Paul Hindemith

Summarizing the music of Paul Hindemith, whose catalogue includes more than three hundred works written over nearly fifty years of composing, may be a somewhat intimidating task. An instrumentalist and quartet player, a master composer and a virtuoso of counterpoint, Hindemith was an insatiable musical “jack-of-all-trades,” exploring a wide range of genres from his very first significant works, which he composed shortly after the First World War. Germany’s Weimar years (1919-1933) were frothy with music — chamber, solo, and ensemble, choral, vocal, and opera — and Hindemith composed furiously during this era, producing more than half of his oeuvre. Adapting a strongly anti-Romantic stance, he explored jazz and military music, cinema and dance. Starting in 1922, he took a deep dive into the early music repertoire and developed a passion for the viola d’amore. This first phase of his musical career, in other words, was diverse and inventive. His experimentations in the context of the Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden festivals were the apogee of this early phase.

From 1933, when the Nazi Party took power in Germany, until Hindemith’s departure for the United States in 1940, he embarked on a second phase of his career and a style that aimed to be more approachable, simpler, and clearer. It was at this point that his language crystalized into one that would characterize his work throughout his years in the United States.

The Weimar Years

Between 1919 and 1921, after the juvenile, if promising, Gesänge op. 9 using poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Ernst Wilhelm Lotz, Hindemith produced in quick succession a trilogy of three short operas on provocative subjects from expressionism. Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen (Murder, Hope of Women), with a libretto by Oskar Kokoschka, depicts a battle to the death between “man” and “woman,” both reduced to exaggerated sexual symbols. Das Nusch-Nuschi (The Nusch-Nuschi), with librettist Franz Blei, is a drama in song and dance for “Burmese puppets” that takes place in a harem guarded by eunuchs. Finally, in August Stramm’s scandalous drama Sancta Susanna, the lines are blurred between a young nun’s love of Christ and the sexual extasy in which it culminates. Strongly influenced by expressionist literature — Kokoschka and Stramm’s texts (from 1909 and 1913, respectively) both appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Der Sturm and were republished in Der jüngste Tag — Hindemith’s wild and provocative choice of subject matched his atypical musical forms. The opposition between the two protagonists in Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen is expressed in a sonata form with four sections (exposition, development, slow movement, recapitulation) that channels and frames the violent excesses of the argument. In Sancta Susanna, the best of the three scores, Hindemith fits his signature use of variation neatly into the concentric, seven-part form (ABCDCBA); according to musicologist Giselher Schubert, this rigid, symmetrical architecture symbolizes a critique of the Church’s rigidity.¹ Such a structural approach, and the relative autonomy of the orchestra, anticipates the aesthetics Hindemith would develop in his later stage works of the late 1920s. The harmony is often dissonant and chromatic, yet it remains rooted in tonality. Hindemith had no inclination toward atonality, which he would later strongly criticize in the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Parody is particularly evident in Das Nusch-Nuschi, especially in the third tableau where Hindemith maliciously quotes Richard Wagner, borrowing King Marke’s “Mir dies” to Tristan as he discovers his misfortune and orders the guilty party be castrated. In the same work Hindemith, not without provocative humor, specifies that

the ‘choral fugue’ (with all the modern conveniences of augmentation, diminutions, stretto, and basso ostinato) owes its existence to a single unhappy coincidence: they were conceived by the composer. They have no further purpose than this: to incorporate themselves stylishly into the framework of this picture and provide all 'experts' with the opportunity to bark about the incredibly bad taste of their creator.

As Schubert noted (in the same article in which he cites the above passage), Hindemith approaches contrapuntal procedures in the same spirit when he “unambiguously parodies the function of old techniques for composing ‘modernity’ [that is, from Brahms to Reger] and not the old techniques or the old forms themselves.”²

At another level, this trilogy can also be seen as a parody of Puccini’s Trittico.³

Mechanical, pulsating rhythms characterize the first of Hindemith’s seven Kammermusiken (1921-1927), which, in places, hewed close to the work of Igor Stravinsky. In the six pieces that followed, writing for small instrumental ensemble in the spirit of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos allowed Hindemith to reconnect with the concertante style through concertos for piano, cello, violin, viola, viola d’amore, and organ (the piano and the cello are explicitly marked “obligato” in nos. 2 and 3). This nod to the Baroque includes the use of single themes, fugato, and variations, mixed in with military marches and medleys. Another Baroque form, the concerto grosso, resurfaces in the Concerto for Orchestra (1925), which is in ways a continuation of Kammermusiken, with a concertino of oboe, bassoon, and violin. The piece also includes a reference to passacaglia in its finale.

