As a Tree Bears Fruit

When Paul Hindemith wrote a parody of Tristan into an early opera, the offense to Wagner stirred up a resentment in his native Germany that lingered on for years. In the '30s, when his music had attained the clean, clear shape of neoclassicism, the Nazis banned it because of its antiRomantic ring. And after the war, when Hindemith returned to Europe after 13 years in the U.S., he was widely considered a walking anachronism by the new musical revolutionaries. In youth, he had been called "the playboy." In age, he was "the academician." In more than 40 prolific years, he never won much of an audience.

Last week, though, when Hindemith's death was tolled in the German press, the critics freely spoke of him as the giant of modern German composers. Perhaps because his music in retrospect seems eminently German, few of the German obit writers remembered to mention that he was a U.S. citizen who had not lived in his homeland for 25 years. His works stand as a crown to the German baroque tradition, and in his early music especially, there is an almost impressionistic reflection of the anarchy and despair that gripped Germany after World War I. He wrote within a range of dark emotions that makes much of his music seem alien and bitter--but it is historically accurate as well.

Complete Musician. Hindemith was a composer's composer--and a complete musician. He wrote music, as Albert Einstein once said, "as a tree bears fruit"--great bushels of music, turned out in orderly, workmanlike style. He was a concert violist and pianist, a competent player of every other instrument in the orchestra, and a greatly admired conductor. In a single day at the Berlin Festival in 1960, Hindemith conducted four choirs, played a three-string vielle in a recital of 14th century songs, then sat back to listen to the world premiere of his Motets for Tenor and Piano. "Almost overpoweringly impressive," wrote Die Welt of the new composition.

Still, very little of his work found its way into the standard orchestral repertory. Even such masterpieces as the opera Mathis der Maler, the Philharmonic Concerto, the symphony Harmonie der Welt, and the requiem are rarely heard. Though his music is easily accessible to modern audiences, it is admired mainly by musicians, who hear in it the evidence of a lofty musicianship that is not often encountered in modern composers.

Close Friends. Hindemith was born in Hanau and was playing the violin in the city's dance halls and beer gardens by the time he was 13. When his compositions were banned in Germany in 1934, Hindemith turned to reorganizing the music education program of Turkey, then came to the U.S. in 1940. He was a professor of music at Yale until 1953, when he returned to Europe and settled down in Zurich. He was a short, round little man of robust health until circulatory ailments began to plague him in his declining years. Hindemith died at 68, following four swift strokes, and was buried near Vevey on Lake Geneva. Only a few close friends were at his graveside.

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