Paul Hindemith

16 Nov 1895
28 Dec 1963
Offer Flowers
Light a Candle
Pray for the soul
Seek Blessings



Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered Frankfurt’s Hoch’sche Konservatorium, where he studied violin with Adolf Rebner, as well as conducting and composition with Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles.

At first he supported himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy groups. He became deputy leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra in 1914, and was promoted to leader in 1917. He played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet from 1914.

Hindemith was conscripted into the German army in September, 1917 and sent to join his regiment in Alsace in January, 1918.

There he was assigned to play bass drum in the regiment band, and also formed a string quartet. In May 1918 he was deployed to the front in Flanders, where he served as a sentry; his diary shows him “surviving grenade attacks only by good luck,” according to New Grove Dictionary.[1] After the armistice he returned to Frankfurt and the Rebner Quartet.

In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.

In 1922, some of his pieces were played 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.

In 1927 he was appointed Professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Hindemith wrote the music for Hans Richter’s 1928 avant-garde film Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk), although the score was subsequently lost, and he also acted in the film.


During the 1930s he made a visit to Cairo and several visits to Ankara where (at the invitation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) he led the task of reorganizing Turkish music education and the early efforts for the establishment of the 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 based on his early, sexually charged operas such as Sancta Susanna), and in December 1934, during a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels publicly denounced Hindemith as an “atonal noisemaker.”

Other officials working in Nazi Germany, though, thought that he might provide Germany with an example of a modern German composer, as by this time he was writing music based in tonality, with frequent references to folk music; the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler’s defense 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 favor with the Nazi hierarchy; he finally emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 (in part because his wife was of partially Jewish ancestry).

In 1935, the Turkish government commissioned Hindemith to reorganize that country’s musical education, and, more specifically, to prepare 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 émigrés. Nevertheless, he greatly influenced the developments of Turkish musical life; the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to his efforts. In fact, Hindemith was regarded as a “real master” by young Turkish musicians and he was appreciated and greatly respected.





An anonymous critic writing in Opera magazine in 1954, having attended a performance of Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage, noted that “Mr Hindemith is no virtuoso conductor, but he does possess an extraordinary knack of making performers understand how his own music is supposed to go”. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962.

After a prolonged decline in his physical health (though he kept composing until almost the last), Hindemith died in Frankfurt from pancreatitis at the age of 68.


This style has been described as neoclassical, but is very different from the works by Igor Stravinsky labeled with that term, owing more to the contrapuntal language of Johann Sebastian Bach and Max Reger than the Classical clarity of Mozart.

The new style can be heard in the series of works called Kammermusik (Chamber Music) from 1922 to 1927. Each of these pieces is written for a different small instrumental ensemble, many of them very unusual.

Kammermusik No. 6, for example, is a concerto for the viola d’amore, an instrument that has not been in wide use since the baroque period, but which Hindemith himself played.

He continued to write for unusual groups throughout his life, producing a trio for viola, heckelphone and piano (1928), 7 trios for 3 trautoniums (1930), a sonata for double bass and a concerto for trumpet, bassoon, and strings (both in 1949), for example.

Around the 1930s, Hindemith began to write less for chamber groups, and more for large orchestral forces. In 1933–35, Hindemith wrote his opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald. This opera is rarely staged, though a well-known production by the New York City Opera in 1995 was an exception (Holland 1995).

It combines the neo-classicism of earlier works with folk song. As a preliminary stage to the composing of this opera, Hindemith wrote a purely instrumental symphony also called Mathis der Maler, which is one of his most frequently performed works.

In the opera, some portions of the symphony appear as instrumental interludes, others were elaborated in vocal scenes.

Hindemith wrote Gebrauchsmusik (Music for Use)—compositions intended to have a social or political purpose and sometimes written to be played by amateurs. The concept was inspired by Bertolt Brecht. An example of this is his Trauermusik (Funeral Music), written in January 1936.

Hindemith was preparing the London premiere of Der Schwanendreher when he heard news of the death of George V. He quickly wrote this piece for solo viola and string orchestra in tribute to the late king, and the premiere was given that same evening, the day after the king’s death. Other examples of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik include:

the Plöner Musiktage (1932): a series of pieces designed for a day of community music making open to all inhabitants of the city of Plön, culminating in an evening concert by gymnasium students and teachers.

a Scherzo for viola and cello (1934), written in several hours during a series of recording sessions as a “filler” for an unexpected blank side of a 78 rpm album, and recorded immediately upon its completion.

Wir bauen eine Stadt (“We’re Building a City”), an opera for eight-year-olds (1930).


It takes melodies from various works by Weber, mainly piano duets, but also one from the overture to his incidental music for Turandot (Op. 37/J. 75), and transforms and adapts them so that each movement of the piece is based on one theme.

In 1951, Hindemith completed his Symphony in B-flat. Scored for concert band, it was written for the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own”. Hindemith premiered it with that band on April 5 of that year.

Its second performance took place under the baton of Hugh McMillan, conducting the Boulder Symphonic Band at the University of Colorado. The piece is representative of his late works, exhibiting strong contrapuntal lines throughout, and is a cornerstone of the band repertoire.

Hindemith recorded it in stereo with members of the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI in 1956.



He classifies chords in six categories, on the basis of how dissonant they are, whether or not they contain a tritone, and whether or not they clearly suggest a root or tonal center. Hindemith’s philosophy also encompassed melody—he strove for melodies that do not clearly outline major or minor triads.

In the late 1930s, Hindemith wrote a theoretical book The Craft of Musical Composition (vol. 1, Hindemith 1937), which lays out this system in great detail. He also advocated this system as a means of understanding and analyzing the harmonic structure of other music, claiming that it has a broader reach than the traditional Roman numeral approach to chords (an approach that is strongly tied to the diatonic scales).

In the final chapter of Book I, Hindemith seeks to illustrate the wide-ranging relevance and applicability of his system in analysis of music examples ranging from the early origins of European music to the contemporary.

These analyses include an early Gregorian melody, and compositions by Guillaume de Machaut, J. S. Bach, Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and finally, a composition of his own.

His piano work of the early 1940s Ludus Tonalis contains twelve fugues, in the manner of Johann Sebastian Bach, each connected by an interlude during which the music moves from the key of the last fugue to the key of the next one. The order of the keys follows Hindemith’s ranking of musical intervals around the tonal center of C.

One traditional aspect of classical music that Hindemith retains is the idea of dissonance resolving to consonance. Much of Hindemith’s music begins in consonant territory, progresses rather smoothly into dissonance, and resolves at the end in full, consonant chords. This is especially apparent in his Concert Music for Strings and Brass.

Further information: List of compositions by Paul Hindemith and List of operas by Hindemith

indemith conducted some of his own music in a series of recordings for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra and for Deutsche Grammophon with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which have been digitally remastered and released on CD.

The Violin Concerto was also recorded by Hindemith for Decca/London, with the composer conducting the London Symphony Orchestra with David Oistrakh as soloist. Everest Records issued a recording of Hindemith’s postwar When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (“A Requiem for Those We Love”) on LP, conducted by Hindemith.

A stereo recording of Hindemith conducting the requiem with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with Louise Parker and George London as soloists, was made for Columbia Records in 1963 and later issued on CD.

He also appeared on television as a guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s nationally syndicated “Music from Chicago” series; the performances have been released by VAI on home video.

A complete orchestral music collection has been recorded by German and Australian orchestras, all released on the CPO label, recordings all conducted by Werner Andreas Albert.

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