This neo-Baroque style that Hindemith adopted in the 1920s eventually detached from being merely irreverent parody and became a lasting compositional approach. In his later compositions, it expresses in voices linked by counterpoint but maintaining their independence and autonomy, as well as in a type of polyphony less concerned with relationship between voices than with each individualized line. In some of his vocal music, as well, text and music move completely independent of each other.

Starting in 1921, Hindemith’s career opportunities expanded when he joined the artistic committee of the Donaueschingen Festival, founded by the House of Fürstenberg with Joseph Haas, Heinrich Burkard, and Eduard Erdmann. The following year marked the launch of the Amar Quartet, in which he played the viola until 1929. The group premiered many new compositions, including Hindemith’s own Quartet No. 2 op. 16 (1918), works by Alois Hába, Philipp Jarnach, Anton Webern (6 Bagatelles op. 9 in 1924), and Alfredo Casella. Parody and musical jokes continued to shape Hindemith’s lesser-known chamber music pieces performed at the festival, including “Minimax”: Repertory for Military Orchestra, Overture to “the Flying Dutchman” for string quartet, Das atonale Cabaret (1921) which includes vocal pieces for unusual groupings (voice and guitar, baritone and harmonium), and his “Boston” waltz evoking Frank Wedekind.

As the festival grew over the years, it became a major venue for Hindemith’s creative explorations. There, he performed Kammermusik no. 1 and Die junge Magd (1922), as well as Four Madrigals for mixed choir (1925), which brought him international acclaim. In 1926 when the festival was organized around original military-themed compositions, Hindemith premiered Konzertmusik op. 41 for wind ensemble (conducted by Hermann Scherchen) and original works for mechanical instruments (including the original score, now lost, for the Das Triadische Ballett op. 40, by choreographer Oskar Schlemmer). The experiment was repeated when the festival moved to Baden-Baden in 1927; Hindemith reprised the mechanical instrument theme there and in a film score for mechanical organ for Felix the Cat, also lost. Hin und zurück op. 45a also premiered at that year’s festival.

On the occasion of the 1928 Baden Baden festival, he wrote for player piano in the (again lost) score for Hans Richter’s avant-garde film Vormittagspuck (Ghosts before Breakfast). For performance over the radio, he wrote Der Lindberghflug, composed with [Kurt Weill](https://ressources.ircam.fr/composer/kurt-weill/biography based on a text by Bertolt Brecht), Lehrstück (also with a text by Brecht), and the children’s opera Wir bauen eine Stadt (1930). An interest in electronic musical instruments led him to the Trautonium, for which he composed several pieces, including the 1935 solo Langsame Stück und Rondo and a 1930 concerto. The latter follows a conventional form and is not sufficiently idiomatic to the Trautonium (as underscored by the existence of a clarinet transcription).

Alongside his involvement in festival programming and experimental work, Hindemith continued to pursue an active career as a violist, building his reputation through international tours that took him as far as the USSR in 1927 and 1928.

After composing two highly successful song collections in 1922, Des Todes Tod (with texts by Eduard Reinacher) and Die junge Magd (Georg Trakl), Hindemith concluded his “expressionist” phase and turned his sights on opera. With Ludwig and Willy Strecker, his publishers at Schott, he considered various ideas (Faust, The Threepenny Opera, even an exotic story set in the South Seas).

“As far as I am concerned,” he wrote on 4 April 1924,

an opera can be set in a factory, in the streets of a large city, in a railway train or anywhere you like […], it doesn’t have to be naturalistic, veristic, or symbolic. The main thing is that one should be able to write some real music for it.

