Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith, a composer, violist, conductor, teacher, and music theorist, was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, as the eldest child of a painter and decorator. He learned violin as a child and later studied at Dr. Hoch's Konservatorium in Frankfurt under Adolf Rebner, Arnold Mendelssohn, and Bernhard Sekles. To support himself early on, he played in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. By 1914, he was deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, becoming concertmaster in 1916, and also played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet.

After his father died in World War I in 1915, Hindemith was drafted into the Imperial German Army in September 1917. He played bass drum in a regimental band and formed a string quartet before being sent to the front in Flanders in May 1918, where he served as a sentry and narrowly survived grenade attacks. Following the armistice, he returned to Frankfurt and the Rebner Quartet.

In 1921, Hindemith founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and toured Europe extensively, focusing on contemporary music. His younger brother Rudolf was the original cellist. As a composer, he became a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style in the 1920s, producing works like *Kammermusik*, which echo Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and feature viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments. His pieces were performed at the 1922 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Salzburg, bringing him international attention. The following year, he wrote the song cycle *Das Marienleben* and began organizing the Donaueschingen Festival, programming avant-garde composers like Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. In 1927, he was appointed professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik. He composed and acted in Hans Richter's 1928 avant-garde film *Ghosts Before Breakfast*, though the score and original film were later burned by the Nazis. In 1929, he performed the solo part in the premiere of William Walton's viola concerto after Lionel Tertis declined it.

Hindemith married actress and singer Gertrud Rottenberg in 1924; the couple had no children.

The Nazi regime had a conflicted relationship with his music. Some officials condemned it as "degenerate," particularly his early, sexually charged operas like *Sancta Susanna*. In December 1934, Joseph Goebbels publicly called him an "atonal noisemaker." The Nazis banned his music in October 1936, and it was included in the 1938 *Entartete Musik* exhibition. However, other Nazi figures saw him as a potential model for modern German composition, as his later work was tonal and referenced folk music. Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler defended him in 1934 along these lines. The controversy persisted throughout the 1930s, with Hindemith's favor with the Nazis fluctuating.

During the 1930s, Hindemith visited Cairo and Ankara multiple times. After Goebbels pressured him to request an indefinite leave from the Berlin Academy, he accepted an invitation from the Turkish government in 1935 to oversee the creation of a music school in Ankara. There, he became a key figure in music pedagogy under President Kemal Atatürk, with Eduard Zuckmayer as his deputy. He reorganized Turkish music education and helped establish the Turkish State Opera and Ballet. Though he did not stay as long as other émigrés, his influence was profound—the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts, and young Turkish musicians regarded him as a "real master."

Toward the end of the 1930s, Hindemith and his wife emigrated to Switzerland and then the United States ahead of World War II, after worsening difficulties with the Nazi regime. In his later years, he conducted and recorded much of his own music.

Most of Hindemith's compositions are anchored by a foundational tone and use musical forms, counterpoint, and cadences typical of Baroque and Classical traditions. His harmonic language is more modern, freely using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale within a tonal framework, as detailed in his three-volume treatise *The Craft of Musical Composition*. His notable works include the opera *Mathis der Maler* (1938), the symphony *Mathis der Maler* (1934), the *Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber* (1943), and the oratorio *When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd* (1946), a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem.