Paul Hindemith

• Period: Modern (1910-1949)
• Country: Germany
• Born: November 16, 1895 in Hanau
• Died: December 28, 1963 in Frankfurt
• Genres: Ballet, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, Vocal Music

Biography

A theorist, teacher, violist, conductor, and composer who is regarded by many as the foremost German composer of his generation, Paul Hindemith was one of the most central figures in music between the First and Second World Wars. Born outside of Frankfurt, Hindemith moved with his family to the city in 1902. It was here, in 1904, that Hindemith began taking violin lessons. By 1908, Hindemith became a student of Adolf Rebner, a teacher at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, who arranged for Hindemith to be awarded a free place at the conservatory the following year. Although he had long been composing, Hindemith, in addition to continuing his study of the violin, began to study composition formally. However, he was forced to leave the conservatory in 1917 when he was called up for military service. He spent most of his service as a member of a regimental band stationed about 3 kilometers from the front line.

After returning from the war, Hindemith again took to the concert stage, having switched to viola in 1919. In 1923 he was invited to join the administrative committee of the Donaueschingen Festival, a group over which he exerted an ever increasing amount of control; programming works of such composers as Schoenberg and Webern. The next year he married Gertrud Rottenberg, the daughter of the conductor of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, an ensemble in which Hindemith had been playing. In 1927 he received an appointment as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In addition to maintaining an active performing career, Hindemith soon developed a strong interest in teaching, and even took on an evening class at the Volksmusikschule NeuKolln.

Early in 1934, the Nazi party began a campaign to discredit Hindemith, which culminated in a boycott of the composer's works announced by the Kulturgemeinde in November of that year. In January 1935, Hindemith was given a six-month leave from the Hochschule. However, as the boycott of his music was not endorsed by the music division of the Nazi party until 1937, Hindemith was allowed not only to return to teaching, but also to undertake a series of concert tours abroad, to have his music published, and to enter into an agreement with the government of Turkey to build an organized musical life in that country. However, in 1937, Hindemith left Germany for Switzerland, and in 1940 came to the U.S.

After a series of lecture and teaching engagements which had been arranged by friends, Hindemith took a position at Yale, teaching composition and, from 1945 to 1953, conducting the Collegium Musicum. In 1946, Hindemith became an American citizen. In 1951 he accepted a position at the University of Zurich and, after retiring from Yale in 1953, took up permanent residence in Switzerland. After retiring from his post in Zurich, in 1955, he became more active as a conductor. In November 1963, he was taken ill and transferred to a hospital in Frankfurt, where he died of acute pancreatitis. ~ Stephen Kingsbury, All Music Guide

Discography

Hindemith: Concerto for violin; Four Temperaments Buy this CD

Hindemith Conducts Hindemith: The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon Buy this CD

Hindemith: Concert Music; Horn Concerto; Clarinet Concerto and others Buy this CD

Paul Hindemith Performs Hindemith Buy this CD

(b Hanau, nr Frankfurt, 16 Nov 1895; d Frankfurt, 28 Dec 1963). German composer. He studied as a violinist and composer (with Mendelssohn and Sekles) at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt (1908-17) and made an early reputation through his chamber music and expressionist operas. But then he turned to neo-classicism in his Kammermusik no.1, the first of seven such works imitating the Baroque concerto while using an expanded tonal harmony and distinctively modern elements, notably jazz. Each uses a different mixed chamber orchestra, suited to music of linear counterpoint and, in the fast movements, strongly pulsed rhythm.

During this early period Hindemith lived as a performer: he was leader of the Frankfurt Opera orchestra (1915-23, with a break for army service), and he played the viola in the Amar-Hindemith Quartet (1921-9) as well as in the first performance of Walton's Viola Concerto (1929). Much of his chamber music was written in 1917-24, including four of his six quartets and numerous sonatas, and he was also involved in promoting chamber music through his administrative work for the Donaueschingen Festival (1923-30). However, he also found time to compose abundantly in other genres; including lieder (Das Marienleben, to Rilke poems), music for newly invented mechanical instruments, music for schoolchildren and amateurs, and opera (Cardillac, a fantasy melodrama in neo-classical forms). In addition, from 1927 he taught at the Berlin Musikhochschule.

