Thread: Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

History does have a way of sorting things out.

By the time Paul Hindemith died, the so-called “serious music” world—or at least its living, creative branch—had been seduced by young lions from the Darmstadt summer school and similar hothouses. Olivier Messiaen acted as their indulgent headmaster, with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage his star pupils. A host of lesser composers, many of them university professors, drew their inspiration (as Boulez and Stockhausen and Cage had once done) from the theories of Arnold Schoenberg and his student Anton Webern. Schoenberg declared tonal music dead, and Webern went on to atomize the rhythms and textures that had attended it. Audiences showed little interest in most of this music, but it didn’t matter. One made a career based not on what the public thought, but on the opinions of one’s peers in the “club.”

At some remove from this younger crowd stood a few tonally-oriented Old Pros: Bartók, penniless and dead by 1945. Stravinsky, who adopted Webernian techniques in the ‘50s. Copland, who followed suit.

And Hindemith. He was the giant who never repented his tonal ways. To the very end, he persisted in creating music of substance, balance, and clarity, all of it revolving around perceptible consonance and dissonance—real tonal centers, triadic structures, and the satisfying tension-and-release of traditional harmonic language. (Actually, he developed a new way to look at harmony—click here for that.)

By 1963, no one cared. Hindemith’s moment was over.

But then more history happened. Toward the end of 2013, a year marked by 200th-anniversary celebrations for Verdi and Wagner, we began to notice an uptick in the number of Hindemith recordings, many of them preserving performances in memoriam held earlier in the year. Some important artists, including Paavo Järvi, Tabea Zimmermann, and Idil Biret, brought out lively new interpretations of Hindemith’s best music. Fifty years after his death, Hindemith’s star has begun to rise again.

If you are new to Hindemith’s music, one very good way to make its acquaintance is through the big orchestral works—Mathis der Maler (the symphony, not the opera), or Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, maybe Nobilissima Visione or the Konzertmusik op. 50. They have been recorded many times over the years. They’re tuneful, expressive, and easy on the ears.

Or you could consider the concertos for viola.

Hindemith was a viola player himself—by choice, mind you. After having become proficient enough on violin to be named concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra at the age of 19, he decisively switched to viola three years later. Something about the viola appealed enormously to this young polymath, who once boasted that he could play every instrument in the orchestra, at least a bit. Was it the instrument’s deeper, warmer sound? Or did its attraction lie in its role as an inner voice—the line that fills in the harmony, offers counterpoint at just the right time, and in so many other ways completes a string quartet or an orchestra?

Whatever the reason, Hindemith-as-composer and Hindemith-as-performer formed an unbeatable duo in the 1920s and ‘30s. Here’s what one German reviewer said in 1930:

Armed with a viola, the completely non-professorial Professor Paul Hindemith walked onto the stage to perform his Kammermusik Nr. 5, the viola concerto. . . . Both as a creative as well as a performing artist Hindemith is the most unceremonious musician of our time; his manner is so incredibly natural and informal that one could indeed think it is almost an act. One can really feel the child-like joy he takes in enticing the most fantastic escapades from his grumbling instrument, laughing up his sleeve because of the amazement he thereby causes.

Let’s hear some of that concerto. Here is an excerpt from its third movement as played on an astonishingly fine new recording from Tabea Zimmermann and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Hans Graf conducting (Myrios Classics MYR010; SACD). In character it’s a scherzo, filled with short, almost jokey musical motives that fairly dance off the page. At first you won’t notice that it’s also a strict fugue, offering an effortless flow of Professor Hindemith’s skillful counterpoint. (This was the guy who once determined that listeners can usually follow three fugal voices at once but seldom four. That raises a question: which is more fun, to follow the fugue or to get lost in it?)

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And here is a little of the fourth movement, which begins by quoting the Bayerischer Avanciermarsch (March “Forward, Bavaria!”)—a strategy that tells us a lot about Hindemith. Like Bach, he wasn’t above sticking in a familiar tune; it made his music more “relatable,” as the kids say today, but also allowed him to parody Germany’s jingoistic attitudes.

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By 1927, when he composed the Kammermusik Nr. 5, Hindemith had forsworn the Bad Boy music that first won him attention. In the early ‘20s he had written a trio of sexually provocative operas, and the Kammermusik Nr. 1 of 1922 seemed similarly meant to disturb people. But during this decade Hindemith was also actively searching for new aesthetic principles that would honor the practical and necessary in music-making—quite a departure from the late-romantic “art for art’s sake” ethos.

Hindemith with his viola.

He combined his new interest in viable music for real people, including amateurs, with an anti-romantic turn toward Baroque compositional practice. Thus the Kammermusik series of concertos (1922–27) was modeled more on Bach’s Brandenburgs than on anything by Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky. You will have noticed that the viola soloist in Kammermusik No. 5 doesn’t stand apart from the ensemble but rather plays an integral role within it. Likewise, counterpoint is a central part of nearly every movement, as in Bach’s works.

Ms. Zimmermann’s new recording features not only this Kammermusik viola concerto, but also the monumental six-movement version of the Konzertmusik für Solobratsche und grösseres Kammerorchester, op. 48a (1930), newly reconstructed and given its recording premiere here. And she begins with Hindemith’s most popular work for viola and orchestra, 1935’s Der Schwanendreher (“The Swan Turner,” a reference to medieval minstrels who played the hurdy-gurdy, which often had a handle shaped like a swan’s neck).