Ultimately, he drew his characters from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella Mademoiselle de Scudéry. In Cardillac, he foregrounded the portrait of the artist, as he would do again later in Mathis le peintre. In doing so, he worked within the tradition of the Künstleroper (artist opera), following earlier examples such as Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand, Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, and Weill’s recent Der Protagonist. In Cardillac, a renowned goldsmith cannot bear to be separated from his creations. Although he sells his works, he is then driven to reclaim them, murdering his customers in order to take them back. With this work, Hindemith returned to number operas (in this case, 18 numbers) in three acts, and he adopted “New Objectivity” (Die Neue Sachlichkeit), moving away from the pathos of expressionism through a deliberate rejection of sentimentality. To this end, he used counterpoint to contrast with the lyricism of the vocal parts, employing fugato (in the Prelude), variations (in no. 2), concertino with two obbligato flutes (no. 8), fugue (in no. 10, the duet “Father, I will not forsake you” between Cardillac and his daughter), and a passacaglia with twenty-two variations (in no. 17 when Cardillac justifies himself with a public confession, asking for the “necessary return of the work to the one who created it”). The first and third acts, in which the people clamor for justice to be carried out against the murderer, symmetrically frame the central act, which focuses largely on two intimate duets (between Cardillac and his daughter, and between the daughter and the officer). The most striking example of the interplay between the drama and the autonomous instrumental music occurs at the end of the first act (no. 6), when the gentleman visits the lady in a scene of romantic seduction. A shadow flits across the stage, murders the suitor, and steals the jewel just as the curtain falls. There is immense contrast between both the love scene and then the murder but also between the onstage violence and the music, two flutes playing a round that the score notes should be “very graceful” but which is abruptly cut off by a brutal return to reality. The dramatic effect is, paradoxically, strengthened by this very contrast.

The brilliant score was an immediate success, galvanized by Otto Klemperer’s conducting at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin. Its reception, if not unanimous, was not ambivalent. Notably, Hanns Eisler critiqued it for the artifice he perceived in its baroque forms and procedures. In this, Cardillac may be considered to be the beginning of the crystallization of Hindemith’s subsequent style, which featured a conservative attitude that would only intensify in the years that followed. In 1951, Hindemith revised the score in four acts, considerably weakening the very elements that made the initial version so fresh and original.

Hindemith’s compositional deftness stands out even more in the short sketch Hin und zurück, which premiered in 1927 at Baden-Baden in the “minute-opera” category (along with Darius Milhaud’s The Abduction of Europa and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel). In it, Hindemith’s virtuoso writing makes the banal argument of a couple come to glowing life, as their quarrel devolves into a fight and ends with the jealous husband murdering his wife and committing suicide. At this point, a deus ex machina appears in the form of a wise man who sends the action spinning backward to the couple’s concord at the beginning. Step by step, the intense polyphonic score mirrors the dramatic subject and plays back the music of the first half in reverse — a technique that also fascinated Alban Berg, whose Lyric Suite was also performed at the festival. The score, written for an ensemble of six soloists, retains the spirit of Hindemith’s Kammermusiken and seeks to transpose cinematic techniques into music — making the loss of the soundtrack to the Richter film mentioned earlier of this essay even more unfortunate.

Hindemith’s work with Brecht was more complicated. In Lindbergh’s Flight (1929), a radio drama (Hörspiel) with a script by Brecht and music co-composed with Weill in collaboration with schools for broadcast, the two composers divided the work of composing of the numbers. Weill composed those representing the American perspective, while Hindemith wrote those associated with the European side. This juxtaposition caused the work to suffer from a lack of stylistic unity.

Brecht was similarly dissatisfied with his Lehrstück (Didactic Play or The Lesson on Consent), performed in Baden-Baden in 1930 by a mixed choir and incorporating film projection and clowning. He felt that a misunderstanding had arisen between him and Hindemith when Hindemith stated that “the score was more a proposal than a prescription,” and that “the sole educational goal that could enter into consideration was a purely musically formal one.”⁴ Later, reflecting on what he called “culinary opera,” Brecht concluded that “composers who attempt to renew opera inevitably stumble, as Hindemith or Stravinsky did, on the apparatus of opera.”⁵

These collaborations with Brecht, along with an awareness that he needed to reach out to audiences in order to educate them, led Hindemith to take an interest in utilitarian music, Gebrauchsmusik, offering listeners music that was approachable from their level. This approach shaped his relationships with audiences at a time when Germany was overwhelmed by inflation. In this vein, in 1929, he embraced the vogue for operas based on current events (Zeitoper), composing Neues vom Tage (News of the Day) with the librettist Marcellus Schiffer, who had also written the text of Hin und zurück. The two works explore similar themes; in this case, a couple on the verge of separation turns to an agency that arranges a staged adulterous encounter, enabling one partner to file for divorce. Ultimately, however, the agency’s intervention leads them to reconcile after they find themselves in a theatrical reenactment of their own relationship. The lively, lighthearted score once again showcases Hindemith’s versatility in blending jazz, popular music, and neoclassical forms. In this respect his approach contrasts with Weill’s more subtle approach and Schoenberg’s more profound one (as in Von Heute auf Morgen). The final scene in the first act, featuring a naked woman singing from her bathtub, became notorious for shocking Adolf Hitler and would later contribute to the difficulties Hindemith faced under the regime.

