7. Emigration to the usa.

In February 1940, a few months after the outbreak of World War II, Hindemith left Switzerland for the USA. He did so reluctantly and only at the insistence of his friends, for his visits to that country during the previous three years had somewhat disillusioned him. Having listened to his own recordings of some of his viola works, he did not want to perform in public any longer as a viola player. He had been invited to teach, however, at SUNY, Buffalo, and Cornell University, Wells College and the Boston SO summer school at Tanglewood, and looked forward to returning to Switzerland and a peaceful Europe after a short period. Once in the USA, he succumbed to an uncharacteristic depression that did not abate until he received an invitation from Yale University to give a series of guest lectures, from which he hoped a more permanent arrangement would evolve. These were so successful that he was immediately offered a visiting professorship (winter semester, 1940–41), which he gladly accepted. He impressed his students at Tanglewood so much that some of them, including Norman Dello Joio, Lukas Foss and Harold Shapero, followed him to Yale.

Hindemith showed such commitment in his teaching that by January 1941 Yale made overtures to appoint him to a permanent post. The university wanted to link his position to a continuing reform of music studies, a situation that allowed Hindemith a great deal of freedom in designing his own courses. In addition to composition, he taught music theory, comprised of the history of theory, traditional theory and the elements discussed in Unterweisung im Tonsatz. His instruction in traditional theory gave rise to additional books, including A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony (1943) and Elementary Training for Musicians (1946). He also hoped to extract a book on composition in three or more parts from his courses on Unterweisung im Tonsatz, thus completing that work. After the publication of Exercises in Two-Part Writing (1939), however, he was unable to continue. Unterweisung im Tonsatz, therefore, is his only large-scale project to remain incomplete.

In addition to his courses on the history of music theory, Hindemith founded the Yale Collegium Musicum, through which he instituted historically informed performances of early music from Perotinus to J.S. Bach. The 12 concerts he gave with this ensemble (until 1953) were so successful that some were repeated in New York. As well as preparing music for performances and directing rehearsals, Hindemith played instruments such as the fiddle, viol, viola d’amore and bassoon. Through these concerts he exercised a powerful influence on historically informed performing practice in the USA. His composition classes at Yale were also thought to be the best in the country at the time, although he refused to acknowledge that any of his pupils, except Foss, had any talent.

Hindemith’s success as a teacher was matched by corresponding success as a composer. Virtually unknown in the USA in 1940, within a short period of time his music became more frequently performed than that of any other composer living in the country. He received many commissions and adapted his work to the conditions of American musical life and orchestral culture, though only to the extent that he had reacted to social conditions in the past. There is no mistaking the fact, therefore, that works such as the Cello Concerto (1940), the Symphony in E (1940), the Symphonic Metamorphosis after Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943) and the Symphonia serena (1946), while written for the virtuosity and brilliance of the American symphony orchestra, still acknowledge a specifically German musical tradition. The finale of the Cello Concerto uses an old march; the Symphony in E , Hindemith’s first four-movement symphony conceived as a piece of absolute music, is clearly indebted to Bruckner; the Symphonic Metamorphosis draws on whole works by Weber, not just themes as the title claims; and the second movement of the Symphonia serena paraphrases a Beethoven march (woo18).

The chamber works of this period exhibit significant structural complexity, while maintaining a largely relaxed temperament. The Sonata for two pianos (1942) boasts a double canon as its slow movement and an expansive triple fugue as its finale. Canonic and fugal devices, such as retrograde, are also featured in the String Quartets nos.6 (1943) and 7 (1945). Isorhythmic passages, reflecting Hindemith’s preoccupation with early music, appear in the Sonata for alto horn and piano (1943), and the finale of the Piano Concerto (1945) is a variation movement on the medieval dance Tre fontane. He also wrote a series of smaller compositions to play at home with his wife and numerous songs on German, French and English poems (the majority of these remained unpublished during his lifetime). In 1940 he composed the first of his motets for voice and piano on texts from the Catholic liturgy for Christmas, according to the older liturgical order. By 1960 he had set all the relevant parts of Gospels for the Christmas season. He gave serious thought to writing an opera on an American subject, but abandoned the idea in light of the difficulty of getting such a work performed. He also did not want to involve himself in the problems of writing authentically American music or a genuinely American opera.

In 1942 Hindemith wrote his last piano work, Ludus tonalis, the introduction of which takes the form of a prelude that, turned 180 degrees, is the postlude as well. The main body of the work is a series of 12 three-part fugues representing every type of fugal structure: double and triple fugues, fugues in retrograde, inversion, augmentation and diminution, fugues that combine themes and canonic fugues. In between the fugues, which correspond to the pitch order of his Series 1, Hindemith inserted modulating free form interludes, each approaching the individuality of a character-piece. His intention was to show ‘those who had not sunk beyond hope of rescue’ what ‘composition is’. He regarded the conquest of technical problems presented by such a piece as a moral victory and expected it to be misunderstood and a failure. In fact, the first edition sold out in three months.

Hindemith had originally imagined that he would be unable to compose in a foreign environment and was homesick for Germany, but it was while he was in the USA that he became known throughout the world. His success as a composer and teacher, as well as the feeling that he was needed and could contribute something useful to American musical life, helped him to grow away from his German origins and ties relatively painlessly, so that eventually he began to regard them as provincial.

Hindemith, Paul