2. World War I and the early 1920s.

Hindemith was called up for military service at the end of 1917 and in January 1918 joined his regiment (then stationed in Alsace but sent to Flanders the following summer). He was assigned to the regimental band, in which he played the bass drum. During the last months of the war, however, he was posted to the trenches as a sentry, surviving grenade attacks only by good luck, as his diary reveals. While in the army he formed a string quartet and managed to continue composing (fig.1). Later he wrote of a particular incident that held decisive significance for him: playing Debussy’s String Quartet at the very moment when the news of Debussy’s death was announced on the radio.

We did not play to the end. It was as if our playing had been robbed of the breath of life. But we realized for the first time that music is more than style, technique and the expression of powerful feelings. Music reached out beyond political boundaries, national hatred and the horrors of war. On no other occasion have I seen so clearly what direction music must take. (Zeugnis in Bildern, p.8)

At the end of the war Hindemith returned to the Frankfurt Opera as leader, and to the Rebner Quartet, but, at his own request, as a viola player rather than a violinist. He therefore had the experience of playing the quartet repertory, including contemporary works such as Schoenberg’s first and second quartets, from the perspective of both a second violinist and a viola player.

Despite his change of instrument, Hindemith now began to think of himself primarily as a composer. On 2 June 1919 he organized a ‘composition evening’ in Frankfurt, the programme of which consisted entirely of his own works. The event was so successful that B. Schott’s Söhne, Mainz, offered to publish his music, remaining his sole publisher from then onwards. While Hindemith gained the benefit of Schott’s influence and support, Schott gained a composer who was extraordinarily reliable in the planning of his works, who wrote in an exemplary hand, and who would become one of the most prolific and frequently performed composers of his generation.

Hindemith’s new self-confidence as a composer released an unrivalled creative energy, and within a very short space of time he produced a huge quantity of new works: one-act operas, chamber music, piano music, vocal works, parodies, entertainment music and film scores. In them he severed all ties with his eclectic, late Romantic beginnings and developed a personal brand of Expressionism, audible in the one-act operas Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen op.12 (1919), Das Nusch-Nuschi op.20 (1920) and Sancta Susanna op.21 (1921, fig.2), and the song cycles Des Todes Tod op.23a (1922) and Die junge Magd op.23 no.2 (1922). In these, Hindemith set texts by writers whose work exemplified literary Expressionism (Oskar Kokoschka, August Stramm, Georg Trakl), and he intensified the expressive content of his music accordingly. He expanded his harmonic and tonal means to the very limits of tonality in the case of Sancta Susanna, and intensified the orchestral coloration, while elsewhere he stripped the musical fabric down to unadorned two-part textures. At the same time he counterbalanced the expressive tendencies towards intensification and dissolution by the use of regular formal designs: for example, the one-act opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen is in sonata form while Sancta Susanna takes the form of a series of variations. He carried aspects of this style over into those chamber works which exemplified the Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘new objectivity’, such as the String Quartets no.3, op.16 (1920) and no.4, op.22 (1921), the Kammermusik no.1, op.24a (1922) and the song cycle Das Marienleben op.27 (1922–3). This evolutionary process (from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit) is illustrated in the two versions of the Cello Sonata op.11 no.3: in the first version (1919), the middle movement (of three) bore the programmatic heading ‘Im Schilf. Trauerzug und Bacchanale’, referring to Walt Whitman’s poem When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d; in the second version (1921), Hindemith eliminated the two outer movements and composed a new first movement to which he appended the original middle movement, now without its programmatic heading, thus changing the piece from programme music into absolute music. The fugato start of the newly composed movement, moreover, altered the significance of the original middle movement music: the many ostinato passages present therein no longer provided an illustration of the ‘bacchantic’ programme, but functioned as a motivic reduction of previously introduced material. The movement was transformed, therefore, into the style that was to be considered typical of Hindemith: purely musically motivated, elementally simple, ‘objective’ music-making. In the concentration on purely musical procedures the music also began to lose its late Romantic, harmonically plush opulence and sonority altogether. Hindemith now took to writing parts as independent lines; the Neue Sachlichkeit was thus identified stylistically with the assertion of a fundamentally linear, polyphonic musical idiom that seemed new in the context of the time. Formal coherence was no longer supported and articulated by motivic-thematic developmental processes, tonal functional harmony, or regular syntax, but rather by a rhythmically and metrically uniform structure or a sometimes supple, sometimes strict continuity of musical movement. In this continuity, musical procedures were reduced to their primary elements, such as a pulsing metre, often made particularly effective by means of irregular accents. The harmonic dimension is markedly dissonant in these works, to allow the often extremely individualized voices in the musical texture to stand out against each other. There are also directions to the players which makes explicit the priority that impetuous, almost reckless playing was to have over articulation, clear enunciation and beauty of sound: for example, ‘Furious tempo. Wild. Beauty of sound is a secondary matter’ (Sonata for solo viola op.25 no.1, 4th movement), or ‘Disregard what you learnt in your piano lessons. Don’t spend too much time considering whether to strike D# with the fourth or the sixth finger. Play this piece in a very wild manner, but always keep it very strict rhythmically, like a machine. Look on the piano here as an interesting kind of percussion instrument and treat accordingly’ (Suite ‘1922’ for piano, op.26, 5th movement).

In 1921, with the explosive double première of his one-act operas Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Das Nusch-Nuschi (their provocative attitude towards sexuality created a scandal) and the first performance of the String Quartet no.3, Hindemith established himself as a composer to be watched. At first this new recognition did not diminish his activities as a performer. The Third Quartet was performed by an ensemble made up of Licco Amar (violin), Walter Caspar (violin), Hindemith (viola) and his brother Rudolf (cello), who was later replaced by Maurits Franck. The Amar Quartet, as it was known, became central to Hindemith’s performing career during the 1920s. With his discovery in 1922 of the viola d’amore, Hindemith also began to explore and perform early music. In 1923, however, after negotiating with Schott for a guaranteed monthly income, he was able to leave the Frankfurt Opera orchestra. He became a member of the programme committee of the Donaueschingen Festival which, with him as its driving force, became one of the most important centres of contemporary music in the 1920s.

Hindemith, Paul