In 1927, Hindemith took a post as professor at the Berlin Hochschule, then directed by Franz Schreker. His teaching career would become more and more important to him in the coming years.

This period of his life was marked with experimentation and rich artistic activity, divided between his work in utilitarian music and the creativity fostered by the Baden-Baden festival. It came to an end with the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, which imposed constraints whose scope he only gradually came to realize, ultimately to his detriment.

Confronting the Third Reich

When Hitler took power in early 1933, Hindemith remained confident: as he wrote to Strecker some weeks later (on 15 April 1933),

Based on what is going on here, I don’t think we will need to worry much about the future of music. We just need to be patient in the coming weeks. So far, even with all these changes, nothing has affected me.

Was this insouciance or political naiveté? In fact, Hindemith’s attitude grew from his recent interest in social issues, which took the form of engagement in training amateur musicians, as with his 1928-1930 publication Sing- und Spielmusik für Liebhaber und Musikfreunde op. 45. However, many of his works were already targets, described as early as 1929 as “empty games with tones” and “musical Bolshevism,” in particular by the Nazi Alfred Rosenberg. They were quickly banned soon after 1933.

His 1931 oratorio Das Unaufhörliche, written for the large-scale forces of four soloists, children’s choir, mixed choir, and orchestra, explores an unceasing search for the laws of creation and asks how humans should live in accordance with them. The work can be seen as a transitional piece between Hindemith’s earlier compositions and the direction he would later pursue with Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter). The heavily symbolic text draws on the writings of Gottfried Benn, a fierce adversary of Brecht. In a striking and somewhat ironic gesture, Hindemith also quotes passages from Brecht’s Lehrstück in the second part of the work. This dense and intellectual textual framework contrasts with the music itself, which is airy and melody-driven in the choral and solo parts. Hindemith’s less conventional Philharmonisches Konzert nevertheless confirms his continued preference for polyphonic writing and harmonic clarity.

Seeking a libretto for a new work, Hindemith returned to the theme of the artist, which he had first explored in Cardillac. This time, he turned to the foundations of German culture, choosing the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald as the subject for Mathis der Maler. Although the action takes place during the Protestant Reformation and the German Peasants’ War, the work is widely considered to be autobiographical.

From the outset, Mathis is plagued by self-doubt (“Have you accomplished what God has asked of you?”). He becomes involved with the conflict between Catholics and Lutherans, even as Cardinal Albrecht carries out a papal order to hold an auto-da-fé. Dismayed by this act of cowardice, the artist ultimately withdraws into solitude to await death: “Let them remember, once I am buried, a whisper of the good I was able to achieve […] from what I loved.”

The opera’s seven tableaux take a streamlined, melodic compositional approach with conventional ternary and strophic form, incorporating elements of popular song. Hindemith uses ensembles ranging from duets to quartets and choir. The work marks a turning point between his earlier, often radical experiments of the Weimar years and a later crystallization of style and form, signaling a decisive move toward a more conventional musical language that would characterize his work after 1935.

In the introduction Hindemith wrote for the opera’s 1938 premiere, he offers a summary of his artistic stance, embodied in the character of Mathis: >Endowed with absolute perfection and conscience in his artistic work, and yet, as a soul-searcher, manifestly tortured by the infernal doubts, he witnesses […] the eruption of a new era and the inevitable overturning of once prevalent ideas. He perceives the products of a dawning Renaissance, and that their consequences will be unpredictable, but in his own work, resigns himself to developing traditional forms to their extremes, just as Johann Sebastian Bach caught in the incoming tide of musical progress in his own era, became known as a conservative. Caught up in the dreadful workings of the State and the Church, Mathis resists the pressures of these powers with all his might. However, his paintings show quite clearly the degree to which he was overwhelmed by the savagery of his time, with its throng of miseries, illness, and war.

In Hindemith’s mind, there was a separation between art and politics, but this belief was totally incompatible with Nazi ideology in the 1930s. His was ostracized for this belief. And coinciding with his isolation was a hardening of his aesthetic and an increasingly pronounced orientation to his spiritual commitments.

