HINDEMITH

One of the leading German composers in the first half of the 20th century, Paul Hindemith was a prolific writer who developed a distinctive compositional style. He was a leading exponent of Gebrauchsmusik—literally “music for use.” Although this implies a practical function, such as a film score, in Hindemith’s case, it more specifically meant music for amateurs, or music to be enjoyed in the home.

Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on November 16, 1895. He was the oldest of three children, who were all encouraged by their father, an amateur musician who played the zither, to explore their musical talents. Hindemith started taking violin lessons in 1904, and continued as a student at the Frankfurt conservatory from 1907 to 1917.

From an early age, Hindemith showed that he was exceptionally gifted as an instrumentalist. He quickly became proficient on the violin, followed by the viola, and was also accomplished on a number of other instruments, particularly the piano and clarinet. While at the conservatory, Hindemith attracted the attention of the senior violin teacher, Adolf Rebner, who took the 12-year-old boy on as a private pupil. Rebner also allowed Hindemith to tour as second violinist and then as viola player in his own string quartet. When Hindemith’s father was killed fighting in the German army in 1915, he had to play clarinet in cafes to provide financial support for his mother.

Hindemith was appointed leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1916, although in the following year he was drafted to serve in the war. For the next two years, he played in a regimental band and was encouraged by his commanding officer to form a string quartet. After completing his military service, he earned a living playing in quartets and resumed his position with the Frankfurt Opera. In 1921, he formed the renowned Amar-Hindemith Quartet, and a few years later married Gertrud Rottenberg, the daughter of the director of the Frankfurt Opera.

In 1923, Hindemith was invited to join the administrative committee for the Donaueschingen Festival. In this position he was able to bring new life to the festival, although none of his own works was actually performed there. Four years later, in 1927, Hindemith was appointed professor of composition at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, and it was there that he first began to take an interest in teaching music theory as well as composing music for amateur musicians—the music that later became known as Gebrauchsmusik.

Composer and violinist Paul Hindemith conducts a rehearsal in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1953.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Hindemith’s career began to suffer critical and, in the 1930s, political adversity. This came to a head at the premiere of his opera Cardillac (1926). The German critics at the time believed that he was betraying his country’s music tradition and that the imagery used in the opera was far too sexually explicit. In the early 1930s he began to attract criticism from the Nazi government for his radicalism, and because of his friendships with Jewish musicians. In 1934, the Nazi committee in charge of determining what was acceptable in the arts, attempted to ban all performances of Hindemith’s music, despite considerable anger expressed by a number of his supporters, not least the eminent conductor Wilhelm FURTWäNGLER.

Consequently, Hindemith was given a six-month leave of absence from his teaching position at the Hochschule, although he was not forced to leave the country. The ban on Hindemith’s music did not actually become effective until 1937, by which time he was already back in the Hochschule teaching, performing on concert tours, and getting his music published. Nonetheless, 1937 was the year in which he decided to give up his post at the Hochschule and leave for Switzerland with his wife. In February 1940, Hindemith and his wife visited New York City and made a few concert tours, and in the following year they took up U.S. residence.

While in America, Hindemith taught at a number of institutions, including Buffalo, Cornell, and Yale universities. He was given a permanent position at Yale from 1940 to 1953. As a teacher, Hindemith placed very strict and rigorous demands upon his students.

After leaving Yale in 1953, he and his wife moved back to Switzerland, residing in Blonay, near Vevey, while he continued on as a professor emeritus at the University of Zurich. In his later years, he took up an interest in conducting and went on many concert tours worldwide, including to South America, Japan, Europe, and the U.S. On November 15, 1963, Hindemith became ill while at home in Blonay and was taken to a hospital in Frankfurt. He died the following month, on December 28, at age 68, from acute pancreatitis.

THEORETICAL APPROACH

Neither truly radical nor conservative, Hindemith’s music lies between these two extremes. The 20th century saw many distinct styles of composition evolve, and Hindemith worked his way through several of them. Like many of his contemporaries, he started out in a Post-Romantic style, exemplified by his String Quartet No. 1 (1918). He experimented with expressionism in the one-act operas Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (1919) and Sancta Susanna (1921), and the song cycle Das Marienleben (1923). Around 1927, he moved on to a simpler and clearer Neo-Baroque style, and seemed finally to settle into a Neo-Romantic mode in works such as the opera Mathis der Maler (1935) and the ballet Nobilissima Visione (1938). Much of his Gebrauchsmusik of the 1930s remains in Neo-Baroque style. Hindemith never composed 12-tone music, and although some of his music is highly dissonant, it always retains a tonal centre.

Eventually, Hindemith attempted to systematise his style of composition, and wrote several books with this purpose in mind. Of these, Unterweisung im Tonsatz (“The Craft of Musical Composition”), published in 1937, is fundamental to an understanding of his approach. His compositional style was centred on what he perceived to be the importance of intervals, based on their acoustic and psychological strength. As a result, quartal harmony (where chords are built on the basis of superimposed fourths) became a characteristic part of his harmonic system.

Whereas SCHOENBERG, and those who followed, discounted traditional tonality, Hindemith always maintained a relationship with it—he believed that the rules of tonality should be stretched as far as they could go, without breaking them. He claimed that the process of natural harmonic tension and relaxation created in tonal music is essential, and that the lack of it in serial music is a weakness. As befits the Germanic tradition, Hindemith was especially drawn to counterpoint.

In several respects, Hindemith had much in common with 18th-century Baroque composers. Like Telemann, he wrote much Gebrauchsmusik. Another of Hindemith’s Baroque traits was his fondness for entire movements that progress forward and then back, imitating works such as Bach’s Musical Offering. An example is Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, in which the “Postlude” is the Prelude upside down. It is in his sonatas, however, of which there are 25 for orchestral instruments, both with and without piano, that Hindemith applied his principles of Gebrauchsmusik.

Hindemith proved that he was a highly original and extremely prolific composer—it is said that he could compose a piece of music as easily as write a letter. As a composer-performer, he remained one of the most accomplished among his contemporaries. He was a keen experimenter who was capable of trying his hand at a number of varied styles and forms, and it is therefore somewhat ironic that so few composers were influenced by his music.

Richard Trombley

PAUL

HINDEMITH

THEORETICAL APPROACH