Essay About Musical Direction And Pauls Father

Paul Hindemith
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Paul was born in the German town of Hanau in 1895, on December Sixteen. We might
assume that Hindemith felt a pull in the musical direction from a very early age; Pauls father was
a painter and did not want his son becoming a musician, so our little composer-to-be ran away at
the age of 11, and started his own life. Paul taught himself the violin and viola, and began earning
his living by playing at Cafes and other such establishments. Eventually, Hindemith learned the
rudiments of all the instruments that mattered, so he could play them at least passably– but he
was surely a virtuoso at his viola and viola damore.
Eventually, Hindemith ended up at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where he studied his music
performance under the tutelage of people like Arnold Mendelssohn. While there, Hindemith
showed increasing interest in the field of composition– he began writing in earnest around the
time he completed his courses at the Conservatory, and began establishing himself in the music
culture through chamber music and expressionistic opera.
Paul landed a pretty major job in the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra he was first
concertmaster, and then conductor over the years 1915-1923. After this, he founded his Amar
String Quartet, for which he was violist– the group became pretty celebrated and performed
successfully throughout Europe. Its agreed that 1921 was when Hindemith began to come into
his own, and emerge as well-known into the world as a composer and performer. Hindemith
appeared regularly at the Donaueschingen Festival starting that year, and in 1922-24 his Chamber
Works were performed at the Salzburg Festival (which I assume was a fairly big deal at the time).
Up until about 1925, Hindemith was pretty conventional, going along more or less
complacently with the musical norms of his time. But in 1925, he came out with “Kammermusik”,
his first openly atonal composition. The piece was representative of new ideas, and roused lots of
talk when it was performed at the Venice Festival of the International Society of Contemporary
Music. Before he knew it, Paul was a sort of pioneer, a figurehead of the advancing frontier in
“Modern Music”.
Ah– during these years of his life, Hindemith was working as a professor of Composition
at the Berlin Hochschule.
It was around 1934 that Hindemith started having some trouble with the Nazis. For one,
they didnt like his music. In fact, Alfred Rosenberg, who was Chief of Nazi Foreign Affairs, said
his musics were the “foulest perversions of German music.” Obviously, the Nazis gave his career
a hard time and tried to squelch his fame. You see, the Nazis probably gave Hindemith a hard
time because he was married to a half-Jewess, and also made recordings with Jews, whom he
refused to break off with. Besides, the Nazis were stuffy bigwigs and found all progressive music
undesirable.
Nevertheless, everything went pretty well for Paul until that year, 1934. Mathis Der
Mahler came out and was given a debut performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. Everyone loved
it, and it was set to be staged as an opera, but alas, the Nazis scrapped the idea because they
didnt like anything creative and new. The conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, wrote a nasty letter
about the Nazis veto of the venture, and had it published– unfortunately, Hitler himself got mad
at Furtwangler and Hindemith, so Paul had to pack up and move away to Turkey to avoid
unpleasantness. He spent a year or so in Turkey revitalizing the music life there, then shipped off
to the USA on an invitation from Elizabeth Coolige. He played a USA debut concert in
Washington, D.C., on April Tenth, in 1937. He frequented the USA from then on as a violinist
and a conductor. He returned to America in 1938 for the debut of his ballet, St. Francis. The
book says Hindemith had become an American Citizen in 1936, so obviously Paul had plans for
the USA and was ready for his career there. At last, in 1939, Paul decided to move there while
Germany was stuck in W.W.II, and sat tight.
Hindemith taught at Yale and got to lecture at Harvard. He wrote some on theory, and
composed a whole bunch while he was in the States. In 1944 he visited Germany and had a street
named in his honor. The musicians there wanted Paul to return and stay, but he declined to do so
until 1953, when he moved to Zurich. By now, Hindemith was something of a celebrity– he
emerged as the most important German composer after W.W.II; in1955 he won the $35000
Sibelius Award; in 1960, the NY Critics Circle Award; and in 1962, the $52000 Italian Balzan
Prize.
Sources seem to agree that Hindemiths style was ever-maturing, up until he died of a
stroke in 1963, in a Frankfurt hospital on December 29. It was just shortly after his last
conductors gig in Berlin.
Early