Paul Hindemith ( / ˈ p aʊ l ˈ h ɪ n d ə m ɪ t / POWL HIN -də-mit ; German: [ˌpaʊ̯l ˈhɪndəmɪt] ; 16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist, and conductor. In 1921, he founded the Amar Quartet and traveled widely across Europe. As a composer, he helped promote the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style of music in the 1920s. His works included Kammermusik, which featured the viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a style inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach. Other important works include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), his oratorio Das Unaufhörliche (1931), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), 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), which is a requiem based on a poem by Walt Whitman. Before World War II, Hindemith and his wife moved to Switzerland and the United States to escape growing problems with the Nazi German government. In his later years, he performed and recorded many of his own compositions.

Most of Hindemith's compositions are based on a central musical note. His music uses forms, counterpoint, and cadences common in the Baroque and Classical periods. His use of harmony is more modern, incorporating all 12 notes of the chromatic scale within his system of music, as explained in his three-volume book, The Craft of Musical Composition.

Life and career

Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, as the oldest child of Robert Hindemith, an artist and decorator from Lower Silesia, and his wife, Marie Warnecke. He learned to play the violin as a child. He attended Frankfurt's Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner and also learned conducting and composition from Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. At first, he earned money by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. In 1914, he became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. In 1916, he was promoted to concertmaster. From 1914, he played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet.

After his father died in 1915 during World War I, Hindemith was forced to join the Imperial German Army in September 1917. He was sent to a regiment in Alsace in January 1918. There, he was assigned to play the bass drum in the regiment's band and also formed a string quartet. In May 1918, he was sent to the front in Flanders, where he worked as a sentry. His diary describes surviving grenade attacks by luck, according to New Grove Dictionary. After the war ended, he returned to Frankfurt and rejoined the Rebner Quartet.

In 1921, Hindemith founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and toured Europe, focusing on modern music. His younger brother, Rudolf, was the original cellist.

As a composer, Hindemith supported the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style in the 1920s, with works like Kammermusik. These pieces, similar to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, feature the viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments. In 1922, some of his works were performed at the International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Salzburg, which introduced him to an international audience. The next year, he composed the song cycle Das Marienleben and began organizing the Donaueschingen Festival, where he included works by avant-garde composers like Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1927, he became a professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter's 1928 film Ghosts Before Breakfast and also acted in the film. The score and film were later destroyed by the Nazis. In 1929, he played the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto, after the composer's original dedicatee, Lionel Tertis, refused to perform it.

On May 15, 1924, Hindemith married Gertrud Rottenberg, an actress and singer. They did not have any children.

The Nazis had a complicated relationship with Hindemith's music. Some criticized his work as "degenerate," especially his early operas like Sancta Susanna. In December 1934, Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Minister of Propaganda, publicly criticized Hindemith as an "atonal noisemaker." In 1936, the Nazis banned his music and included it in the 1938 Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition. However, some officials believed Hindemith's later works, which used tonality and folk music, could represent modern German music. Wilhelm Furtwängler, a conductor, defended Hindemith in 1934. The controversy continued throughout the 1930s, with Hindemith's favor with the Nazis rising and falling.

During the 1930s, Hindemith visited Cairo and Ankara multiple times. In 1935, he accepted an invitation from the Turkish government to help create a music school in Ankara, after Goebbels pressured him to take a leave of absence from the Berlin Academy. In Turkey, he led efforts to reform music education and establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet. He did not stay in Turkey long, but he greatly influenced Turkish music. The Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his work. Young Turkish musicians admired Hindemith as a "real master."

In the late 1930s, Hindemith toured America as a viola and viola d'amore soloist. He moved to Switzerland in 1938, partly because his wife had Jewish ancestry. However, his main reason for leaving Germany was his conflict with Nazi artistic policies.

While in the United States, Hindemith taught at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Collegium Musicum. He required his students to study composition and theory using his book, The Craft of Musical Composition, and other educational materials. He taught for over ten years, instructing about 400 students, of whom 46 earned degrees, mostly in music theory. His notable students included Lukas Foss, Graham George

Music

Paul Hindemith was one of the most important German composers of his time. His early music followed a style known as late romanticism, and later he created works influenced by expressionism, similar to the style of Arnold Schoenberg. In the 1920s, Hindemith developed a more structured and complex style, which some called neoclassical. However, this style was different from the neoclassical works of Igor Stravinsky. Instead, it drew more from the musical techniques of Johann Sebastian Bach and Max Reger than from the clear, simple style of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This new style is clearly heard in a series of works called Kammermusik (Chamber Music), written between 1922 and 1927. Each piece in this series was composed for a different small group of instruments, many of which were unusual. For example, Kammermusik No. 6 is a concerto for the viola d’amore, an instrument that was rarely used after the Baroque period. Hindemith himself played the viola d’amore. He continued to write for unusual instrument combinations throughout his life, including a trio for viola, heckelphone, and piano (1928), seven trios for three trautoniums (1930), a sonata for double bass, and a concerto for trumpet, bassoon, and strings (both in 1949).

In the 1930s, Hindemith wrote fewer chamber music pieces and focused more on large orchestras. He composed his opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of painter Matthias Grünewald, between 1933 and 1935. This opera is rarely performed, though a famous production by the New York City Opera in 1995 was an exception. In 2021, a 2012 production by Theater an der Wien was released on DVD by Naxos. The opera blends the neoclassical style of Hindemith’s earlier works with folk songs. Before writing the opera, Hindemith composed a purely instrumental symphony with the same name, which is one of his most frequently performed works. Some parts of the symphony appear as instrumental interludes in the opera, while others are expanded into vocal scenes.

