Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a prolific German composer, violist, violinist, teacher and conductor. In the 1920s, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit style of music. Notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben, Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra, and the opera Mathis der Maler. Hindemith's most popular work, both on record and in the concert hall, is likely the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, written in 1943.
Life and career
Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered Frankfurt's Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner, as well as conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. At first he supported himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. He became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1914, and was promoted to concertmaster in 1916. He played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet from 1914.Hindemith was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917 and sent to join his regiment in Alsace in January 1918. There he was assigned to play bass drum in the regiment band, and also formed a string quartet. In May 1918 he was deployed to the front in Flanders, where he served as a sentry; his diary shows him "surviving grenade attacks only by good luck", according to New Grove Dictionary. After the armistice he returned to Frankfurt and the Rebner Quartet.
In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.
In 1922, some of his pieces were played in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1927 he was appointed Professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast, and also acted in the film; the score and the original film were burned by the Nazis. The score was recreated by Ian Gardiner in 2006. In 1929 he played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, turned it down.
Hindemith's relationship to the Nazis is a complicated one. Some condemned his music as "degenerate", and in December 1934, during a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace, Germany's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels publicly denounced Hindemith as an "atonal noisemaker". The Nazis banned his music in October 1936 and he was subsequently included in the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf.
Other officials working in Nazi Germany, though, thought he might provide Germany with an example of a modern German composer, as by this time he was writing music based in tonality, with frequent references to folk music; the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler's defense of Hindemith, published in 1934, takes this line. The controversy around his work continued throughout the thirties, with Hindemith falling in and out of favor with the Nazis.
During the 1930s he made a visit to Cairo and several to Ankara. He accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to oversee the creation of a music school in Istanbul in 1935, after Goebbels had pressured him to request an indefinite leave of absence from the Berlin Academy. In Turkey, he was the leading figure of a new music pedagogy in the era of president Kemal Atatürk. His deputy was Eduard Zuckmayer. Hindemith led the reorganization of Turkish music education and the early efforts to establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet. He did not stay in Turkey as long as many other émigrés, but he greatly influenced Turkish musical life; the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts. Young Turkish musicians regarded Hindemith as a "real master", and he was appreciated and greatly respected.
Toward the end of the 1930s, Hindemith made several tours of America as a viola and viola d'amore soloist. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938, and settled in the United States in 1940.
At the same time that he was codifying his musical language, Hindemith's teaching and compositions began to be affected by his theories, according to critics like Ernest Ansermet. Once in the U.S. he taught primarily at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum. He had such notable students as Lukas Foss, Graham George, Andrew Hill, Norman Dello Joio, Mitch Leigh, Mel Powell, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schönthal, Samuel Adler, Leonard Sarason, and Oscar-winning film director George Roy Hill. He also taught at the University at Buffalo, Cornell University, and Wells College. During this time he also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World was extracted. Hindemith had a long friendship with Erich Katz, whose compositions were influenced by him. Also among Hindemith's students were the composers Franz Reizenstein and Robert Strassburg.
Hindemith became a U.S. citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe in 1953, living in Zürich and teaching at the university there until he retired from teaching in 1957. Toward the end of his life he began to conduct more, and made numerous recordings, mostly of his own music.
In 1954 an anonymous critic for Opera magazine, having attended a performance of Hindemith's Neues vom Tage, wrote, "Mr Hindemith is no virtuoso conductor, but he does possess an extraordinary knack of making performers understand how his own music is supposed to go".
in 1955 from Antti Wihuri.
Hindemith received the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1955. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962 "for the wealth, extent and variety of his work, which is among the most valid in contemporary music, and which contains masterpieces of opera, symphonic and chamber music."
After a prolonged decline in his physical health, although he composed almost to his death, Hindemith died in Frankfurt from pancreatitis aged 68.
Music
Style
Hindemith is among the most significant German composers of his time. His early works are in a late romantic idiom, and he later produced expressionist works, rather in the style of the early Schoenberg, before developing a leaner, contrapuntally complex style in the 1920s. This style has been described as neoclassical, but is quite different from the works by Igor Stravinsky labeled with that term, owing more to the contrapuntal language of Johann Sebastian Bach and Max Reger than the Classical clarity of Mozart.The new style can be heard in the series of works called Kammermusik from 1922 to 1927. Each of these pieces is written for a different small instrumental ensemble, many of them very unusual. Kammermusik No. 6, for example, is a concerto for the viola d'amore, an instrument that has not been in wide use since the baroque period, but which Hindemith himself played. He continued to write for unusual groups of instruments throughout his life, producing a trio for viola, heckelphone and piano, 7 trios for 3 trautoniums, a sonata for double bass and a concerto for trumpet, bassoon, and strings, for example.