His concern with so many branches of music sprang from a sense of ethical responsibility that inevitably became more acute with the rise of the Nazis. With the beginning of the 1930s he moved from chamber ensembles to the more public domain of the symphony orchestra, and at the same time his music became harmonically smoother and less intensively contrapuntal. Then in the opera Mathis der Maler (preceded by a symphony of orchestral excerpts) he dramatized the dilemma of the artist in society, eventually opposing Brechtian engagement and insisting on a greater responsibility to art. Nevertheless, his music fell under official disapproval, and in 1938 he left for Switzerland, where Mathis had its first performance. He moved on to the USA and taught at Yale (1940-53), but spent his last decade back in Switzerland.

His later music is in the style that he had established in the early 1930s and that he had theoretically expounded in his Craft of Musical Composition (1937-9), where he ranks scale degrees and harmonic intervals in order from most consonant (tonic, octave) to most dissonant (augmented 4th, tritone), providing a justification for the primacy of the triad. His large output of the later 1930s and 1940s includes concertos (for violin, cello, piano, clarinet and horn) and other orchestral works, as well as sonatas for most of the standard instruments. His search for an all-encompassing, all-explaining harmony also found expression in his Kepler opera Die Harmonie der Welt.

works:
Operas

• Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (1919)
• Sancta Susanna (1921)
• Cardillac (1926, rev. 1952)
• Hin und zurück (1927)
• Neues vom Tage (1929)
• Mathis der Maler (1935)
• Die Harmonie der Welt (1957)
• The Long Christmas Dinner (1960)

Ballets

• Der Dämon (1922)
• Nobilissima visione (1938)
• Hérodiade (1944)
• The Four Temperaments, pf str (1946)

Orchestral music

• Conc. for Orch (1925)
• Philharmonisches Konzert (1932)
• Mathis der Maler, sym. (1934)
• Sym., E♭, (1940)
• Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber (1943)
• Die Harmonie der Welt, sym. (1951)

Chamber orchestral music

• Kammermusik no.1 (1922)
• no.2 with solo pf (1924)
• no.3 with solo vc (1925)
• no.4 with solo vn (1925)
• no.5 with solo va (1927)
• no.6 with solo va d′amore (1927)
• no.7 with solo org (1927)

Chamber music

• 6 str qts (1919, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1943, 1945)
• 2 str trios (1924, 1933)
• numerous sonatas etc

Choral music

• Das Unaufhörliche, oratorio (1931)
• When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom′d (1946)
• Mass (1963)

Songs

• Das Marienleben (1923, rev. 1936-48)
• many others

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Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) was a prolific and versatile German composer and also an important teacher of musical composition.

Paul Hindemith was born on Nov. 16, 1895, in Hanau am Main. At the age of 9, he began violin lessons; advancing rapidly, he was soon able to enter a conservatory in nearby Frankfurt, where he studied composition. In 1923 he became concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera orchestra. More important, however, was his career as violist, first in the Rebner Quartet and later (1922-1929) in the Amar Quartet, which toured Europe playing many major contemporary works.

In 1919 Hindemith signed his first contract with a music publisher (Schott), a connection he maintained throughout his life. That same year he wrote his first important compositions: the First String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 10, and the one-act opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen. These were rapidly followed by two more stage works: Das Nusch-Nuschi, a one-act play for Burmese marionettes, and the one-act opera Sancta Susanna. All these works were controversial, and Hindemith was considered a radical. Yet, later, his music remained firmly rooted in tonality; he rejected the twelve-tone method and was not interested in electronic composition.