His desire to cling to his identity, to show that he was culturally and emotionally German, was a way of parrying attacks leveled at him by the Nazis, who could not look past what they deemed irremediably dangerous deviance. Works considered objectionable included his opera trilogy of the early 1920s and Neues vom Tage — and of course his collaborations with Brecht, a known Marxist. Replying to these objections, Wilhelm Furtwängler published a letter in Hindemith’s defense, following the premier of Mathis der Maler in November 1934. Furtwängler conceded that certain “regrettable subjects” might have led the “very young” composer astray (admittedly, this position was more difficult to maintain with Neues vom Tage). He highlighted Hindemith’s pedagogical work with youth and cited his “tremendous ethic” in the “mastery of his craft,” adding, “Where would we get if political denunciation was applied in such wide measure against art?” Furtwängler concluded, “In light of the world’s indescribable poverty where truly productive musicians are concerned, we cannot afford to dispense with such a man as Hindemith.”

Separating art from politics clearly conflicted with the Nazi worldview, which held that art had to comply with and flow from Reich policies. Goebbels riposted by announcing that the Führer asked for Furtwängler’s resignation (4 December 1934). But the Nazi leaders did not actually want to see Furtwängler leave the country, and he was eventually reinstated as orchestra conductor, although not allowed to resume his positions of artistic leadership. Unintentionally, though, his letter gave the Nazi government an excuse to sideline Hindemith. Not yet ready to leave Germany, Hindemith, like Furtwängler, stayed in the country and continued trying to gain recognition and acceptance from the government.

In a major study of composers of the Nazi era, Michael Hans Kater challenges those who defend Hindemith’s choices. He presents strong evidence that Hindemith sought to curry favor with the Nazi regime in order to “safeguard for ‘the German musical culture a future field of influence of the greatest possible extent, and hence work for German prestige abroad.’”⁶ In 1935, Hindemith was offered a mission to Turkey to promote German musical culture — at least the kind he supported. He made three trips there between 1935 and 1937, reporting back to the German authorities each time.

It is difficult to imagine how Hindemith would have reacted if he had succeeded in gaining the imprimatur of the Third Reich, but it is very likely that the concessions they would have demanded of him would have placed him in conflict with the authorities. For instance, he repeatedly expressed his opposition to the Nazi regime, in particular by continuing to perform with Jewish musicians.

Whatever might have happened, and despite the success of the Mathis der Maler Symphony, whose three movements were excerpted from the opera, the opera version was not performed on German soil. It finally premiered in Zurich in 1938, the same year that pieces by Hindemith featured in the notorious “Degenerate Music” exhibition curated by Nazi authorities in Düsseldorf.

Hindemith found the three trips he made to the United States between 1937 and 1939 disappointing. Despite multiple invitations to move there, he ended up settling in Switzerland, “because it was close enough to Germany to facilitate an easy and quick return should the occasion present itself.”⁷

At this time, Hindemith was working on a major theoretical work, Unterweisung der Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition) that advanced his own understanding of tonality. In examining Hindemith’s theoretical work, it becomes clear why he opposed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serial system, which he criticized throughout his writing and teaching career.

In Unterweisung der Tonsatz, he proposes that instead of building harmony from chords made of stacked thirds, he builds it from intervals ranked by their natural strength, based on the harmonic series (with the exception of the harmonic seventh, which he disregards). From this system, he creates two “series” of chords: chords with tritones and chords without. This approach becomes complicated in practice: as it moves further away from the fundamental note, the system clashes with equal temperament. Hindemith locates the twelve tones in relation to their given “tonic” based on how close they are in the harmonic series. As a result, there is no real modulation or major-minor binary. Critics such as Célestin Deliège argue that this complex system mixes natural acoustics (harmonics) with Hindemith’s own subjective choices.⁸ Moreover, it risks becoming too rigid, standardizing composition and limiting harmonic variety in future music.

Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis, subtitled “Counterpoint, Tonal, and Technical Studies for the Piano” (1942), offered practical applications of his compositional theories. It alternates twelve fugues for three voices and twelve interludes, framed by a Praeludium and a Postludium (which is a retrograde inversion of the Praeludium) — an homage to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Klavierübung III, with expanded tonality and virtuosic piano writing.

After he began teaching in the United States in 1940, Hindemith joined Schoenberg and Milhaud in lamenting the poor technical skills of American students. While hardly inclined to encourage his students, Hindemith (again, like Schoenberg) aimed to improve their empirical knowledge by composing more approachable pieces, as well as by writing his textbook Elementary Training for Musicians (1969).

