Paul Hindemith

Paul was born in the German town of Hanau in 1895, on December Sixteen. We might

assume that Hindemith felt a pull in the musical direction from a very early age; Paul's father was

a painter and did not want his son becoming a musician, so our little composer-to-be ran away at

the age of 11, and started his own life. Paul taught himself the violin and viola, and began earning

his living by playing at Cafes and other such establishments. Eventually, Hindemith learned the

rudiments of all the instruments that mattered, so he could play them at least passably-- but he

was surely a virtuoso at his viola and viola d'amore.

Eventually, Hindemith ended up at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where he studied his music

performance under the tutelage of people like Arnold Mendelssohn. While there, Hindemith

showed increasing interest in the field of composition-- he began writing in earnest around the

time he completed his courses at the Conservatory, and began establishing himself in the music

culture through chamber music and expressionistic opera.

Paul landed a pretty major job in the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra... he was first

concertmaster, and then conductor over the years 1915-1923. After this, he founded his Amar

String Quartet, for which he was violist-- the group became pretty celebrated and performed

successfully throughout Europe. It's agreed that 1921 was when Hindemith began to come into

his own, and emerge as well-known into the world as a composer and performer. Hindemith

appeared regularly at the Donaueschingen Festival starting that year, and in 1922-24 his Chamber

Works were performed at the Salzburg Festival (which I assume was a fairly big deal at the time).

Up until about 1925, Hindemith was pretty conventional, going along more or less

complacently with the musical norms of his time. But in 1925, he came out with "Kammermusik",

his first openly atonal composition. The piece was representative of new ideas, and roused lots of

talk when it was performed at the Venice Festival of the International Society of Contemporary

Music. Before he knew it, Paul was a sort of pioneer, a figurehead of the advancing frontier in

"Modern Music".

Ah-- during these years of his life, Hindemith was working as a professor of Composition

at the Berlin Hochschule.

It was around 1934 that Hindemith started having some trouble with the Nazis. For one,

they didn't like his music. In fact, Alfred Rosenberg, who was Chief of Nazi Foreign Affairs, said

his musics were the "foulest perversions of German music." Obviously, the Nazis gave his career

a hard time and tried to squelch his fame. You see, the Nazis probably gave Hindemith a hard

time because he was married to a half-Jewess, and also made recordings with Jews, whom he

refused to break off with. Besides, the Nazis were stuffy bigwigs and found all progressive music

undesirable.

Nevertheless, everything went pretty well for Paul until that year, 1934. Mathis Der

Mahler came out and was given a debut performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. Everyone loved

it, and it was set to be staged as an opera, but alas, the Nazis scrapped the idea because they

didn't like anything creative and new. The conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, wrote a nasty letter

about the Nazis' veto of the venture, and had it published-- unfortunately, Hitler himself got mad

at Furtwangler and Hindemith, so Paul had to pack up and move away to Turkey to avoid

unpleasantness. He spent a year or so in Turkey 'revitalizing' the music life there, then shipped off

to the USA on an invitation from Elizabeth Coolige. He played a USA debut concert in

Washington, D.C., on April Tenth, in 1937. He frequented the USA from then on as a violinist

and a conductor. He returned to America in 1938 for the debut of his ballet, St. Francis. The

book says Hindemith had become an American Citizen in 1936, so obviously Paul had plans for

the USA and was ready for his career there. At last, in 1939, Paul decided to move there while

Germany was stuck in W.W.II, and sat tight.

Hindemith taught at Yale and got to lecture at Harvard. He wrote some on theory, and

composed a whole bunch while he was in the States. In 1944 he visited Germany and had a street

named in his honor. The musicians there wanted Paul to return and stay, but he declined to do so

until 1953, when he moved to Zurich. By now, Hindemith was something of a celebrity-- he

emerged as the most important German composer after W.W.II; in1955 he won the $35000

Sibelius Award; in 1960, the NY Critics Circle Award; and in 1962, the $52000 Italian Balzan

Prize.

Sources seem to agree that Hindemith's style was ever-maturing, up until he died of a

stroke in 1963, in a Frankfurt hospital on December 29. It was just shortly after his last

conductor's gig in Berlin.

Early