Paul Hindemith

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a conductor, and an actor in an avant-garde film. He survived grenade attacks on the Flanders front, built a music school in Ankara at the invitation of a foreign government, was publicly denounced as an "atonal noisemaker" by Joseph Goebbels, and eventually became an American citizen while teaching hundreds of students at Yale. His music spans a territory from late romantic opulence to an entirely original harmonic system that he worked out across a three-volume treatise. The questions worth asking are not simply what he wrote, but how a man that prolific moved through one of the most turbulent centuries in European history, and what it costs a composer to keep working when the state decides your music is degenerate.

• 2. War, Frankfurt, and First Fame

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  Robert Hindemith, a painter and decorator from Lower Silesia, died in World War I in 1915, leaving his eldest son to support himself. Paul had already been playing dance bands and musical-comedy groups while studying at Frankfurt's Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, where his teachers included Adolf Rebner for violin and Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles for conducting and composition. He joined the Rebner String Quartet in 1914 as second violinist and rose to deputy leader, then concertmaster, at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra within two years.

  Conscripted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917, Hindemith was sent to a regiment in Alsace in January 1918 and assigned to play bass drum in the regimental band. He also formed a string quartet there. By May 1918 he was deployed to the front in Flanders as a sentry. His diary, as quoted in the New Grove Dictionary, records him "surviving grenade attacks only by good luck".

  After the armistice he returned to Frankfurt. In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, taking the viola chair himself and installing his younger brother Rudolf as the original cellist. The group toured extensively across Europe with a focus on contemporary music. The following year, pieces by Hindemith were played at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, bringing him to an international audience for the first time. He married Gertrud Rottenberg, an actress and singer, on the 15th of May 1924.

• 3. Neue Sachlichkeit and the Kammermusik Years

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  Between 1922 and 1927 Hindemith produced the series of works called Kammermusik, each scored for a different and often unusual small instrumental ensemble. The series drew comparisons to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and featured the viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in what critics called a neo-Bachian spirit. Kammermusik No. 6, for instance, is a concerto for the viola d'amore, an instrument largely dormant since the baroque period that Hindemith himself played.

  The broader style he was developing was associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, movement of the 1920s: leaner and more contrapuntally complex than the late romantic idiom he started in, owing more to Bach and Max Reger than to the Classical clarity of Mozart. In 1927, he was appointed Professor at the Berliner Hochschule fur Musik.

  He did not stop at music. In 1928, Hindemith wrote the score for Hans Richter's avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast and also appeared in it as an actor. The Nazis later burned both the score and the original film. The following year, Hindemith played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after the violist Lionel Tertis, for whom it was written, had turned it down. That year he also composed a trio for viola, heckelphone, and piano, an ensemble whose instrumentation alone signals his appetite for unusual combinations.

• 4. Goebbels, Degenerate Music, and Ankara

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  In December 1934, Joseph Goebbels used a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace to denounce Hindemith by name as an "atonal noisemaker". The accusation drew partly on the sexually charged nature of his early operas, including Sancta Susanna. Yet the picture was never simple: some Nazi officials believed Hindemith could serve as a model of a modern German composer, since by the 1930s he was writing tonal music with references to folk song. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler published a defence of Hindemith in 1934 taking precisely that line. The ban on his music came anyway, in October 1936, and in 1938 he was included in the Entartete Musik, or Degenerate Music, exhibition in Dusseldorf.

  Before the ban, the Turkish government had already moved. After Goebbels pressured Hindemith to request an indefinite leave of absence from the Berlin Academy, Hindemith accepted a Turkish invitation to visit Ankara multiple times during the 1930s and to oversee the creation of a music school there in 1935. His deputy was Eduard Zuckmayer. Hindemith led the reorganization of Turkish music education and the early efforts to establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet. Young Turkish musicians regarded him as a "real master". The Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts, even though he did not stay as long as many other emigres.

  He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938. A source close to him noted that while his wife was of part-Jewish ancestry, it was primarily his conflict with the artistic policies of the Third Reich that determined his decision to leave.

• 5. Yale and the American Chapter

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  Arriving in the United States in 1940, Hindemith took up a post primarily at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum. He required his students to work from his own pedagogical texts, especially The Craft of Musical Composition. According to Luther Noss's A History of the Yale School of Music 1855-1970, Hindemith taught for a little over ten years, with 400 students passing through, 46 of whom earned degrees, mostly in music theory.

  The list of his students crosses fields in unexpected ways. Among the composers were Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Harold Shapero, Samuel Adler, and Mitch Leigh. George Roy Hill, the film director, studied with him. So did the future rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. Hindemith also taught at Cornell University, the University at Buffalo, and Wells College during this period.

  He gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which his book A Composer's World was extracted in 1952. Hindemith became a U.S. citizen in 1946. In 1951 he completed his Symphony in B-flat for Band, written for the U.S. Army Band known as Pershing's Own. He premiered it with that band on the 5th of April that year; its second performance was given by the Boulder Symphonic Band at the University of Colorado, conducted by Hugh McMillan. He recorded it in stereo with members of the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI in 1956.

• 6. The Musical System

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  The Craft of Musical Composition, written in the late 1930s across three volumes, sets out in detail the harmonic system Hindemith developed. His music is tonal but non-diatonic, often written without a traditional key signature. It centres on a tonic and moves between tonal centres, but attempts what he called the free use of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale rather than drawing on a diatonic subset.

  At the core of the system is a ranking of every musical interval in the twelve-tone equally tempered scale from the most consonant to the most dissonant. Chords are classified in six categories based on dissonance, whether they contain a tritone, and whether they suggest a clear root or tonal centre. Hindemith also applied the system to melody, aiming for lines that do not outline major or minor triads in an obvious way.

  He advocated this framework as an analytical tool with broader reach than the traditional Roman numeral approach to harmony. In the final chapter of Book 1, his analyses range from the early Gregorian melody Dies irae through Guillaume de Machaut, J. S. Bach, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg, to one of his own compositions. He was rigorous enough about the system that he rewrote some of his earlier music after developing it. His 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues in the manner of Bach, with traditional devices including inversion, diminution, augmentation, retrogradation, and stretto; the order of the keys follows his own ranking of intervals around the tonal centre of C.

• 7. Late Works and Final Years

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  The Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, completed in 1943, is by many accounts the most popular of Hindemith's works in both recordings and concert halls. It takes melodies from various Weber pieces, mainly piano duets, and one from the overture to Weber's incidental music for Turandot (Op. 37/J. 75), transforming each into the basis of a movement.

  Hindemith returned to Europe in 1953, settled in Zurich, and taught at the university there until he retired from teaching in 1957. In 1954, an anonymous critic for Opera magazine, attending a performance of his Neues vom Tage, wrote that Hindemith was "no virtuoso conductor, but he does possess an extraordinary knack of making performers understand how his own music is supposed to go". He received the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1955 and the Balzan Prize in 1962, the latter awarded for the wealth, extent, and variety of his work, which the prize citation described as containing masterpieces of opera, symphonic, and chamber music.

  Despite a prolonged decline in his physical health, he composed almost until the end. He died in Frankfurt of pancreatitis on the 28th of December 1963, aged 68. He and his wife Gertrud were buried in the cemetery in La Chiésaz, in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. An asteroid, 5157 Hindemith, was discovered and named for him in 1973, a decade after his death.