4. The Berlin years.

In 1927 Hindemith was invited to teach composition at the Berlin Musikhochschule. His open-mindedness, curiosity and breadth of knowledge made him an ideal teacher. He tended to overburden and thus discourage his pupils, however, who, only a few years younger than himself, he otherwise treated as comrades. He soon arrived at the conclusion that composition, strictly speaking, could not be taught; only the craft of how to handle musical materials could be passed on. Unable to find suitable textbooks, he undertook research in music theory and acoustics, learning Latin and mathematics to facilitate the reading of old musical treatises. In addition, he took a close interest in media developments and was one of the first composers to offer courses in film music. He also assisted in the development of the trautonium and contributed to the work of the Hochschule’s radio research department. He investigated the premises of a music written especially for radio and experimented with music for the gramophone, running recorded vocal and instrumental sounds at different speeds, mixing them and re-recording. At the same time, he explored the Hochschule’s collection of old instruments, learnt to play them, and gave lessons to amateurs at the Volksmusikschule in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln for which he wrote a Hör- und Spielschule. In 1929 he left the Amar Quartet and founded a string trio with Josef Wolfstahl (later replaced by Szymon Goldberg) and Emanuel Feuermann.

Hindemith’s music of the late 1920s, therefore, served extremely divergent functions. He wrote the simplest possible works for children and amateurs to play and produced music for public concerts that was generally less complicated and more circumscribed in its harmonic and tonal language. This latter type is best represented by the series of Konzertmusiken opp.48, 49 and 50 (1929–30). In the last movement of the Konzertmusik op.49, Hindemith quotes a German folksong for the first time in his career. These works led Hindemith to elaborate the musical material in a more planned and systematic way. He continued to use all the notes of the chromatic scale, as before, but melodically he distributed the total chromatic so as to create individual lines that were wholly diatonic. The modes, scales or scale-segments thus produced are subjected to constant change by inserted steps of a 2nd or by the local redefinition of individual steps within the scale. Hindemith‘s elaboration of the common fundamental of these different modes or scale-segments is all the more intensive. Combined with a greater plasticity in the shaping of melodic lines and a choric deployment of the orchestral resources, with an obvious preference for the brass, this leads to formal dispositions in the Konzertmusiken which are easy to discern and understand even though thay have no relation to any traditional models. Neues vom Tage (1928–9), an opera with a contemporary setting that echoes contemporary popular music, sums up the spirit and mood of the age, using parody to keep it at a distance.

The radical political developments of the late 1920s increasingly hampered Hindemith’s work. Political differences had already led to a breach between Hindemith, on the one hand, and Brecht, Eisler and Weill, on the other, during preparations for the 1930 Neue Musik Berlin. When Hindemith refused to schedule a performance of Brecht and Eisler’s Die Massnahme, a Lehrstück that takes a narrow party line, they accused him of censorship. At the same time Hindemith actively sought collaboration with Gottfried Benn, a poet regarded as Brecht’s antithesis in every respect. Although Hindemith was not attracted to Benn’s ‘art for art’s sake’ aesthetic, he felt himself increasingly fostering a more emphatic understanding of art. The oratorio which Hindemith and Benn wrote together, Das Unaufhörliche (1931), was the first of Hindemith’s works to introduce and express this change in direction.

Hindemith, Paul