Paul Hindemith

Composer, conductor and violist, Paul Hindemith was a threefold musician, performer and teacher, working in a wide range of styles, from neo-classicism to cutting-edge modernism. Born in Hanu, near Frankfurt am Main, on November 16, 1895, he grew up in a modest family with a painter-decorator father, who was nevertheless committed to the cultural education of his children. Trained on the violin from 1906, while his sister Toni took up the piano and his younger brother Rudolf the cello, he studied with Anna Hegner, who recommended him to his own teacher Adolf Rebner, concertmaster of the Hebner Quartet and conductor at the Frankfurt Opera. Particularly gifted, the young Hindemith entered the Dr. Hoch Konservatorium in Frankfurt in 1912, where he studied with Arnold Mendelssohn (Felix Mendelssohn's grand-nephew) and later with Bernhard Sekles. He played for a time in ballroom orchestras, before joining both the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra and the Hebner Quartet, writing a first String Quartet (1915), awarded by the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Foundation, and then a Cello Concerto. Having just lost his father, Hindemith was mobilized in 1917 and sent to Alsace and Flanders during the First World War, forming a string quartet at the front and composing the piano cycle In einer Nacht. Six months after his demobilization in December 1918, he organized a concert of his works and signed a lifetime contract with the publisher Schott. After switching from violin to viola as a member of the Hebner Quartet, he began composing his seven Kammermusik for small ensemble and soloists (1921-1927) and the opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen after Kokoschka, forming a scandal-scented Expressionist triptych with the biting Das Nusch-Nuschi and the iconoclastic Sancta Susanna. Fritz Busch, who directed the creations of the first two, abstained from the third. Also in 1921, the violist formed the Quatuor Amar, which remained active until 1929. Hindemith received a monthly salary from Schott in return for regular works, and left the Frankfurt Opera to devote himself to composition. In 1923, he became involved in the programming of the Donaueschingen Festival, which was transferred to Baden-Baden in 1927 and then to Berlin in 1930, becoming an important rendezvous for musical creation. These years saw the release of the grating Suite "1922 " for piano, a parody of popular music, the Concerto for orchestra, showing his curiosity for Bach's Brandenburgers (1923), four Konzertmusik (1926-1931), the melodic cycle Das Marienleben after Rilke (1923) and the opera Cardillac after E.T.A. Hoffmann (November 9, 1926), affiliated with the "new objectivity"(Neue sachlichkeit) in opposition to expressionism. This "total cacophony", according to critics, was revised in 1952. In May 1924, he married Gertrud Rottenberg, daughter of the conductor of the Frankfurt Opera, actress, singer and musician. Appointed professor of composition at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in 1927, he took an interest in all aspects of the function, teaching at the Neuköln Volksschule and founding a string trio with Emanuel Feuermann and Josef Wolfstahl (later Szymon Goldberg). He composed the music and played in Hans Richter's film Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), burned by the Nazis, who classified his music as degenerate, while Goebbels called him an "atonal noise-maker" in a speech. Defended by Wilhelm Furtwängler but officially banned in October 1936 and included in the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, Hindemith nevertheless found support in high places, praising his use of tonality and popular themes. Under pressure to resign his post, the composer traveled to Egypt and Turkey, where he was offered the directorship of the Ankara Conservatory, which he declined. This period of uncertainty saw him compose some of his greatest works, such as the operas Neues vom Tage (1929), premiered by Otto Klemperer in Berlin, and Mathis der Maler, from which he drew the symphony of the same name, premiered by Furtwängler in Berlin on March 12, 1934, the Three Piano Sonatas (1936), the first Wind Sonatas (ten in all, between 1936 and 1955) and the Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (1938). He visits the United States for a series of recitals on viola and viola d'amore, then settles temporarily in Switzerland in 1938, where Mathis der Maler is premiered in Zurich on May 28, before leaving for the other side of the Atlantic in 1940. He taught at Yale University until 1953, and also at Buffalo, Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) and Wells College (Aurora, NY). He became a naturalized American citizen in 1946, and in that year wrote Symphonia Serena and Requiem: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, after the piano exercises Ludus Tonalis (1942) and Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943). Well received in the United States, he gave readings, received commissions and trained numerous composers, including Robert Strassburg. After the Second World War, he returned to Europe for two tours, composing the Clarinet Concerto (1947) and Horn Concerto (1949). Invited to teach at Zurich University, he combined this activity with his position at Yale, from which he resigned in 1953. In the meantime, he composed the Symphony in B-flat major and the Symphony Die Harmonie der Welt, both dating from 1951. He wrote the libretto for the opera of the same name, based on the life of Johannes Kepler, which premiered in Munich on August 11, 1957, the year of his retirement. As his health declined, he received several awards and left his Swiss home in Blonay for Frankfurt, where he died of an inflamed pancreas on December 28, 1963, at the age of 68. Eschewing labels and schools, Hindemith embraced modernity without practicing dodecaphony, developing his own tonal system within the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, working on the consonance and dissonance of intervals and using motor rhythms, as he set out in his theoretical treatise The Craft of Musical Composition (1941-1942).

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