Hindemith also created Gebrauchsmusik (Music for Use), compositions designed for social or political purposes and sometimes intended for amateur musicians. This idea was inspired by the writer Bertolt Brecht. An example is Trauermusik (Funeral Music), written in January 1936. Hindemith was preparing the London premiere of his viola concerto Der Schwanendreher when he learned of the death of King George V. He quickly composed Trauermusik for solo viola and string orchestra as a tribute to the king. The piece was performed the same evening, the day after the king’s death. Other examples of Gebrauchsmusik include:

• Plöner Musiktage (1932), a series of pieces for a community music event in the city of Plön, ending with a concert by grammar-school students and teachers.
• A Scherzo for viola and cello (1934), written in a few hours during recording sessions as a "filler" for a blank side of a 78 rpm album and recorded immediately.
• Wir bauen eine Stadt ("We’re Building a City"), an opera for eight-year-olds (1930).

Hindemith’s most popular work, both on recordings and in concerts, is likely the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, written in 1943. This piece uses melodies from various works by Carl Maria von Weber, mostly piano duets, and one from the overture to his incidental music for Turandot (Op. 37/J. 75). Hindemith transformed and adapted these melodies so that each movement of the piece is based on one theme.

In 1951, Hindemith completed his Symphony in B-flat, written for a concert band. It was composed for the U.S. Army Band "Pershing’s Own" and premiered by that band on April 5, 1951. Its second performance was conducted by Hugh McMillan with the Boulder Symphonic Band at the University of Colorado. The piece is representative of Hindemith’s later works, featuring strong contrapuntal lines and is a key work in the band repertoire. He recorded it in stereo with members of the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI in 1956.

Most of Hindemith’s music uses a unique system that is tonal but not based on the traditional diatonic scale. It often omits the use of a standard key signature. Like most tonal music, it centers on a tonic and moves between different tonal centers, but it uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale freely. Hindemith even rewrote some of his earlier music after developing this system. A key feature of his system is ranking all intervals of the 12-tone equally tempered scale from most consonant to most dissonant. He classifies chords into six categories based on dissonance, whether they contain a tritone, and whether they suggest a clear root or tonal center. His philosophy also included creating melodies that do not clearly outline major or minor triads.

In the late 1930s, Hindemith wrote a three-volume instructional book called The Craft of Musical Composition, which explains his system in detail. He also promoted this system as a way to analyze the harmonic structure of other music, claiming it was more versatile than the traditional Roman numeral approach to chords. In the final chapter of the first book, he analyzed examples from medieval to contemporary music, including the early Gregorian melody Dies irae, works by Guillaume de Machaut, J. S. Bach, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and his own compositions.

Hindemith’s 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues, similar to Johann Sebastian Bach’s style, using techniques like inversion, diminution, augmentation, retrogradation, and stretto. Each fugue is connected by an interlude that transitions from the key of the previous fugue to the next. The order of the keys follows Hindemith’s ranking of musical intervals around the tonal center of C.

Hindemith also preserved the classical idea that dissonance resolves to consonance. Much of his music begins with consonant sounds, moves into dissonant tension, and resolves into consonant chords and cadences. This is especially clear in his Concert Music for Strings and Brass (1930).

Awards and honors

• Howland Memorial Prize (1940), presented by Yale University
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1940)
• Bach Prize, awarded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (1951)
• Order Pour le Mérite (1952)
• Wihuri Sibelius Prize (1955)
• Goethe Plaque, awarded by the City of Frankfurt (1955)
• Elected to the American Philosophical Society (1962)
• Balzan Prize (1963)
• Asteroid 5157 Hindemith (1973), discovered and named for him

• Philadelphia Academy of Music (1945)
• Columbia University (1948)
• Goethe University Frankfurt (1949)
• FU Berlin (1950)
• Oxford University (1954)

Pedagogical writings

Hindemith's complete set of instructional books, arranged in a possible educational order:

• Elementary Training for Musicians. Published in London by Schott and in New York by Associated Music Publishers in 1946. ISBN 978-0-901938-16-9
• A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony
• The Craft of Musical Composition

Recordings

Paul Hindemith was a very productive composer. He conducted his own music in recordings for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra and for Deutsche Grammophon with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. These recordings were improved using modern technology and released on CD. The Violin Concerto was also recorded by Decca/London, with Hindemith conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and David Oistrakh as the solo violinist. Everest Records released a recording of Hindemith's postwar work When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd ("A Requiem for Those We Love") on LP, with Hindemith conducting. A stereo recording of Hindemith conducting the same requiem with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring Louise Parker and George London as soloists, was made for Columbia Records in 1963 and later released on CD. Hindemith also appeared on television as a guest conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's nationally syndicated "Music from Chicago" series; these performances were later released by VAI on home video. A complete collection of Hindemith's orchestral music was recorded by German and Australian orchestras, all conducted by Werner Andreas Albert, and released on the CPO label.

Hindemithon Festival

An annual festival celebrating the music of Paul Hindemith has taken place at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, starting in 2003 and continuing until at least 2017. The event includes performances by student, staff, and professional musicians who play various works composed by Hindemith.