Paul Hindemith

Hindemith pursued multiple roles across music as a theorist, instructor, violist, conductor, and composer, widely viewed as the preeminent German creator of his era and a pivotal presence in the interwar period between the two world conflicts. His idiom fused neoclassical principles with contemporary harmonic language and occasional jazz inflections. Operas, ballets, orchestral scores, choral settings, and chamber pieces all figured in his output. Early on, Hindemith espoused Gebrauchsmusik, an outlook that elevated practical function above aesthetic refinement. Even so, his most familiar scores, above all the opera Mathis der Maler, earn admiration for their emotional resonance, lush and vivid orchestral hues and gestures, singular handling of simultaneous rhythms, and supple, swift-moving polyphony.

Hindemith entered the world outside Frankfurt and moved with his relatives into the city in 1902. Violin lessons began there in 1904. By 1908 he had become a pupil of Adolf Rebner, an instructor at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, who obtained a tuition-free place for him at the institution the next year. Although composition had already occupied him for some time, Hindemith now undertook formal study in that discipline while continuing violin work. Military conscription cut short his conservatory tenure in 1917; most of his service was spent in a regimental band stationed roughly three kilometers from the front. After the armistice, Hindemith returned to the concert platform with the Rebner Quartet, having taken up the viola in 1919, yet increasingly regarded composition as his central vocation. In those years his music moved away from late-Romantic Expressionism tied to specific functions, occasions, or purposes and toward a new idiom of absolute and objective music.

An invitation to join the administrative committee of the Donaueschingen Festival arrived in 1923; over time he exerted growing sway on its programming, which included works by Schoenberg and Webern. The following year he married Gertrud Rottenberg, daughter of the conductor of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, an ensemble in which Hindemith had performed. His eight-part series titled Kammermusik took shape during this period. In 1927 he accepted a professorship in composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Alongside his performing schedule, Hindemith soon developed a serious commitment to teaching that included an evening class at the Volksmusikschule NeuKolln.

Early in 1934 the Nazi party initiated a campaign to discredit Hindemith that led the Kulturgemeinde to declare a boycott of his works in November. A six-month leave from the Hochschule was granted in January 1935. Because the music division of the Nazi party did not endorse the boycott until 1937, he was permitted to resume teaching, undertake foreign concert tours, publish his music, and conclude an agreement with the Turkish government to establish an organized musical culture there. Also in 1935 he completed Mathis der Maler, the opera he had begun in 1933 and that would become his most celebrated stage work. Political conditions delayed its premiere until 1938 in Zurich, after he had departed Germany for Switzerland. He then emigrated to the United States in 1940.

Following lecture and teaching engagements arranged by friends, he joined the faculty at Yale, where he taught composition and, from 1945 to 1953, conducted the Collegium Musicum. Hindemith became an American citizen in 1946. In 1951 he accepted a position at the University of Zurich; after retiring from Yale in 1953 he settled permanently in Switzerland. Sonatas for every orchestral instrument appeared across his career; the final one, the Tuba Sonata, dates from 1955, the year he stepped down from his Zurich post. Conducting subsequently claimed more of his attention. Taken ill in November 1963, he was transferred to a Frankfurt hospital and died there of acute pancreatitis.