Work in the final period

Hindemith persisted in his desire to leave behind a lasting body of work rooted in musical tradition. This led him to compose, among other things, a considerable number of chamber music pieces, continuing the chain of solo or strings-and-piano-works he had written before 1924. He wrote no fewer than ten sonatas for wind instruments and piano (1936-1943), and, after 1935, some ten concertos, including his celebrated Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra. The brilliant and successful works of the last two decades of his life include Metamorphoses on themes by Carl Maria von Weber, as well as ballets, notably The Four Temperaments and Nobilissima Visione.

His style during this time became firmly established. Exemplary pieces include A Requiem for Those We Love based on a poem by Walt Whitman (1946), as well as a number of severe and at times grandiloquent scores such as Apparebit repentina dies (for mixed choir and ten brass instruments, 1947) and Ite Angeli Veloces, a cantata that set to music a hymn written by Paul Claudel (1953-1955). Hindemith’s last composition was the stripped-down Messe for mixed choir (1963).

Die Harmonie der Welt (The Harmony of the World, 1956-1957) is a late opera that Hindemith considered his best work, and it is reflects the openly spiritual outlook of his later years.

He had already explored the same idea in a symphony of the same name, written in 1951. The symphony has three movements named after concepts from Boethius: “Musica instrumentalis,” “Musica humana,” and “Musica mundane.” This last movement, a large-scale piece, was inspired by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who hypothesized a correspondence between the planets and musical intervals: Mars he linked to the fifth, Saturn to the major third, Jupiter to the minor third, and Earth to the minor second. The symphony’s sheer scale, austere symbolism, and inapproachability prevented it from encountering the success Hindemith had hoped for.

Hindemith’s reputation largely rests on his first fifteen years, when his work was most experimental and varied; after 1945, it is often viewed as less compelling. Theodor Adorno was particularly critical. He accused Hindemith of being unable to recognize that musical materials are social constructs, not absolutes. He believed Hindemith did not understand that artists must take a critical stance within society. Adorno’s views may well have contributed to a loss of interest in Hindemith’s work among younger composers. This was evident at Darmstadt, where Hindemith was quickly overshadowed by composers of the Second Viennese School.

Criticism was not limited to the avant-garde. In 1962, the conductor Ernest Ansermet, known for his conservative views, offered the following assessment:

Hindemith is one of the most upright music-makers I know; manifestly, he is a born musician, the most gifted one Germany has produced since the Strauss-Mahler-Reger generation. Precisely because he is so upright, he responded to the problems our era set for composers by striving for sure footing in his technique. Unfortunately, he sought the same thing in acoustic phenomena, which, in my opinion, was an error. This meant that Hindemith was working from a debatable theory when he put his musical ideas and aspirations to work. In any case, this basis in theory detracts from the creative spontaneity of his first works. And, at the same time, the craftsman in him seems to win out over the artist, which can make his music seem very well-executed — but nothing more. I believe these two traits explain why his later compositions were not met with the kind of audience enthusiasm that works such as Mathis le peintre or Nobilissima Visione still elicit.⁹

Ultimately, the generation of Béla Bartók, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg revealed more deftness in adapting to their historical circumstances than Hindemith. After Mathis, after 1940, Hindemith turned inward. His music became increasingly fixed in more rigid forms of expression.

^{1. Giselher SCHUBERT, “Expressionnisme et musique utilitaire: L’évolution de la musique scénique d’Hindemith dans les années vingt,” in Contrechamps No. 4, April 1985. ↩}

^{2. Giselher SCHUBERT, “Paul Hindemith et le néo-baroque: Notes historiques et stylistiques,” in Contrechamps No. 3, September 1984. ↩}

^{3. Klaus LAGALY, in Experiment und Erbe: Studien zum Frühwerk Paul Hindemiths (ed. Julius Berger and Klaus Velten), Saarbrücken, Pfau Verlag, 1993. ↩}

^{4. Bertold BRECHT, Écrits sur le théâtre I, “Note sur la pièce didactique de Baden-Baden,” Paris, L’Arche, 1979, p. 345. ↩}

^{5. Bertolt BRECHT, Écrits sur le théâtre I, “Sur l’emploi de la musique dans un théâtre épique,” Paris, L’Arche, 1972, p. 457. ↩}

^{6. Michael Hans KATER, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, Oxford University Press, 2000. ↩}

^{7. KATER, Composers of the Nazi Era. ↩}

^{8. Célestin DELIÈGE, “De Vienne à Francfort: des voies critiques nouvelles pour l'esthétique musicale,” in InHarmoniques No. 1, 1986. ↩}

^{9. Ernest ANSERMET, Correspondances avec des compositeurs européens (1916-1966), vol. 1, Genève, Georg Éditeur, 1994. ↩}