9. Return to Switzerland.

The Norton lectures were a summation of Hindemith’s years of teaching in America, both in content and in fact. In 1949 he received an invitation to take up a teaching position at the University of Zürich, an offer he accepted in light of his recent European tours and the prospect of more conducting engagements. At first he tried to alternate between New Haven and Zürich (1951–3), but when his workload became too heavy he resigned from Yale. He settled in Switzerland in 1953 and spent the rest of his life in Blonay, a village above Lake Geneva between Montreux and Vevey. He no longer brought the same intensity to his teaching; his courses, seen to include too much theory for composition pupils and too much practical musicianship for musicologists, failed to attract the best students. In some ways appearing to have given up, he supervised only two doctoral dissertations before teaching his last courses in 1957. These were dedicated to Gesualdo’s madrigals and Schoenberg’s string quartets. In the latter Hindemith conducted a fundamental critique of 12-note technique: ‘What is art in this technique was already art beforehand, without it, and can continue to be so after it. The technique as such does not create any works of art.’ (Neumeyer and Schubert, 1990, p.44)

As his enthusiasm for teaching waned, he turned all the more energetically to conducting, leaving himself increasingly little time to compose. He conducted in every musical centre in Europe, most notably in London, Vienna and Berlin, and also in provincial towns in Germany, Great Britain and Italy. In addition, he embarked on extensive tours of South America (1954) and Japan (1956). He directed his own music dutifully, rather than with any special eagerness, although his favourite music to conduct was that of Mozart, Bruckner and Reger. Nevertheless, he made a series of definitive recordings of his own works with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the only operas he conducted were his own.

Hindemith’s compositions from the years following World War II show a preponderance of works for wind instruments, including concertos for the clarinet (1947), horn (1949) and trumpet and bassoon (1949–52), a concerto for woodwind and harp (1949), the Septet (1948), the Sinfonietta in E (1949–50) and the Symphony for Concert Band (1951). He also completed additions to the series of sonatas, began to revise earlier works and carried out projects that had long been planned. He finished a new version of Cardillac in 1952, transforming the original story of a criminal into an ambitious study of the artist in society; the changes incorporated an opera within the opera in the form of an excerpt from Lully’s Phaëton. In 1954 he completed a new version of Neues vom Tage, instituting changes to the libretto that alleviated problems of casting and staging. After fundamental revision, the Clarinet Quintet op.30 (1923) was published for the first time in 1955. The reworking of the Kammermusiken nos.1 and 4, and the Concerto for Orchestra op.38 were less stringent.

In the same way that the symphony Mathis der Maler had anticipated the opera of the same name, Hindemith composed the symphony Die Harmonie der Welt (1951) to anticipate the opera on Kepler (completed in 1957). His conception of music as the well-proportioned ordering of tonal material, suggesting the overall order of the natural world and corresponding to the ancient world’s idea of a cosmic harmony of the spheres, is reflected in the work. Music is not perceived here as a stimulus to the emotions or used as a means of expression, but rather transmits a sense of something better, more perfect, without naming it. What is seen on stage is, admittedly, the discord of Kepler’s life and times. In 1940, however, Hindemith conveyed the ideas behind the work as follows:

The spiritual and intellectual content of the work … should centre on the search for harmony in all things of life and the world, and on the loneliness of him who finds it. The nonharmony of the events of the time and of his fellow-men will serve to demonstrate the seminal quality of artistic and scientific thoughts and actions; despite comets, wars, ecclesiastical schisms, sickness and change of emperors, a great idea will blossom and grow taller than all other wild and noisy life. (Hindemith-Jb, xxvi, 1997, p.205)

Hindemith, Paul