10. Late works.

In 1957, after he had finished Die Harmonie der Welt and retired from teaching in Zürich, Hindemith's compositional style underwent a change accompanied by a broadening of his music-theoretical thinking and reflected in changes made to his concert repertory. He now understood the concept of ‘total tonality’ (Gesamttonalität) as the harmonic basis of a work, and placed ‘the key and chord relationships and the sequence in which they appear’ at the centre of his thinking on music theory, acknowledging:

There is essentially no difference whether I control the melodic-harmonic material with the aid of church modes, major and minor scales, main and subsidiary tonal functions or predetermined series of rows from the chromatic 12-note scale. The substance of the music that can be heard and understood intuitively will be affected, admittedly, according to the individual nature of each of those organizational principles, and from the technical point of view each of them has not the same harmonic-melodic potential. (Paul Hindemith: Aufsätze-Vorträge-Reden, pp.298–9)

Tonality, therefore, was seen as one means of organization among others; the way in which a composer used it could vary according to the purpose he wished the piece to serve. It would make sense, for example, to bring out the simplest tonal relationships in works intended for educational use, and to suppress all immediately comprehensible tonal relationships in more demanding chamber music. Tonality resulted in the measures taken to serve a particular compositional purpose (and atonality, in his view, was therefore created when tonal relationships were presented in only the most complex circumstances).

This theoretical broadening was matched by an increase in the styles, techniques and materials used by Hindemith in his compositions. In the works of these years, he acknowledged generic norms, such as the motet and the madrigal, and made references to music by other composers. In the 1920s he had been inclined to allude to early music in terms of musical style, but now he was drawn more to the aesthetic importance and historical worth of old genres. To him the motet represented the oldest and most demanding genre of sacred vocal music, the madrigal that of secular vocal music. The one-act opera The Long Christmas Dinner (1960–61), after Thornton Wilder, uses an English Christmas carol; the Pittsburgh Symphony (1958) quotes a folksong, a Pete Seeger song and Webern’s Symphony op.21; the cantata Mainzer Umzug (1962), on a text by Carl Zuckmayer, includes traditional Shrove Tuesday music used in Mainz; the Organ Concerto (1962–3) refers to the Whitsun hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and the L’homme armé melody; and the Mass for mixed a cappella chorus (1963), Hindemith’s last work, uses fauxbourdon, isorhythm and Figurenlehre. Some of these works also exhibit a confrontation with newer compositional developments, such as serial technique. Hindemith used specially constructed 12-note themes in the Sonata for bass tuba and piano (1955), and an 8-note row in the last movement of the Pittsburgh Symphony. However, he used such techniques not so much for the sake of achieving an egaliterian chromaticism that would result in atonality as rather in order to give themes a motivic and intervallic unity. Nearly all the works end with pure triads, representing the state of complete relaxation of musical tension implicit in the theory of harmonisches Gefälle.

In a comparable way, Hindemith’s programming mixed 20th-century music and early music (in which he performed when period instruments were needed), as well as combining solo vocal, choral, chamber and orchestral repertory. He wanted the music he composed or performed to establish and demonstrate a substantial unity overriding differences of genre, period or style, without having to emphasize this by arranging or interpreting the music in a special way. The totality of music, as Stravinsky called the immeasurably rich musical tradition, had to prove itself without violence amid the otherness of historical remoteness, unfamiliarity or modernity.

Hindemith, Paul