Opera Paul Hindemith "There and Back Again" St. Petersburg Chamber Opera
Schedule for Paul Hindemith "There and Back Again" 2022
Composer: Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith
Born in Hanau, Germany, Hindemith was taught the
violin as a child. He entered the Hochsche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main
where he studied conducting, composition and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and
Bernhard Sekles, supporting himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy
outfits. He led the Frankfurt Opera orchestra from 1915 to 1923 and played in
the Rebner string quartet in 1921 in which he played second violin, and later
the viola. In 1929 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively
toured Europe.
In 1922, some of his pieces were heard in the International Society for
Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the
attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as
an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by
several avant garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg.
From 1927 he taught composition at the Berliner Hochschule fьr Musik in Berlin.
In the 1930s he made a visit to Cairo and several visits to Ankara where (at the
invitation of Atatьrk) he led the task of reorganizing Turkish music education
and the early efforts for the establishment of Turkish State Opera and Ballet.
Towards the end of the 1930s, he made several tours in America as a viola and
viola d‘amore soloist.
Hindemith‘s relationship to the Nazis is a complicated one: some condemned
his music as "degenerate" (largely on the basis of his early, sexually charged
operas such as Sancta Susanna), and on December 6 1934, during a speech at the
Berlin Sports Palace, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels publicly
denounced Hindemith as an “atonal noisemaker.” Others, though, thought that he
might provide Germany with an example of a modern German composer, who by this
time was writing music based in tonality, and with frequent references to folk
music; the conductor Wilhelm Furtwдngler‘s defence of Hindemith, published in
1934, takes precisely this line. The controversy around his work continued
throughout the thirties, with the composer falling in and out of favour with the
Nazi hierarchy; he finally emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 (partly as his wife
was Jewish), and in the meantime had sworn an oath to Hitler, had accepted a
commission to write music for a Luftwaffe event (although it never
materialised), conducted for official Nazi concerts, and accepted a position on
the Reich Music Chamber. This part of Hindemith‘s life has until recently been
downplayed by historians of the composer (such as Skelton or Kemp), who have
mostly tried to assert his anti-Nazi beliefs.
In 1935, Hindemith was commissioned by the Turkish government to reorganize
that country‘s musical education, and, more specifically, was given the task of
preparing material for the “Universal and Turkish Polyphonic Music Education
Programme” for all music-related institutions in Turkey, a feat which he
accomplished to universal acclaim. This development seems to have been supported
by the Nazi regime: it may have got him conveniently out of the way, yet at the
same time he propagated a German view of musical history and education.
(Hindemith himself said he believed he was being an ambassador for German
culture.) Hindemith did not stay in Turkey as long as many other йmigrйs.
Nevertheless, he greatly influenced the developments of Turkish musical life;
the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts. In fact, Hindemith was
regarded to be a “real master” by young Turkish musicians and he was appreciated
and greatly respected.
In 1940 Hindemith emigrated to the United States. At the same time that he
was codifying his musical language, his teaching and compositions began to be
affected by his theories, according to critics like Ernest Ansermet (1961, note
to p. 42 added on an errata slip). Once in the States he taught primarily at
Yale University where he had such notable pupils as Lukas Foss, Norman Dello
Joio, Mel Powell, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schonthal, and Oscar-winning
film director George Roy Hill. During this time he also gave the Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer‘s World was extracted
(Hindemith 1952). He became an American citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe
in 1953, living in Zьrich and teaching at the university there. Towards the end
of his life he began to conduct more, and made numerous recordings, mostly of
his own music. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962.
Hindemith died in Frankfurt am Main from acute pancreatitis.
Schedule for Paul Hindemith "There and Back Again" 2022
|