The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Hindemith, Paul

(b Hanau, nr Frankfurt, 16 Nov 1895; d Frankfurt, 28 Dec 1963). German composer, theorist, teacher, viola player and conductor. The foremost German composer of his generation, he was a figure central to both music composition and musical thought during the inter-war years.

1. Early life.

2. World War I and the early 1920s.

3. The ‘new objectivity’.

4. The Berlin years.

5. ‘The Hindemith case’.

6. Work in music theory.

7. Emigration to the usa.

8. The postwar years.

9. Return to Switzerland.

10. Late works.

11. Posthumous reputation.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GISELHER SCHUBERT

Hindemith, Paul

1. Early life.

Hindemith descended on his father’s side from shopkeepers and craftsmen who had settled primarily in the small Silesian community of Jauer (now Jawor, Poland), where the family can be traced back to the 17th century, and on his mother's side from small farmers and shepherds in southern Lower Saxony. While no signs of musical interest can be found among the relatives of his mother, Maria Sophie Warnecke (1868–1949), his father, Robert Rudolf Emil Hindemith (1870–1915), came from a family of music lovers. Robert Rudolf supposedly ran away from home when his parents opposed his wish to become a musician; after arriving in Hesse, however, he became a painter and decorator. As he was never able to provide a secure income for his family, the Hindemiths were forced to move frequently. Paul spent three years of his childhood with his paternal grandfather in Naumburg. He was sincerely devoted to his mother, whom he is said to have resembled closely, even in similarity of gestures, and dedicated the first volume (Theoretischer Teil, 1937) of his principal theoretical work, Unterweisung im Tonsatz (Mainz, 1937, 2/1940), to her. In contrast, his relationship with his father was so negative that for a time, beginning in 1914, he severed all ties with him.

Robert Rudolf was intent that his three children should become professional musicians and subjected them to unrelenting musical training from early childhood. Paul, the eldest, learnt to play the violin, his sister Toni (1899–1966) the piano and his brother Rudolf (1900–74) the cello. Hindemith began to receive regular music lessons from local teachers in 1906. From 1907 he studied with the Swiss violinist Anna Hegner, who recognized his gifts and recommended him to her own teacher, Adolf Rebner. As leader of the Frankfurt Opera orchestra, first violinist in a string quartet that bore his name and teacher at the Hoch Conservatory, Rebner was one of the most respected musicians in Frankfurt. He arranged for Hindemith to have a free place at the Conservatory, where at first he concentrated exclusively on the violin. From an early age, he contributed to the family income by playing in public. Robert Rudolf took the children to Silesia where they played in villages as the Frankfurt Children's Trio, accompanied by their father on the zither. He also had to play at inns and dances, and in cinema, spa and operetta orchestras.

After numerous attempts to compose, Hindemith obtained grants and the support of wealthy Frankfurt families that enabled him to add composition study to his training at the Hoch Conservatory (from 1912–13). His first composition teacher was Arnold Mendelssohn, a great-nephew of Felix Mendelssohn and a composer of conservative cast, who had done much to revive German Protestant church music around the turn of the century. Hindemith held him in high esteem and warm regard and dedicated his Kammermusik no.5, op.36 no.4, to him in 1927. When Mendelssohn became ill, Hindemith became a pupil of Sekles, a modernist whose other pupils included Rudi Stephan, Hans Rosbaud, T.W. Adorno and Ottmar Gerster, among others.

While studying with Sekles, Hindemith wrote his opp.1–9, works that already exhibit considerable technical ability. Rather than following one particular compositional school, he adapted many varied influences, including the styles of Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Reger. The Drei Gesänge op.9 for soprano and large orchestra (1917), his major work of this period, demonstrate a secure literary foundation in their selection of contemporary poetry by Ernst Wilhelm Lotz and Else Lasker-Schüler, and acknowledge the most up-to-date musical influences of Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. From early on, Hindemith composed in many genres: orchestral works, chamber works, songs with piano accompaniment and solo piano pieces; he even started an opera (Der Vetter auf Besuch), but did not finish it. None of these compositions were published at the time except the Drei Stücke for cello and piano op.8 (1917); when those that survived appeared after Hindemith’s death, they astonished the musical world with their opulent, late Romantic harmonic language: the very style that Hindemith became famous for vehemently attacking during the 1920s.

In 1914 Hindemith joined the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra as a first violinist. He was promoted to deputy leader during the same year and to leader in 1917. In this position he rapidly made the acquaintance of some of the best conductors of the day, among them Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Fritz Busch and Hermann Scherchen, men who would later champion his compositions. The principal conductor, Ludwig Rottenberg, conducted the German premières of operas by Debussy, Dukas and Bartók and promoted Schreker’s operas above all. (Hindemith married his youngest daughter, Gertrud, in 1924.) In 1915 Hindemith became the second violinist in Rebner’s string quartet. He also appeared as a violin soloist playing concertos by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. In 1923, after he had stopped playing the violin in public in favour of the viola, he took over the solo violin part in the German première of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat.

Hindemith, Paul