Paul
Hindemith (1895-1963)
Ludus
Tonalis (1942) - Studies in Counterpoint, TonalOrganisation and Piano Playing
Kleine
Klaviermusik (Leichte Fünftonstücke), Op. 45 No. 4 (1929)
Paul
Hindemith was born at Hanau, near Frankfurt, in 1895, the son of a house-painter.
He had violin lessons as a child, from 1908 as a pupil of Adolf Rebner, whose
quartet he later joined as second violin, and after the war as a viola-player.
His other musical studies were at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, followed
in 1915 by appointment as leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He made a
name for hirnself as a composer in the years immediately after the war,
particularly through the Donaueschingen Festival. He established with the
violinist Licco Amar the Amar-Hindemith Quartet, which won a reputation for its
performances of conternporary music, later forming a string trio with
colleagues at the Berlin Musikhochschule, where, in 1927, he was appointed
professor of composition.
After
1933 Hindemith found himself increasingly out of sympathy with the newly
established National Socialist régime in Germany and in 1934 his work was
banned, leading to a strong protest frorn Furtwängler, who had conducted the
symphony Mathis der Maler in the same year, and was now, for his temerity,
deprived of his position at the Berlin Opera. Hindemith moved in 1936 to
Turkey, where he was invited to establish a national system of musical
education, in accordance with the cultural policy initiated by Kemal Atatürk.
After a brief stay in Switzerland, he moved in 1937 to the United States, with
a teaching appointment at Yale, which he held until 1953. He spent his final
years in Switzerland.
As
a composer Hindemith was enormously prolific and versatile. His name is
associated particularly with Gebrauchsmusik, music of immediate practical use,
whether for professional or amateur performer. This was in contrast to the
notion of music as essentially the self-expression of a composer, a
self-indulgence he abjured. As a performer he was above all a string-player. He
was an excellent violinist, but also one of the most outstanding viola-players
of his time.
Hindemith
wrote his Ludus Tonalis in America in the autumn of 1942, providing a modern
pendant to Bach's Well-tempered Clavier and a musical and practical realisation
of his theories of tonalorganisation that he had expounded in his Unterweisung
im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition). The sub-title Studies in
Counterpoint, Tonal Organisation and Piano Playing is certainly intended as a
reminiscence of Bach, bringing to mind the four parts of the Klavierübung, with
the Partitas, the Goldberg Variations and so on, the studies not to be
understood as finger exercises but as exercises in musical expression. The work
offers a series of three-voice fugues in the tonalities ofthe twelve notes of
the chromaticscale, but not, as he had originally planned, like Bach's
Well-tempered Clavier, in the order of the ascending notes of the chromatic
scale but in the order of Reihe 1 (Row 1 ), that Hindemith had developed in his
Unterweisung, with the degree of relationship between notes dependent on a
given starting note. Between the fugues Hindemith places Interludes, in the
tonality either of the preceding or following fugue, or modulating between the
two. The interludes are in the form of character-pieces, including a Pastorale,
a March and a Waltz, while the fugues demonstrate different polyphonic
techniques. The first Fugue in C, for example, is a triple fugue, that is a
fugue with three subjects, first announced separately and then played four
times simultaneously. Fugue No. 3 in F continues from the middle as a mirror
fugue, cancrizans ('crab-like', played backwards) note for note as it returns
to the beginning. No. 4 is a double fugue with a gentier second subject later
combined with the first. No. 5 in E, a kind of Gigue, and No. 6 in E flat,
marked "tranquillo", combine the basic form of the subject with its
inversion; No. 9 in B flat demonstrates in scherzando fash ion almost all the
possible transmutations of a fugal subject - inversion, cancrizans, inversion
cancrizans and augmentation. No. 10 in D flat introduces from the middle the
exact inversion of the first part. No. 11 is in fact a two-voice fugue with a
kind of basso continuo, using the device of canon. No. 12, finally, is a fugue
with a stretto exposition, the subject enter ing in the second voice before its
completion by the first voice; at the end of both sections there is a kind of
refrain with the simple sincerity of folk-music, bidding farewell, as the whole
work draws to a close. The cycle of fugues is introduced and concluded by a
Praeludium and Postludium, the second formed by turning the Praeludium upside
down and reading it backwards. In solving the technical problems he posed
himself, Hindemith creat ed not a dry exercise but a work of considerable
imagination. Intellectual achievement and sheer delight in playing are shown
not to be mutually exclusive. The Ludus is a graphic example of the composer's
delight in the fantastic, offered to his wife, born under the sign of Leo, as a
birthday present. He illustrated the work with coloured pencil, among other
things drawing a lion for each entry of the subject of the fugues, and for each
of the twelve a different kind of lion, according to the character of the
music, originally published in a limited edition but providing an instructive
formal analysis of the music.
Among
the pieces that Hindemith wrote for amateurs was the Sing- und Spielmusik für
Liebhaber und Musikfreunde, Op. 45, of 1928/29, a collection of vocal and
instrumental pieces. The fourth of these is Kleine Klaviermusik. The sub-title
Leichte Fünftonstücke (Easy Five-note Pieces) indicates that the twelve
epigrammatic short pieces of varied character, all notated in the G clef, lie
within the interval of a fifth and can be played without any change of hand
position.
Hans
Petermandl
The
pianist Hans Petermandl was born in Linz in 1933 and studied under Bruno
Seidlhofer at the Vienna Musikhochschule, where he was awarded the Bösendorfer
Prize. His career has involved him in a par!icular concentration on the work of
Bach, with two performances of the complete 48 Preludes and Fugues for Austrian
Radio, and performances of Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Hindemith and
contemporary composers. He was soloist in Hindemith's Piano Concerto under the
composer's direction. He has won considerable success in Vienna and elsewhere
with his performances of the complete cycle of Schubert Piano Sonatas and
concert-tours have included not only Europe but also Japan and the United
States of America. He has appeared as a soloist under conductors of the
greatest distinction and in chamber music recitals.