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11/16/1895 - 12/28/1963
Biography
Born in Hanau, Germany, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered the Hochsche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main where he studied conducting, composition and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles, supporting himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy outfits. He led the Frankfurt Opera orchestra from 1915 to 1923 and played in the Rebner string quartet in 1921 in which he played second violin, and later the viola. In 1929 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.
In 1922, some of his pieces were heard in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. From 1927 he taught composition at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In the 1930s he made a visit to Cairo and several visits to Ankara where (at the invitation of Atatürk) he led the task of reorganizing Turkish music education. Towards the end of the 1930s, he made several tours of America as a viola and viola d'amore soloist.
In the 1930s the Nazis condemned his music as "degenerate", despite protests from the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and in 1940 Hindemith emigrated to the United States. (He was not himself Jewish, but his wife was.) At the same time that he was codifying his musical language, his teaching began to be affected by his theories. Once in the States he taught primarily at Yale University where he had such notable pupils as Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schonthal, and Oscar-winning film director George Roy Hill. During this time he also held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World was extracted. He became an American citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe in 1953, living in Zürich and teaching at the University there. Towards the end of his life he began to conduct more, and made numerous recordings, mostly of his own music. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962.
Hindemith died in Frankfurt am Main from acute pancreatitis.
Hindemith's music
Hindemith is seen by some as the most significant German composer of his time. His early works are in a late romantic idiom, and he later produced expressionist works, rather in the style of early Arnold Schoenberg, before developing a leaner, contrapuntally complex style in the 1920s, which some people found (and still find) difficult to understand. It has been described as neoclassical, but is very different from the works by Igor Stravinsky labeled with that term, owing more to the contrapuntal language of Bach than the Classical clarity of Mozart.
This new style can be heard in the series of works he wrote called Kammermusik (Chamber Music) from 1922 to 1927. Each of these pieces is written for a different small instrumental ensemble, many of them very unusual. Kammermusik No. 6, for example, is a concerto for the viola d'amore, an instrument which had not been in wide use since the baroque period, but which Hindemith himself played. He continued to write for unusual groups throughout his life, producing a sonata for double bass in 1949, for example.
Around the 1930s, Hindemith began to write less for chamber groups, and more for large orchestral forces. In 1933-35, Hindemith wrote his opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald. It is respected in musical circles, but like most twentieth-century operas it is rarely staged, though a well-known production by the New York City Opera in 1995 was an exception. It combines the neo-classicism of earlier works with folk song. Hindemith turned some of the music from this opera into a purely instrumental symphony (also called Mathis der Maler), which is one of his most frequently performed works.
Hindemith, like Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek, wrote Gebrauchsmusik (Utility Music), music intended to have a social or political purpose and often intended to be played by amateurs. The concept was inspired by Bertolt Brecht. An example of this is his Trauermusik (Funeral Music), written in 1936. Hindemith was preparing a concert for the BBC when he heard news of the death of George V. He quickly wrote this piece for solo viola and string orchestra to mark the event, and the premiere was given on the same day. Hindemith later disowned the term Gebrauchsmusik, saying it was misleading.
In the late 1930s, Hindemith wrote a theoretical book The Craft of Musical Composition in which he ranks all musical intervals from the most consonant to the most dissonant. It laid out Hindemith's compositional technique he had been using throughout the 1930s and would continue to use for the rest of his life. This work added to his reputation as a composer of music that is theoretically interesting, but lacking in emotional interest. His piano work of the early 1940s, Ludus Tonalis is seen by many as a further example of this. It contains twelve fugues, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach, each connected by an interlude during which the music moves from the key of the last fugue to the key of the next one. Much of Hindemith's music begins in consonant territory, moves into dissonance, and returns at the end to full, consonant chords. This is especially apparent in his "Concert Music for Strings and Brass."
Hindemith's most popular work, both on record and in the concert hall, is probably the Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, written in 1943. It takes melodies from various works by Weber, mainly piano duets, but also one from the overture to his incidental music for Turandot (Op. 37/J. 75), and transforms and adapts them so that each movement of the piece is based on one theme.
In 1951, Hindemith completed his Symphony in B-flat. Scored for concert band, it was written for an occasion of guest conducting the U.S. Army Band "Pershing's Own". The piece is representative of his late works, exhibiting strong contrapuntal lines throughout, and is a cornerstone of the band repertoire.
A Sampling of Works
Operas
Mathis der Maler (1934-1935)
Cardillac
Die Harmonie der Welt (The Harmony of the World)
Ballets
Nobilissima Visione, with Léonide Massine (1938)
Orchestral
Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber
Mathis der Maler Symphony (1933-1934)
Die Harmonie der Welt Symphony
Concerto for Orchestra
Symphony in E-flat major
Symphony in B-flat major, for concert band (1951)
Concerti
Piano Concerto (1945)
Violin Concerto
Trauermusik, for viola and strings
Der Schwanendreher, for viola and orchestra
Cello Concerto
Clarinet Concerto
Horn Concerto
Organ Concerto
Vocal
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Requiem for those we love), for chorus and orchestra, based on the poem by Walt Whitman (1946)
Das Marienleben, song cycle for soprano and piano, based on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, which exists in two versions. (There is also an orchestration by the composer of six of the songs from the cycle, for soprano and orchestra.)
Chamber
String Quartet No. 1 in C, Op. 2
String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 10
String Quartet No. 3 in C, Op. 16
String Quartet No. 4, Op. 22
String Quartet No. 5, Op. 32
String Quartet No. 6 in E-flat
String Quartet No. 7
Brass Septet
Kleine Kammermusik
Kammermusiks 1-7
Octet, for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, 2 violas, cello, and double bass
Instrumental
Viola Sonata No. 1, Op. 11
Viola Sonata No. 2, Op. 25
Flute Sonata (1936)
Oboe Sonata (1938)
Clarinet Sonata (1939)
Bassoon Sonata (1938)
Trumpet Sonata (1939)
Horn Sonata (1939)
Trombone Sonata (1941)
Tuba Sonata (1955)
Harp Sonata
Piano
Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936)
Piano Sonata No. 2 (1936)
Piano Sonata No. 3 (1936)
Ludus Tonalis
