8. The postwar years.

Hindemith took American citizenship in January 1946 and bought a home in New Haven, Connecticut. The composition of his ‘requiem “for those we love’”, When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d (1946), on Walt Whitman’s poem (which he originally thought of subtitling ‘An American Requiem’), was both a testimony of gratitude to the country that had given him shelter and safety at the time of his emigration and also an expression of his reaction to the Holocaust. In the middle of the work he quotes the Jewish melody Gaza, from which he derives the most important themes of the piece. At the same time, he accommodates his music so closely to this melody, as if in identification, that it does not stand out as a quotation.

Hindemith reacted circumspectly to the numerous official and unofficial requests he received to return to Germany. He did not wish to disappoint his new American friends, nor to restructure his life again, and was also worried that returning émigrés would encounter concealed resentment. Furthermore, he distrusted the enthusiasm with which his music was celebrated in postwar Germany and was repelled by the behaviour of Germans who had deserted him in the National Socialist years but who now assured him that privately they had always stood by him and played his music in their homes. Despite these concerns, however, he wanted to see his family and some of his friends again. When the opportunity arose for his journey to Europe to be paid for through conducting engagements, he made his first return visit (April–September 1947). He conducted and gave lectures and courses in Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, but visited Germany only for private, family reasons. On a later visit (1948–9) he undertook professional engagements in Germany at the request of the American military government.

These European excursions changed Hindemith’s musical concerns. First, the concerts he gave strengthened his interest in conducting. Although initially he directed only his own works or early music, he added Haydn and Mozart to his programmes in 1947, a decision that enhanced his success. Second, he observed that comparisons of his earlier works with those written during his American exile found his more recent compositions to lack the wildness and audacity of his earlier style. In 1949 he heard that New Music enthusiasts at the Darmstadt summer courses had dismissed his most recent compositions as ‘old iron’. In response Hindemith commented, ‘It is an honour to belong with the “old iron”. Music history is full of old iron, and it was always more durable than new bullshit’ (unpubd letter to Schott, 29 July 1949).

The new version of Das Marienleben, a project begun in 1935, was finally finished in 1948. Hindemith published the work with a lengthy preface in which he explained the principles of the revision and took issue with the music of the New German School: ‘For all the appreciation with which one may well greet the technical innovations, for they are intended to make work easier, it is nevertheless advisable, in the term “new art”, to lay less stress on the word “new” and emphasize the word “art” more’. This polemic marked the point at which Hindemith’s influence on the next generation of composers began to decline.

The revision of Das Marienleben itself illustrated a new understanding of tonality. Greater discernible rationality in the harmonic-tonal processes was no longer an end in itself, nor was it the goal of the reworking, as appeared to be the case in the first phases of the revision (about 1935), but instead was a means to the end of tonal symbolism. Hindemith assigned tonal centres, now clearly and unambiguously presented as such, to the individuals and emotional spheres represented in Rilke’s poetry. Thus harmonic-tonal relationships were seen as dependent upon their musical function; the composition identified the nature of the tonality, and it was recognized as the outcome of compositional decisions.

A peak in Hindemith’s teaching career in the USA was his invitation to assume the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard University (winter semester 1949–50), the principal responsibility of which was to deliver a series of lectures. He used the opportunity to work out his musical poetics, later published as A Composer’s World (1952). Here, and in the revised edition that appeared in his own German translation in 1959, he broached almost every question of musical creativity: listening, inspiration, craftsmanship, musical material, interpretation and the composer’s view of himself. He described himself as sceptical of progress and ‘profoundly unmodern’ and chose aesthetic criteria and musical comparisons from almost every era to illustrate his points. Free of illusions, he urged the teaching not of composition as an end in itself, but of ‘comprehensive musicianship’ (‘composing is never a profession … it can hardly be regarded as a job which nourishes its proprietor’). He warned young composers: ‘Be prepared for disrespect, boycott and slander, but nevertheless trust in the strength of your work’; at the same time he emphasized the importance of modesty and of not thinking of oneself, suggesting a focus on what could be given to others.

Hindemith, Paul