Paul Hindemith

PAUL HINDEMITH is one of the most significant personalities of the first half of the musical 20^th century. His life and work are marked by major historical events. He was born in the small town of Hanau, near Frankfurt. His childhood was marked by poverty and deprivation, yet his parents encouraged him to develop his distinctive musical talent and to take violin lessons. He received a scholarship and was admitted in the Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied violin, conducting and composition. To support himself, he pursued various musical activities. He played at dance entertainments and in musical comedy formations. At the same time, he joined as second violin in the Rebner String Quartet (directed by his violin teacher Adolph Rebner), and later, in 1919, played viola in the ensemble of his own accord. At the age of 19, he joined the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, initially as a substitute Concertmaster from 1916. During the First World War he was mobilized. After the armistice he returned to Frankfurt and the Rebner Quartet. In 1921, together with the cellist Maurits Frank, Hindemith joined the violist in the newly founded Amarr Quartet, which he toured Europe extensively with and wrote music for. During the Weimar Republic, Hindemith established himself as an internationally renowned violinist and Germany's most important contemporary composer. He participated as a performer in the first in Donaueschingen Chamber Music Days (in the Black Forest). His early works were inspired by the late Romantic style and Expressionism, by the works of Richard Strauss, Franz Schreker and Arnold Schoenberg. He scandalized conservative audiences with a series of three one-act operas based on contemporary provocative texts. In the 1920s his instrumental opuses featured approaches related to neoclassicism in terms of the clear musical expression deployed in the complex polyphonic fabric, the prevailing diatonicism. To this period also belong the masterfully written String Quartets No. 3 and 4 (1921, 1922), the Concerto for Orchestra (1925), the dance pantomime Demon (1924), the opera Cardilac. In the early 1920s the composer joined the then fashionable idea of "new objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit) - art created with a clear practical purpose, not for art's sake. With his move in 1927 to Berlin, where he took up the post of professor of composition at the Academy of Music, Hindemith began to contemplate on the role of the composer in modern society. Convinced that artists should write music for different audiences and performers, including amateurs and young people, he created children's play-songs, pieces for youth groups and brass bands, radio plays and other works. He collaborated with composer Kurt Weill on the music of Bertolt Brecht's radio cantata The Lindberg’s Flight (Der Lindberghflug). He deeply respected the musical tradition, especially Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Brahms. Hindemith created a large body of work, reinterpreting various established musical genres. Showing great imagination in terms of instrumental ensembles, his seven Kammermusik opuses are often described as modern equivalent of Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Written for ensembles of various, including non-traditional instruments, many percussion, etc. Later in America he composed his famous piano cycle Ludus tonalis (1942) on the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of the completion of the Well-Tempered Clavier Johann Sebastian Bach in 1744. For Hindemith, the 1930s were a time of creative development and worldwide recognition as a composer, conductor and performer on viola and viola d`amore. In 1934 he completed one of the his most famous works, the Mathis der Mahler Symphony. Seeking to remain aloof from the ideas of encroaching fascism, he left for Turkey, where he established a system of music education modeled on the Western model and taught at the Ankara Conservatory (1935-1937). In 1937 he decided to leave Berlin and settled in Switzerland. He rethought his musical language, deriving his view of tonality in a two-volume edition with theoretical and practical parts (Unterweisung im Tonsatz,1937, 1939; 1970). Related to this are the series of sonatas for almost every orchestral instrument, which he began writing from 1935 onwards for about two decades. In February 1940 Hindemith left for the United States. He was appointed professor of music at the Yale University. He received prestigious commissions and was one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers. Accepting American citizenship in 1946, Hindemith intended to remain in this country. But by 1951 he was invited to become a professor emeritus in the University of Zurich. In 1953 he went to Switzerland again, teaching at the University until 1958 and remained there to live and work. Among his last works are the opera and related symphony The Harmony of the World (Die Harmonie der Welt), dedicated to the life of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who published in 1619 his Harmonies Mundi (Harmonies of the Worlds). Hindemith's work is controversially received. It has been described as innovative and lacking of intrinsic passion by many traditionalist musicians and yet it is too conventional for some followers of the avant-garde and New Music. But Hindemith is undoubtedly a distinctive figure in twentieth-century culture. His music is respected for the professionalism of its compositional techniques and the breadth of imagination in reviving traditional forms. His last world premiere was of his Mass for mixed choir a cappella, performed on November 12^th, 1963 in Vienna. The composer was present at the rehearsal process. Due to illness he travelled to Germany for examination and treatment. He died on 28 December in Frankfurt, in his native Germany.