By the mid-1930s Hindemith was experiencing increasing difficulty as an artist in Nazi Germany. Goebbels had condemned him as a Jewish “noisemaker,” a designation patently false on both counts; his music and his presence as a performer were effectively banned from German radio and concert stages from 1934 on; and it became very difficult for him to gain permission to tour abroad. Finally he emigrated, first in 1938 to Switzerland, and then in 1940 to the United States. Teaching suited his temperament—he had been a professor at the Berlin Hochschule since 1927—and he accepted an appointment at Yale University soon after arriving here.

Der Schwanendreher is based on old German folksongs. Hindemith scholar Dr. Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt (who contributed excellent notes to this album) believes that the composer’s depressing situation is reflected in some of his creative choices: lines from the folksong texts that reference departure, loneliness, and grief are set directly into the viola part, making their expression very personal. I am tempted to excerpt long passages from this lovely work for you, but instead I will close this section with a clip from another mid-‘30s work, the Trauermusik (Music of Mourning), which Zimmermann also plays.

Hindemith had arrived in England in January 1936 to perform Schwanendreher, but then King George V died, eliminating anything that folksy as a programming option. (Despite Dr. Schaal-Gotthardt’s analysis, most of the work is not an expression of grief.) So Hindemith sat down and wrote something more appropriate. He only had a few hours to compose it and then practice it, so it’s not a ground-breaking piece. But this Trauermusik does give you an idea of how music just seemed to pour out of him in those years:

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Zimmermann and her colleagues had the good fortune to record their Hindemith Volume 1 (Vol. 2 is imminent) in Berlin/Dahlem’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche. Its spacious acoustic seems perfect for this music. The sound of her viola there, lustrous and magically consistent, proved ideal for Hindemith, as did her unforced musicality. These are gorgeous, pleasant, interesting works, and they should be better known. If only we had more Tabea Zimmermanns to evangelize for them, and more labels like Myrios, willing to expend the necessary effort to achieve demonstration-quality sound.

Turning to Hindemith’s music for piano and orchestra, we encounter another landmark release, this from pianist Idil Biret and the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Toshiyuki Shimada conducting (Naxos 8.573201-02). Hindemith: The Complete Piano Concertos includes both the works formally labeled as concertos and other works for piano and orchestra. Some are relatively well-known, some obscure or newly discovered.

Why this pianist and this orchestra? I suppose the Yale connection is clear enough—Hindemith taught there from 1940 to ’53. But Idil Biret can also lay claim to a fascinating Hindemith tie: born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1941, Biret benefited as a youngster from the atmosphere generated by Hindemith’s 1935 visit to Turkey, during which time he was asked by the government to oversee a thorough reform of its music education curriculum along Western lines. Although Biret soon enough decamped to Paris for study with Nadia Boulanger, she retains strong memories of Hindemith’s influence in her native land. There’s a charming photo in the sleeve notes of the 22-year-old Biret in rehearsal with Boulanger (as conductor) for a performance of Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for piano, brass, and two harps with the Hallé Orchestra.

Like Zimmermann’s vol. 1, this recording also provides us with a panoramic view of Hindemith’s compositional development. If anything, its scope is even wider, commencing before Kammermusik Nr. 2 (1924) and ending with the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1945) premiered by Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. In addition, we get the 1930 Konzertmusik for piano, brass, and two harps, very much an experiment in tone colors; The Four Temperaments from 1940; and Klaviermusik mit Orchester, written in 1923 for Paul Wittgenstein but never performed, and only recently recovered from a farmhouse in Pennsylvania—in that sense it’s a “new” Hindemith concerto.

You already know the brittle wit of the Kammermusik pieces. Here’s a sample of Ms. Biret and her 12-piece band in Nr. 2’s “Kleines Potpourri,” written in 3/8 for the ensemble but in 4/4 for the pianist:

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And here’s the first part of the 1930 Konzertmusik finale, which catches the avant-garde mood of that work, commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and premiered by the Chicago Symphony:

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Its airy, mysterious third movement, scored for piano and harps only, also merits repeated hearings.

In the 1940s Hindemith’s output slowed. Whether revising earlier works or creating new ones, he began to apply more rigorously the theoretical principles he had developed over the years. The increased emphasis on balance, symmetry, and “objective” beauty, not to mention stricter adherence to his own notions about harmonic flow, cost him some of the spontaneity more evident in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The Four Temperaments suggests this, as does the 1945 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Here is a bit of the theme from the Temperaments:

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It’s lovely music, engaging in spite of its somehow instant familiarity. (And it may only seem familiar because so many of Hindemith’s American students turned out similar music for high-school bands, community orchestras, and more after the war.)

I find it hard to pick a favorite from these two generous discs. The performances are generally top-notch, and the recordings vibrant and colorful. You will enjoy exploring them! I do have an alternate recommendation, however, for the Wittgenstein Klaviermusik. Written in the manner of the Kammermusik series, this work for piano left-hand only with orchestra is quite difficult. Wittgenstein didn’t care for it and never performed it. Biret and the Yale instrumentalists are not always in perfect sync. The coordination problem is exacerbated by their engineers’ decision to spotlight the piano part, even though, as in Kammermusik Nr. 2, pianist and ensemble are equals and must maintain absolute rhythmic unity while trading motives.

For that, you need the premiere recording, made in 2009 by Leon Fleisher and the Curtis [Institute] Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach (Ondine ODE 1141-2). It’s coupled with Dvo

[Source: http://www.pstracks.com/classical_co...95-1963/12892/]