Paul Hindemith

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Lore & Background

Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the eldest child of painter and decorator Robert Hindemith and his wife Marie. He was taught the violin as a child and entered Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, studying violin with Adolf Rebner, and conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. He supported himself playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups, became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1914, and was promoted to concertmaster in 1916. After his father's death in World War I, Hindemith was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917, sent to a regiment in Alsace in January 1918, and deployed to the front in Flanders in May 1918, where his diary has him 'surviving grenade attacks only by good luck.' After the armistice he returned to Frankfurt and the Rebner Quartet. In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and toured Europe extensively. He married actress and singer Gertrud Rottenberg on 15 May 1924; the marriage was childless. The Nazis' relationship to his music was complicated: some condemned it as 'degenerate,' and in December 1934 Joseph Goebbels publicly denounced him as an 'atonal noisemaker.' The Nazis banned his music in October 1936, and he was included in the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition. However, some officials thought he might provide an example of a modern German composer. Hindemith accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to oversee the creation of a music school in Ankara in 1935, leading the reorganization of Turkish music education. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938, partly because his wife was of part-Jewish ancestry, but primarily due to conflict with the Third Reich's artistic policies. Arriving in the U.S. in 1940, he taught at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946 but returned to Europe in 1953, living in Zürich and teaching at the university there until 1957. He died in Frankfurt of pancreatitis, aged 68, and was buried in La Chiésaz, Vaud, Switzerland.

Reader's Guide

Hindemith is among the most significant German composers of his time. His early works are in a late romantic idiom, and he later produced expressionist works before developing a leaner, contrapuntally complex style in the 1920s, heard in the Kammermusik series (1922–1927). Most of his compositions are anchored by a foundational tone and use musical forms, counterpoint, and cadences typical of the Baroque and Classical traditions, while his harmonic language freely uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, as detailed in his three-volume treatise The Craft of Musical Composition. Notable works include the song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the symphony Mathis der Maler (1934), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946), a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem. Hindemith taught at Yale for a little over ten years, teaching 400 students, of whom 46 earned degrees, mostly in music theory. His notable students included Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, and Samuel Adler. He also taught at the University at Buffalo, Cornell University, and Wells College, and gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World (1952) was extracted. He received the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 1955 and the Balzan Prize in 1962. Toward the end of his life he conducted and recorded much of his own music.

Did You Know?

• Hindemith played the viola d'amore, an instrument not in wide use since the baroque period, and wrote Kammermusik No. 6 as a concerto for it.
• He wrote the music for and acted in Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast; the score and original film were later burned by the Nazis.
• In 1929, Hindemith played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto after Lionel Tertis turned it down.
• He led the reorganization of Turkish music education and the early efforts to establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet in the 1930s.
• Among Hindemith's students at Yale was the future rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.