Around the 1930s, Hindemith began to write less for chamber groups, and more for large orchestral forces. In 1933–35, Hindemith wrote his opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald. This opera is rarely staged, though a well-known production by the New York City Opera in 1995 was an exception. It combines the neo-classicism of earlier works with folk song. As a preliminary stage to the composing of this opera, Hindemith wrote a purely instrumental symphony also called Mathis der Maler, which is one of his most frequently performed works. In the opera, some portions of the symphony appear as instrumental interludes, others were elaborated in vocal scenes.
Hindemith wrote Gebrauchsmusik —compositions intended to have a social or political purpose and sometimes written to be played by amateurs. The concept was inspired by Bertolt Brecht. An example of this is his Trauermusik, written in January 1936. Hindemith was preparing the London premiere of Der Schwanendreher when he heard news of the death of George V. He quickly wrote this piece for solo viola and string orchestra in tribute to the late king, and the premiere was given that same evening, the day after the king's death. Other examples of Hindemith's Gebrauchsmusik include:
- the Plöner Musiktage : a series of pieces designed for a day of community music making open to all inhabitants of the city of Plön, culminating in an evening concert by grammar school students and teachers.
- a Scherzo for viola and cello, written in several hours during a series of recording sessions as a "filler" for an unexpected blank side of a 78 rpm album, and recorded immediately upon its completion.
- Wir bauen eine Stadt, an opera for eight-year-olds.
In 1951, Hindemith completed his Symphony in B-flat. Scored for concert band, it was written for the U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own". Hindemith premiered it with that band on April 5 of that year. Its second performance took place under the baton of Hugh McMillan, conducting the Boulder Symphonic Band at the University of Colorado. The piece is representative of his late works, exhibiting strong contrapuntal lines throughout, and is a cornerstone of the band repertoire. Hindemith recorded it in stereo with members of the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI in 1956.
Musical system
Most of Hindemith's music employs a unique system that is tonal but non-diatonic. Like most tonal music, it is centred on a tonic and modulates from one tonal centre to another, but it uses all 12 notes freely rather than relying on a scale picked as a subset of these notes. Hindemith even rewrote some of his music after developing this system. One of the key features of his system is that he ranks all musical intervals of the 12-tone equally tempered scale from the most consonant to the most dissonant. He classifies chords in six categories, on the basis of how dissonant they are, whether or not they contain a tritone, and whether or not they clearly suggest a root or tonal centre. Hindemith's philosophy also encompassed melody—he strove for melodies that do not clearly outline major or minor triads.In the late 1930s, Hindemith wrote a theoretical book The Craft of Musical Composition, which lays out this system in great detail. He also advocated this system as a means of understanding and analyzing the harmonic structure of other music, claiming that it has a broader reach than the traditional Roman numeral approach to chords. In the final chapter of Book I, Hindemith seeks to illustrate the wide-ranging relevance and applicability of his system in analysis of music examples ranging from the early origins of European music to the contemporary. These analyses include an early Gregorian melody, and compositions by Guillaume de Machaut, J. S. Bach, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and finally, a composition of his own.
His piano work of the early 1940s Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach, using all traditional devices like inversion, diminution, augmentation, retrogradation, stretto, etc., each fugue connected by an to the next, during which the music moves from the key of the last to its successor. The order of the keys follows Hindemith's ranking of musical intervals around the tonal center of C.
One traditional aspect of classical music that Hindemith retains is the idea of dissonance resolving to consonance. Much of Hindemith's music begins in consonant territory, progresses rather smoothly into dissonance, and resolves at the end in full, consonant chords. This is especially apparent in his Concert Music for Strings and Brass.
Works
Pedagogical writings
His complete set of instructional books- Elementary Training for Musicians 1946
- A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony: Book 1, Part 1—With Emphasis on Exercises and a Minimum of Rules, revised edition New York: Schott Music, 1968
- A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony: Book 2—Exercises for Advanced Students, translated by Arthur Mendel. New York: Schott, 1964
- The Craft of Musical Composition: Book 1—Theoretical Part, translated by Arthur Mendel, 1942
- The Craft of Musical Composition: Book 2—Exercises in Two-Part Writing, translated by Otto Ortmann. 1941
- Unterweisung im Tonsatz 3: Übungsbuch für den dreistimmigen Satz . Mainz: Schott 5205,, 251 pages. 1970. Only available in the original German.
Notable students