Paul Hindemith - Biography
Paul Hindemith the great German composer and theorist was born on November 16th 1895 in Hanau Germany and died in Frankfurt am Main on December 28th 1963. Hindemith was instructed on the violin at nine and entered the Hoch Conservatory at fourteen where he studied composition with Arthur Mendelssohn. His father death when he was in his teens left him on his own and he survived by performing in dance bands. In 1915 he became of the Concert Master of Frankfort Opera, he later helped founded the Amar Quartet as the violist (they specialized in modern and early music). By the 1920’s he became a driving force in contemporary music with his concerts in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden. His first compositional phase was centered on chamber music and he wrote a number of pieces for string instruments including Sonatas for Violin, Viola, Viola D’Amore and Cello along with String Quartets and Quintets. Hindemith also wrote an extensively for Wind and Brass during this period this included Sonatas for Flute,Oboe,English Horn,Clarinet,Bassoon,Horn,T rumpet,Trombone and Bass Tuba. The apogee of these chamber works was the series of Seven Kammermusik Concertos Op 24 for diverse instruments that is a modern version of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos. The music that is written for skilled amateurs and professionals became known as Gebrauchmusik (utility music) though Hindemith later objected to this term. He also at the time wrote a series of short expressionist operas in the 1920’s including Sancta Susana, Das Nusch-Nusch and Hin und Zuruck that share the aesthetic of Brecht and far from the conservative style Hindemith would utilize. The most important opera from this period is Cadillac based on a Hoffmann novella that is a work on a significantly larger scale.
He was in the 1920’s to marry Gertrude Ruttenbberg, the daughter of a conductor. Hindemith besides his career as a composer and a performer was also was an instructor in the Berlin High School of Music. All this was endangered by the emergence of the Third Reich. Though in the thirties was Hindemith was to emerge as a musical conservative, to the cultural commissars of the Third Reich he was a radical and they labeled Hindemith a musical Bolshevist, though Hindemith was a pure Aryan by Nazi standards he was his wife was Jewish which made him more suspect. Hindemith at the time was writing an opera for the Berlin State Opera Mathis Der Maler based on the life of the Renaissance painter Mattias Grunenwald. Goebbels personally blocked the premiere performance. This caused the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to write an article defending Hindemith which eventually led to Furtwangler to resigning his state posts. Interestingly enough Hindemith was to stay in Germany until 1938. He did have a rather exotic commission to reorganize musical instruction in Turkey along German lines. This conveniently kept him out of Germany for long periods of time. Eventually Hindemith couldn’t reconcile his artistic principles with the Third Reich and immigrated to Switzerland in 1938.His output in the 1930’s was not as prodigious as before; he fashioned a three movement symphony out of Mathis Der Maler , 3 Piano Sonatas that Glenn Gould later championed and a ballet Nobillissima Visione. He was also to work on outlining his system of composition in that allows some harmonic freedom within a tonal structure this system was to be compiled in a book The Craft of Musical Composition. Hindemith immigrated to the United States in 1940 and for thirteen years was a professor of composition at Yale. The war years were to see the composition of an hour long piano work that was to explore his vision of tonality Ludus Tonalis, Symphony in E Flat also the one work of Hindemith that has a modicum of popularity Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber, and a choral work that was a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt, Requiem for Those we Love‘When Lilacs Last Bloomed’ with texts by Whitman.
By 1950 Hindemith was an avuncular figure, bald and somewhat prematurely aged bearing a resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower. The genial appearance masked a will of iron. He found skilled musical interpreters like conductors Koussevitzky, Szell, Ormandy, Steinberg and the young Leonard Bernstein. Hindemith returned to Germany for the first time in fifteen years in 1953 and was invited to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in 1953 in a series of concerts of his works. Around this time Hindemith decided to move back to Europe and set up a residence in Switzerland. Some of Hindemith’s theories of harmonic consonance with the universe are expounded upon his final opera The Harmony of the World based on the intellectual life of famed astronomer Johannes Kepler. Though a masterful work an opera built around so rarefied a subject wasn’t destined to become a popular; as with Mathis he adapted the work into a Symphony.
Hindemith after he left for Europe still came back frequently to America to conduct and lecture. He wrote another pedagogic book entitled Composers World. He also made a distinguished series of recordings for EMI conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra of his orchestral pieces in the mid 1950’s. He didn’t compose many works in his sixties but spent considerable time revising his earlier works. Hindemith developed cancer at 68 and died on December 28th 1963 in Frankfurt.
Hindemith was a composer whose towering reputation declined after his death. Hindemith didn’t have enormously popular early works like Stravinsky or a dedicated school like Schoenberg or Webern. Significantly the major modernist musician of our times Pierre Boulez has never reordered any of his work. He developed a conservative music system that hasn’t found many followers. You really need to be musically literate to appreciate his music since it is built on structure and harmony and not on tonal beauty or what is normally thought of as melody. Hindemith was a supreme craftsman who many ways was an heir to the great German baroque craftsman (typified by Bach) of the eighteenth century. The best start besides his own recordings is a distinguished series of his orchestral pieces with San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Herbert Blomstedt available on Decca. His Piano Sonatas along with some of his Brass Sonatas and the Marianleben Song Cycle were recorded by Glenn Gould who was a proponent of Hindemith.
