Portrait of the artist as a young woman
As mentioned hitherto, I am playing the Hindemith Sonata again, but have been struggling (despite at least the happy ebb of suicidal feelings) to recapture the passion I had for the piece when I was 20. Below is an essay I wrote at the time. Mature(r) reflections to follow.
Hindemith’s 1939 harp sonata is a crucial work. Even before an examination of its wider intellectual and cultural context, it is in itself a great work by a great composer, where the harp sails through previously unchartered musical and technical waters. The careful design of its three movements (church architecture; children playing outside the church; song at the church’s altar) is serious, moving and beautifully executed, with a tight melodic and harmonic control. More widely, the sonata’s individual merits are part of a grand musical philosophy. At once menschlich and divine, music is a transcendent and spiritual essence, nonetheless sounded by human hands. Perhaps, as such, it can bring about healing in an age shattered by two World Wars. The interweaving of the sonata, its time, and its place in Hindemith’s oeuvre make it difficult to ignore any of them, if the sonata is to be given justice.
Hindemith was in his mid-forties by 1939. He had just clarified his musical opinions in his important harmony book, The Craft of Musical Composition (1937), and had made his political opinions known in anti-Nazi outbursts, which lead to a radio ban on his works in 1934 (and the harp sonata could not be performed for the first time until 1945). Thus the harp sonata was composed at a time when Hindemith firstly had arrived at a mature, clear sense of what he was writing music for, and secondly was hampered from so doing by political events.
The Craft of Musical Composition advocates first and foremost a musical or harmonic clarity and coherence, as a means to echo the harmony present in Nature; once Nature’s harmony is expressed, the musician then can hope to give voice to a cosmic order that would otherwise be closed to human beings. The physical act of hearing these perfectly ordered harmonies, Hindemith argues, makes a divine sphere real, as beyond doubt it is made flesh: “A true musician believes only in what he hears…who even in what seems his blindest groping never loses the true path entirely from view.”1 Thus music becomes a triumphant bridge between man and God. This is an idea that goes back as far as the Orfeo myth itself, but Hindemith’s account as musically definite as it is philosophical, painstakingly detailing exactly how to craft the tonal clarity that makes fine music. The harp sonata’s tripartite church design gains significance in the light of these theories, as do the beautifully severe harmonies and the precise melodic lines: the severity, the seriousness, represents an overall artistic belief that ambitiously pushes music as high as it will go. Everything is there for a wider reason. The technical difficulty of the second movement, for example, exists to show how human bodies can train themselves to perform feats beyond the reach of ordinary people, but only, crucially, through continual discipline. Similarly, Hindemith bothered to write such a major work for a somewhat marginal instrument because he wanted to prove he could write for all instruments: “a technical exercise for the great coup I hope to bring off next spring: Der Harmonie der Welt.”2
Another key aspect of the harp sonata is its Germanness. The German style is audible all the way through. Interestingly, the Lied at the start of the third movement does not translate well, with a twee quality in English that is wholly absent in the German, and which rests uneasily with the deeply spiritual subject matter (of a poet’s harp – the familiar symbol of the divine expressed through art – playing on above the altar after the man’s death) and music. The Nazis objected to Hindemith’s music ostensibly because he “showed signs of an un-German attitude [which] disqualifies him from taking part in the movement’s cultural reclamation work.”3 The “un-German attitude” was primarily Hindemith’s disinclination to give up his Jewish friends or anti-Nazi political convictions. The public success of the Mathis der Mahler Symphony, which juxtaposes the artist Mathias’ social conscience with that of his politician employer, irritated the Nazis further. That Hindemith of all composers be accused of failing Germany is sadly ironic: as Willy Strecker writes, on Mathis der Mahler, “This can become the German opera. The figure of Grünewald, who went his own way in spite of being misunderstood…is of course a reflection of himself [Hindemith], and that is why it interests him so tremendously.”4 In similar national vein, Mathis der Mahler significantly displays for the first time Hindemith’s growing interest in folksong, to give his music more popular relevance. By the time Hindemith was exiled to Switzerland in 1939, then, he suffered an unavoidable “conflict between his love for the land of his origin and his abhorrence of its present political direction.”5