From 1926 to 1929 Hindemith was active in the direction of the contemporary chamber-music festivals at Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden. During these years he wrote chamber music, including chamber concertos for piano, cello, violin, viola, and organ. Cardillac (1926) was an opera of major importance in his career. In 1927 he produced typical examples of his Gebrauchsmusik, that is, music intended for specific purposes or particular occasions: the Spiel-und Jugendmusiken Music for Youth), Op. 43 and 44.

In 1927 Hindemith accepted a professorship of composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. He remained there until 1934, when he was suspended as part of the Nazi campaign against "degenerate" (modern) music. It was under the impact of such turbulent political events that he composed his finest stage work, Mathis der Maler. Dealing with the problems and the duties of the artist in troubled times, this work draws deeply on Hindemith's own spiritual experiences while telling the story of the 16th-century German painter Matthias Grünewald. It was completed in July 1935 and premiered 3 years later in Zurich, Switzerland.

Also in 1935 Hindemith made his first journey to Turkey, where, at the request of the Turkish government, he drew up plans for the organization of Turkish musical life. While these plans were carried out over the next 2 years, he visited Turkey three more times. In 1937 he finally resigned from the Staatliche Hochschule; the following year he moved to Switzerland. In 1940 he emigrated to the United States and settled at Yale University, where he taught for the next 13 years.

During his American period Hindemith produced some of his most popular works, such as Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943) and When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd (A Requiem for Those We Love; 1946). However, he became nostalgic for Europe and in 1953 returned to Switzerland, where he lived for the last 10 years of his life. Among the major works of these years were two operas: The Harmony of the World (1957) and The Long Christmas Dinner (1960). On his last journey to America, in 1963, he heard the first American performance of the latter work, as well as the premiere of the Concerto for Organ and Orchestra, which he had written to celebrate the opening of Philharmonic Hall in New York City. His last work, a Mass for mixed choir a cappella, was premiered in November 1963 in Vienna under his direction. On December 28 he died in Frankfurt.

Hindemith's philosophy of music is summed up in the speech he gave upon receipt of the Balzan Prize in 1963. "In which direction, " he asked, " can music still develop? Certainly not … in the ever greater extension and expansion of the limits of sound. … To express what has never been said before, the musician must enter another dimension. He must explore the heights and the depths, the heights of the spiritual and the depths of the human soul." Such rejection of new sound possibilities weakened Hindemith's influence on musical developments of the 1950s and 1960s. More influential are his theoretical textbooks, The Craft of Musical Composition (1941), Traditional Harmony (1943), and Elementary Training for Musicians (1946), which are widely used in American universities.

Further Reading

Hindemith's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1949-1950 were published as A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations (1952). They offer interesting insights into the composer's views and experiences. A pictorial biography is Testimony in Pictures, with an introduction by Heinrich Strobel (trans. 1968). An excellent general study which discusses Hindemith is Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961).

Additional Sources

Hindemith, Paul, Selected letters of Paul Hindemith, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Noss, Luther, Paul Hindemith in the United States, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Skelton, Geoffrey, Paul Hindemith: the man behind the music: a biography, New York: Crescendo Pub., 1975.

Yale University Music Library, The Paul Hindemith collection: Yale University Music Library archival collection mss 47, New Haven, Conn.: The Library, 1994.

For more information on Paul Hindemith, visit Britannica.com.

Hindemith, Paul (b Hanau, 16 Nov. 1895, d Frankfurt, 28 Dec. 1958).German composer who wrote the scores for several ballets including Massine's Nobilissima visione (London, 1938), Graham's Herodiade (Washington, 1944), and Balanchine's The Four Temperaments (New York, 1946, concert premiere, 1940). He also wrote the music for mechanical organ for Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet (Donaueschingen, 1926.) His concert music has also been used for dance in Balanchine's Metamorphoses (New York, 1952), van Manen's Five Sketches (Five pieces for String Orchestra, Op. 44, The Hague, 1966), Harkarvy's Aswingto (Concert Music for String Orchestra and Woodwind, Op. 50, The Hague, 1969), Balanchine's Kammermusik No. 2 (New York, 1978), and van Manen's Opening (Amsterdam, 1986), among others.

