Paul Hindemith ( ; ; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist, and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. His other notable compositions include the song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938) and the symphony Mathis der Maler (1934), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946), a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem. Hindemith and his wife emigrated to Switzerland and the United States ahead of World War II, after worsening difficulties with the Nazi German regime. In his later years, he conducted and recorded much of his own music.
Most of Hindemith's compositions are anchored by a foundational tone, and use musical forms and counterpoint and cadences typical of the Baroque and Classical traditions. His harmonic language is more modern, freely using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale within his tonal framework, as detailed in his three-volume treatise, The Craft of Musical Composition.
Life and career
Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the eldest child of the painter and decorator Robert Hindemith from Lower Silesia and his wife Marie (née Warnecke). He 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.
After his father's 1915 death in World War I, Hindemith was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917 and sent to a 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 has 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, Hindemith founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe with an emphasis on contemporary music. His younger brother Rudolf was the original cellist.
As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik. Reminiscent of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, they include works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. 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 next year, he composed the song cycle Das Marienleben (The Life of Mary) and 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.A Dictionary of Twentieth Century World Biography. United Kingdom: Book Club Associates, 1992, p. 267. Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk) and also acted in the film; the score and original film were later burned by the Nazis. In 1929, Hindemith played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, turned it down.
On 15 May 1924, Hindemith married the actress and singer Gertrud (Johanna Gertrude) Rottenberg (1900–1967). The marriage was childless.
The Nazis' relationship to Hindemith's music was complicated. Some condemned his music as "degenerate" (largely based on his early, sexually charged operas such as Sancta Susanna). 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 (Degenerate Music) exhibition in Düsseldorf. Other officials working in Nazi Germany, though, thought that 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 defence of Hindemith, published in 1934, takes this line.Furtwängler 1934. The controversy around his work continued throughout the thirties, with Hindemith falling in and out of favour with the Nazis.
During the 1930s, Hindemith visited Cairo and also Ankara several times. He accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to oversee the creation of a music school in Ankara 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. In 1937 he was one of the founding faculty at Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, established by Serge Koussevitzky as an institute for advanced music study and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. One of his students there was Walter Franklin Anderson.
He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938, partly because his wife was of part-Jewish ancestry; "it was primarily Hindemith's conflict with the artistic policies of the Third Reich, however, that determined his decision to leave."
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 such as Ernest Ansermet.Ansermet 1961, note to p. 42 added on an errata slip. Arriving in the U.S. in 1940, he taught primarily at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum. At Yale, he required his students to study composition and theory from his pedagogical work, The Craft of Musical Composition, among other educational texts. Because of his commitments outside the university, the number of composers who studied under Hindemith was small. According to Luther Noss's A History of the Yale School of Music 1855–1970, Hindemith taught for a little over ten years, teaching 400 students, of whom 46 earned degrees, mostly in music theory. He had such notable students as Lukas Foss, Graham George, Andrew Hill, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Yehudi Wyner, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schönthal, Samuel Adler, Frank Lewin, Leonard Sarason, Fenno Heath, Mitch Leigh, and George Roy Hill. Hindemith also taught at the University at Buffalo, Cornell University, and Wells College. During this time he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World (1952) was extracted.Hindemith, Paul (1952). A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hindemith had a long friendship with Erich Katz, whose compositions were influenced by him.Davenport 1970, p. 43. Also among Hindemith's students were the future rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the composers Franz Reizenstein, Harald Genzmer, Oskar Sala, Arnold Cooke,Lessing, Kolja (2002). Notes to Franz Reizenstein: Solo Sonatas. EDA Records. Robert Strassburg, and dozens of other notables.
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."Opera (June 1954): 348.
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."
Despite a prolonged decline in his physical health, Hindemith composed almost until his death. He died in Frankfurt of pancreatitis, aged 68. He and his wife were buried in the cemetery in La Chiésaz, Vaud, Switzerland.
Music
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 neoclassicalTaylor 1997, p. 261. 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 (Chamber Music) 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 (for example) a trio for viola, heckelphone and piano (1928), seven trios for three trautoniums (1930), a sonata for double bass, and a concerto for trumpet, bassoon, and strings (both in 1949).
In the 1930s Hindemith began to write less for chamber music groups, and more for large orchestral forces. He wrote his opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald, in 1933–1935. This opera is rarely staged, though the New York City Opera did so in 1995.Holland 1995. In 2021, Naxos released a 2012 Theater an der Wien production on DVD.Naxos The opera combines the neoclassicism of Hindemith's earlier works with folk song. As a preliminary stage of composing the 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 are elaborated in vocal scenes.