5. ‘The Hindemith case’.

After the January 1933 election brought the National Socialists to power, Hindemith began urgently to question the relationship between art and society, and between artistic and non-artistic commitment. In April 1933 he learnt that half of his output had been branded as manifesting ‘cultural Bolshevism’ and was banned. His string trio could only be performed abroad, he was scarcely ever asked to appear in Germany and his Jewish colleagues at the Berlin Musikhochschule lost their jobs. Initially, he was not particularly worried, as he regarded the National Socialists’ assumption of power to be a democratic change of government that would be short-lived and took it for granted that all those dismissed from their jobs would be reinstated as soon as a new party came to power.

As a composer, however, Hindemith reacted immediately. He began to write large numbers of songs on resigned, melancholy or despairing texts, setting them so that they gave an unmistakable sign of his withdrawal into a state of ‘inner emigration’. (These remained unpublished and were discovered only after his death.) He also started to work on the opera Mathis der Maler (1933–5), writing his own libretto for the first time, and placing the problematic relationship of politics, power, art and personal responsibility into a historical setting. The subject of the opera is the artist Matthias Grünewald, the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, who is led by his sense of social responsibility to give up painting and join the peasants in their struggle against serfdom during the Peasants’ War (1524–5). After being bitterly disappointed by them, Grünewald recognizes that he has betrayed the most precious thing in his existence, his art. In a visionary scene, art is restored to him as the obligation to paint. Although he cannot forget the experiences of suffering, nor his share of guilt, his memories add moral strength to his artistic expression. The final message, therefore, is that the artist who betrays his genuine gifts is socially irresponsible, however hard he tries to quiet his conscience through political activism.

Hindemith’s work on the opera belongs within a context of events taking place in his own life. While working on the scenario, and at Furtwängler’s request, Hindemith composed the symphony Mathis der Maler, the first performance of which (Berlin, 12 March 1934) was an enormous success. Directly foreshadowing the music of the opera, the symphony not only quotes traditional melodies (‘Es sungen drei Engel’) and Gregorian chant (‘Lauda Sion salvatorem’) but also uses traditional structures such as sonata form. Moreover, certain harmonic and tonal developments carry over from one movement to the next and have a programmatic significance. The symphony’s first movement (which is identical to the opera’s prelude) has G as its tonic, but in the course of it the song ‘Es sungen drei Engel’ is introduced in D , which, a tritone away from G, represents in Hindemith’s terms the most distant key from that of the movement’s opening. The final movement develops ever more clearly in the direction of D , and the symphony ends in D major with the chorale-like declamation of Alleluia. In the sense of an inner development, therefore, the harmonic and tonal development strives towards that which seemed the remotest of goals at first: the praise of God. Hindemith’s elaboration of the harmonic and tonal relationships thus becomes steadily clearer and more unequivocal in a way that reflects the central idea of the opera. The triumph of the work, however, led the National Socialists to attack the composer in the press. Thinking for the first time of emigration, Hindemith hatched a politically naive plan with Furtwängler: Furtwängler was to publish an article about Hindemith, speak up for him at an audience with Adolf Hitler and give Hitler a letter inviting him to one of Hindemith’s composition classes. The plan failed. After Furtwängler's article appeared (‘Der Fall Hindemith’, Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung, 25 November 1934), arousing huge interest, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, during a speech at the Berlin Palace of Sport, vilified Hindemith as a ‘dud’, a ‘charlatan’ and an ‘atonal noise-maker’. Furtwängler resigned all his positions (he reconciled with the National Socialists in February 1935) and Hindemith took indefinite leave from his teaching position.

No longer believing that his ‘case’ would be reviewed, although he did nothing to hinder his friends’ attempts to rehabilitate him, Hindemith secretly prepared to emigrate. He gave notice of his intention in works such as the Viola Concerto Der Schwanendreher (1935) and the Piano Sonata no.1 (1936). In the Viola Concerto, based on old German folksongs, he gave quotations to the solo viola that produce the following sequence of statements: ‘Glück liegt in allen Gassen’ (first movement); ‘Nicht länger ich’s ertrag’, ‘hab gar ein’ schweren Tag’ (second movement). Similarly, the First Piano Sonata refers to Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Der Main, which contains the lines ‘… doch nimmer vergess ich dich, so fern ich wandre, schöner Main!’

In April 1935, on the invitation of the Turkish government, Hindemith went to Ankara to act as an adviser on the organization of musical life in Turkey. His thoughts on the subject are included in his essay Vorschläge für den Aufbau des türkischen Musiklebens. He returned to Turkey in 1936 and 1937 to supervise the implementation of his ideas and to supplement them with new ones. In order to preserve his freedom to travel, he represented his work to the German authorities as being on behalf of German culture. At the same time, he helped Jewish musicians escape to Turkey.

In October 1936, after a performance of the Violin Sonata in E was greeted with what was interpreted as political enthusiasm, a ban was placed on all performances of Hindemith’s works. In March 1937 he resigned from the Berlin Hochschule and travelled to the USA for the first time. He went there again in 1938 and 1939. The diary-like letters he wrote to his wife during these journeys illustrate his endeavours to orientate himself in the New World and to look for employment. In May 1938, while he was being denounced as a ‘standard-bearer of musical decay’ at the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, the world première of Mathis der Maler was acclaimed in Zürich; two months later the première of the ballet Nobilissima visione took place in London. That September Hindemith emigrated to Switzerland, settling in Bluche, a village in the Rhône valley above Sion. By 1939 he was surprisingly self-critical of his behaviour under the Nazis: ‘I always see myself as the mouse who recklessly danced in front of the trap and even ventured inside; quite by chance, when it happened to be outside, the trap closed!’ (Paul Hindemith: ‘Das private Logbuch’, p.357)

Hindemith, Paul