Hindemith, Paul (1865–1963), German composer, theorist, teacher, and viola player. His dauntingly copious output, encompassing a huge variety of forms and instrumental combinations, includes the three‐act opera Cardillac (1926; revised, 1952), with libretto by Ferdinand Lion adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann's novella Das Fräulein von Scuderi (1819). The story, set in 17th‐century Paris and telling of a fatally gifted goldsmith whose murderous obsession with his own creations proves his undoing, is told via a series of neo‐baroque musical numbers, characteristic of Hindemith's essentially anti‐romantic compositional ethos at this time.

— Stephen Benson

Hindemith, Paul (Hanau, 1895-1963, Frankfurt/ Main), one of the leading German composers in the 1920s and 1930s, emigrated to the USA in 1938 as a result of his increasingly uneasy relationship with the Third Reich; he returned to Europe in 1951. In the 1920s he formulated the conception of Gebrauchsmusik (‘music for use’, a twin to Gebrauchslyrik), which had connections with the didactic and revolutionary aims of K. Weill and B. Brecht with whom he collabo-rated in his Lehrstück Der Lindberghflug (1929, see Ozeanflug, Der). O. Kokoschka (1919), F. Blei (1920), and E. T. A. Hoffmann (1926) are among writers on whose works he based his operas of this period, which also includes settings of 6 poems by G. Trakl (Die junge Magd, 1922).

In the 1930s, when teaching at the Berlin Hochschule, he turned away from this trend, believing that audience participation was of paramount importance, and concentrated on the concept of Sing- und Spielmusik, writing music and theoretical works intended for students, children, and amateurs, including the opera for children Wir bauen eine Stadt (1930). This was followed by an oratorio, Das Unaufhörliche (1931), to a text by G. Benn.

Hindemith's best-known work is the opera Mathis der Maler (1934-5, concerning the painter Mathias Grünewald, with a libretto by the composer). Das Marienleben (1922-3, revised 1936-48) is a setting for soprano and piano of 15 poems by Rilke; between 1933 and 1935 he also wrote 6 settings of poems by Hölderlin. Other notable works are his ballet Nobilissima visione (1938) and his Requiem to words by Walt Whitman (1946).

Hindemith, Paul (hĭn'dəmĭth) , 1895–1963, German-American composer and violist, b. Hanau, Germany. Hindemith combined experimental and traditional techniques into a distinctively modern style. After studying at the Frankfurt Conservatory, he began his career as a viola player. He taught (1927–37) composition at the Berlin Hochschule, but during the Nazi regime his compositions were banned because of their dissonance and modernity. In 1935 he was commissioned by the Turkish government to reorganize that country's musical education. Later he taught at Yale Univ. (1940–53), becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946; but in 1951 he returned to Europe to teach at the Univ. of Zürich. Hindemith's early compositions are highly contrapuntal and often atonal. Later works display a return to tonality that has often been termed neoclassical. His best-known work is the symphony (1934) drawn from his opera Mathis der Maler [Mathis the painter] (1938), which is based on the life of the painter Mathias Grünewald. Other operas include Cardillac (1926) and Neues vom Tage [news of the day] (1929). Many of Hindemith's works might be classed as Gebrauchsmusik [utility music], written for specific performance by amateur school groups or chamber music organizations. His aim was to establish closer contact between composer and public. Included in this group are the children's opera Wir bauen eine Stadt [we are building a city] (1931) and numerous sonatas and chamber works. Other important works are the Ludus Tonalis (1943) for piano; the song cycle Das Marienleben (1923, 1948) set to poems by Rilke; the viola concerto Der Schwanendreher (1935), based on medieval German folk songs; the ballet Nobilissima Visione (1938); and the setting for chorus and orchestra of Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946). His writings include Traditional Harmony (2 vol., 1943, 1948), The Craft of Musical Composition (1937, tr. 1942) and A Composer's World (1952).

Bibliography

See studies by I. Kemp (1970) and G. Skelton (1975).

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