Years ago, when I was just starting to show my musical compositions to other people, two or three of them remarked that I must have been influenced by Paul Hindemith.
I had heard the name, but I was actually not really familiar with his music. And I must admit, that after all these years, my appreciation of his music has not really progressed beyond his greatest hits, like the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber.
If someone noticed the influence of Carl Nielsen or Vagn Holmboe in my music, I would be very impressed; I am more familiar with those Danes, “world famous in Denmark” both of them, than I am with Hindemith.
But I’ve been thinking about Hindemith a lot lately, mostly because of the dreaded upcoming presidential inauguration of popular vote loser and Putin puppet Donald Trump.
You see, Hindemith, born in 1895, was already a renowned composer when Hitler came to power. Although he was not Jewish, Hindemith had cause for concern, and eventually he would find himself exiled like many Jewish musicians.
In the 1920s, Hindemith had been criticized for not being German enough in his music, and he self-consciously began to emphasize his existing interest in German folk music.
It was not enough. His opera Mathis der Maler was banned by the Nazis, and it took intense lobbying from conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler to get the ban overturned.
Despite signing an oath to loyalty to Hitler in 1936, life for Hindemith in Nazi Germany was not easy. But on the plus side, he had a much easier time than Furtwängler repairing his reputation after the war.
Hindemith tried to live with the Nazis for the rest of the decade, but by 1940 he had had enough, and they had had enough of him. First he went to Switzerland and then to America.
It was very soon after arriving in America that Hindemith started working on the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, though at first it was going to be ballet music.
Howard Posner wrote for the Los Angeles Philharmonic the most informative programme notes I’ve ever read for this composition:
The surprising thing is that Hindemith’s end product, while staying so close to Weber, sounds so little like the original. For example, in the first movement, based on the fourth of eight piano duets, Op. 60, there are few hints of the 19th century aside from the middle-section theme given to the oboe. ...The second movement is based on Weber’s incidental music to Schiller’s adaptation of Turandot, the same Carlo Gozzi fantasy about China that Puccini used for his 1926 opera. Weber took his melody from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1767 Dictionaire de Musique. ... It was ... as close as Weber was going to get to a real Chinese melody, and he used it almost exclusively in five of the six numbers he wrote for the play. It is the only tune that Hindemith alters significantly, but his insistent repetition of the tune is modeled on Weber’s Turandot overture. ...The third movement retains most of the substance, and the ABA structure, of Weber’s Andantino con moto from Six Pièces for two pianos, Op. 10, No. 2. The dancing flute solo in the last third of the piece is solely Hindemith’s. The march finale is again from the Op. 60 duets, much expanded. The horn calls implicit in Weber’s trio section are made explicit in Hindemith’s version, and become the basis of the requisite big finish.
I would add that the Metamorphosis is perhaps Hindemith’s most ebullient, effervescent and varied composition. And his take on Turandot is more convincingly Oriental than Weber’s. Perhaps Hindemith could have done something very interesting with Michael Haydn’s Turkish March...
I find some of HIndemith's other music much too uniform throughout. And I’m not alone: his depiction of the Four Temperaments, for example, was once panned as “the One Temperament.”
But this is most certainly a function of my still limited familiarity. After all, there was a time when I thought all Martinů’s Symphonies were scarcely different from one another, but I’m starting to know better than that.
And I was kind of surprised when iTunes pulled up the Pittsburgh Symphony as one of Hindemith’s compositions. It comes from a Rozhdestvensky album that I bought for the “Vienna” version of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor.
Now that I listen more to music from MP3s through iTunes rather than from the CDs, which I now very rarely take out of their cases, it becomes easier for me to forget details such as these.
As you might have guessed or already know, Hindemith wrote the PIttsburgh Symphony at the request of the Pittsurgh Symphony Orchestra's director William Steinberg, a Jewish exile from Germany.
The Pittsburgh Symphony seems a little closer in spirit to the Metamorphosis than most of the other music by Hindemith that I have listened to, and it is short enough that you can put it on one CD with an entire Bruckner Symphony.
Another important American commission was Benny Goodman’s for the Clarinet Concerto. The most recent recording is perhaps Eddy Vanoosthuyse’s with the Central Aichi Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergio Rosales, on the Naxos label.
Hindemith was a prolific composer, and even limiting myself to his orchestral music I still have a lot of great music of his to get to know.
Granted that orchestral music is not as important here in America today as it was in Germany in the 1930s. Trump probably doesn’t care what composer John Adams thinks of him, but it’s still possible Adams might find himself exiled to Canada.
A major omission on my part: my eBook Repertoire Tips for Classical Music Radio Stations mentions Hindemith, but only in connection to Sir William Walton and Carl Maria von Weber; the former wrote some variations on a theme of Hindemith's, and the latter, well, you already know.
I will be adding a few paragraphs specifically on Hindemith’s music to that book very soon. If you get it now it’s free, and if you get it again after I’ve added more information on Hindemith, it will still be free.
This was originally posted on Daily Kos yesterday.
