Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith (born November 16, 1895, Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, Germany—died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt am Main) was one of the principal German composers of the first half of the 20th century and a leading musical theorist. He sought to revitalize tonality—the traditional harmonic system that was being challenged by many other composers—and also pioneered in the writing of Gebrauchsmusik, or “utility music,” compositions for everyday occasions. He regarded the composer as a craftsman (turning out music to meet social needs) rather than as an artist (composing to satisfy his own soul). As a teacher of composition he probably exerted an influence on most of the composers of the generation that followed him.

Hindemith earned his living at an early age playing the violin in cafes, dance bands, and theatres. His undertaking of almost any kind of musical job may have contributed to the facility and matter-of-factness with which he later composed. Studying music in Frankfurt, at 20 he became leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra.

Meanwhile, his own compositions were being heard at international festivals of contemporary music. Early works included chamber music composed for the Amar-Hindemith Quartet, in which he played the viola; the song cycles Die junge Magd (1922; “The Young Maid”), based on poems by Georg Trakl, and Das Marienleben (1924, rev. 1948; “The Life of Mary”); and the opera Cardillac (1926), based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scuderi (“The Girl from Scuderi”). By the late 1920s Hindemith was regarded as the foremost German composer of his generation.

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Composers & Their Music

The “utility” music he wrote for children’s games, youth groups, brass bands, radio plays, and other practical purposes reflected a functional trend in the culture of postwar Germany. Hindemith collaborated with Kurt Weill on the music for a radio cantata by Bertolt Brecht, Der Lindberghflug (1928; “The Lindbergh Flight”).

His greatest work, Mathis der Maler, an opera about the painter Matthias Grünewald and his struggles with society, caused a public imbroglio in Nazi Germany when Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted an orchestral version with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1934 and vigorously supported the opera in the press. The Nazi cultural authorities, led by Joseph Goebbels (minister of propaganda), banned the opera, denouncing the composer as a “cultural Bolshevist” and “spiritual non-Aryan.”

Hindemith, who had been professor of composition at the Berlin Academy of Music since 1927, left Germany for Turkey, where he set up a music education system on Western lines and taught at the conservatory in Ankara (1935–37). Later he taught at Yale University (1940–53) and at the University of Zürich (1951–58).

His early music was considered anti-Romantic and iconoclastic, but it also showed humour, exuberance, and inventiveness. His Kammermusik series—for small, unconventional, astringent groups of instruments—is outstanding. He also produced such works as the Violin Concerto (1939), the Cello Concerto (1940), the Symphonic Metamorphoses After Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1946), and the operas Die Harmonie der Welt (1957; “The Harmony of the World”) and The Long Christmas Dinner (1961).

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An opponent of the 12-tone school of composer Arnold Schoenberg, Hindemith formulated the principles of a harmonic system that was based on an enlargement of traditional tonality. His Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937–39; The Craft of Musical Composition, 1941, rev. 1945) constitutes a theoretical statement of his principles.