The Eternal Objectivist

Berlin in the 1920s and 30s will never lose its lustre. Marlene Dietrich, Christopher Isherwood, Kurt Weill... all denizens of an endless parade of poetry, prose and politics. That trilogy of visitor and native produced truly enduring works. Eager for more, history demands that we search through the conscience and culture of that time for endless cabaret turns, Zeitopern and Gebrauchsmusik, yet often it turns up duds. In our hunger, we often prize temporal redolence over true quality.

One figure who bucks that trend, though has not yet fully surfaced in our fervour for restitution and the reinvigoration of Entartete Kultur is Paul Hindemith. Currently he is represented only by a slim body of music from his sizeable catalogue. Much of it will doubtless remain on the shelf, though this winter, Hyperion Records has chosen to proselytise his music by continuing a series of recordings of some of his greatest music. 

The project began in 2009 with the release of three volumes of Hindemith's music for viola, concluding with a third volume featuring his music for viola and orchestra. After all, the viola was Hindemith's instrument during the fecund decade of the 1920s. Yet before he turned to the viola, Hindemith had been a highly proficient violinist, leading the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra, including in the premieres of Franz Schreker's operas. 

In chamber music, Hindemith led his own string quartet, as well as playing second violin in his teacher Adolf Rebner’s quartet. During World War I he formed another foursome with his fellow soldiers. Hindemith's experiences on the Western Front may not have spurred his change of musical heart, yet they certainly coincide, for after hostilities ceased, Hindemith returned to his position at the opera house in Frankfurt and in the Rebner Quartet, but as a viola player. In 1923 he gave up playing the violin in public entirely and devoted himself to the viola, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician in the Amar Quartet, which he had founded in 1921.

Despite the move, Hindemith continued to compose for the violin, completing a sequence of four sonatas in 1939 – the first had been written while still serving on the Western Front. This chain of works, recorded for Hyperion by Tanja Becker-Bender and Péter Nagy, provides potent musical evidence of the changes in Hindemith's style, for not only did he swap instruments, but he also moved away from what might, in the cultural discourse of the day, be termed the 'subjectivity' of post-Romanticism. Instead he embraced the emotional neutrality of Neue Sachlichkeit.

Yet Hindemith was never so hard-line about his music, its tenor or its potential political message – much to the dismay of his compatriot Brecht (and to some extent Weill). Indeed context is, by its nature, a subjective matter. Hindemith clearly wanted to rise above such things. And by 1936, when he composed the three piano sonatas – featured on another new disc from Hyperion and performed by Markus Becker – debates about subjectivity and objectivity had been rendered null by much more serious events and threats to creativity. Hindemith had seen the writing on the wall in 1925:

I am firmly convinced that a big battle over new music will start in the next few years—the signs are already there. The need will be to prove whether or not the music of our day, including my own, is capable of survival. I of course believe firmly in it, but I also believe that the reproaches made against most modern music are only too well deserved. Enemies of the new music will use all possible means to attack it.

Staring down the barrel of that gun, Hindemith embarked on his opera Mathis der Maler in 1933 (the year Hitler rose to power). It was to prove his most searingly personal work, projecting the need to create at any cost, as well as realising how spinelessness his contemporaries were – all seen through the allegorical prism of the 16th-century painter Matthias Grünewald, who abandons art to fight in the Peasants’ War. The Symphony of the same name, premiered, much to the Nazis' annoyance in 1934 by Wilhelm Fürtwängler, draws its music from the opera and is the backbone to Hyperion's third disc of Hindemith's music. 

Listening to all three new recordings – having provided the liner notes for the orchestral disc, performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins – I realised that Hindemith's initial impetus in the 1920s and 30s may indeed have been to turn away from subjectivity towards a more modish objectivity, yet his music is so finely wrought, intellectual yet intelligible, that it transcends both this debate and the text-book imagery of fish-net tights and Metropolis-like crowds that is the visual prompt for so many interpretations of his time. 

True, Mathis der Maler was composed in that fetid hot-house, yet the warmth of its bold Alleluias, heard in the closing bars of the Symphony, reach far beyond the regime against which it sounded its criticism. Although Hindemith was named the ‘standard-bearer of musical decay’ at the 1938 Entartete Musik exhibition, his music (and its message) has the power to endure. Click here for more information about Hyperion's recordings of Hindemith's music. 

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