equivalent of A-flat, the key of the Sage's Monologue, evoking once again the cause of this reversed ending."
