Between 1933 and 1935 Hindemith wrote the opera MATTHIAS THE PAINTER, based on his own libretto, about the life of the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald (1470 – 1528). The opera was denied admission to the stage because its plot had too many analogies to the current situation in Nazi Germany – the tumultuous era of the Reformation, the Peasants’ War, the pyres on which Luther’s books were burned, the repressive effect on the artistic mind. The opera was not premiered until 1938 in Zurich. At the request of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler for a new work for an upcoming Berlin Philharmonic tour, Hindemith extracted musical material from the opera in the three-movement symphony MATTHIAS THE PAINTER. Each of the movements is named after a painting from the Isenheim altarpiece, Matthias Grünewald’s greatest work, painted in 1515-1516. The first movement, ANGELIC CONCERT, introduces the melody of the medieval German song Es sungen drei Engel (Three Angels Sang). The following movements are Entombment and The Temptation of St. Anthony. The symphony was premiered on March 12th, 1934, and in October of that year it was heard under the baton of Otto Klemperer with the New York Philharmonic.