In
summary, the harp sonata can be placed against a backdrop of high
musical ideals, which combine concern for music’s divine power with
an intensely human interest, and more specifically a popular and a
German one, a Volkmusik for a turbulent time. It must be
remembered that it is a middle-period work. Post-war, Hindemith was
invited back from his exile to Germany, but bitterly decided not to
go, feeling that his country was using him only to restore the
shattered musical scene: “For all of them one is simply a toy
brick which they are trying in their egoism to force into the
position which suits them best in order to get the most favourable
results for themselves.”6
If Hindemith was bruised after the effort of making a new life for
himself in America, betrayed by the Germany he had loved, there also
lurked an artistic insecurity behind his jovial manner and
dictatorial teaching style. In 1951, after he was awarded the Bach
prize, Hindemith wrote in his letter of thanks that “Perhaps one
should regard such prizes only as an acknowledgement of good
intentions and not as reward for achievement. As such they would be
due to all who genuinely strive to reach beyond themselves.” Since
the 1930s, he had been planning his “great coup”, the meisterwerk
that was to be Der Harmonie der Welt. As the title displays,
it was to be the apotheosis of all that Hindemith first outlined in
The Craft of Musical Composition; also, of A Composer’s
World: Horizons and Limitations (1950). He writes on 25th
September 1939: “I see it as a very large and very serious work…a
mixture of ordinary domestic life, momentous world events (Reichstag,
Thirty Years War) and cosmic matters…I hope I can bring it off as I
have it in my head.”
By
1951, it still had not been written. When it was performed first in
the Prinzregententheater on 11th August 1957 it was
unenthusiastically received. The suggestion that Hindemith’s most
personally significant work failed gains momentum in comparison to
the less confident and more reflective tone of A Composer’s
World. In this his other major book, Hindemith cites St
Augustine and Boethius to justify his belief in music’s active
moral effect on the world. Augustine, he argues, views music as part
of a higher order which only gains its moral meaning when it is
processed in human minds: “to turn our souls towards everything
noble, superhuman and ideal.” Boethius, in contrast, has music as
“the active partner; our mind is a passive receiver and is
impressed and influenced by the power music exerts.” Hindemith
would have the musician combine both approaches, the most completely
to realise a musical synthesis of human and divine. But even as he
tries to do it, so is he aware that he is grappling with opposing
viewpoints:
“The fact that very few masterworks display this congruence of vision and materialization shows us that even the individual possessing the greatest gift and the highest technical skill is not always able to reach this goal. A tremendous effort is needed in order to work towards it, not merely a technical effort, but moral effort, too – the effort to subject all considerations of technique, style and purpose to this one ideal congruence. Again, it is the aspiration towards the ideal unity of the Augustinian and the Boethian attitude towards music which must ennoble our endeavours and which on the other hand pushes, as we know, the final goal into an utter remoteness close to inaccessibility.”
What Hindemith unflichingly realises, is that the task he has set himself of using music as a way to connect humanity and eternity is essential, because otherwise music’s full power would not be used - but it is also ultimately doomed to failure, because music has to be created by fallible human beings. In the last act of Der Harmonie der Welt, where Johannes Kepler has died, disillusioned with his task of rescuing humanity after the thirty years’ war, the final tableau admits that such failure is inevitable because Kepler is only human. Does this mean, then, that the harp sonata finally is depressing, a grand design that can never succeed? That it is of the middle period argues a more upbeat interpretation. At the time it was written, Hindemith was in his prime, a mature man of forty-four, but without the sadder wisdom of old age. The harp sonata believes in what it sets out to do, and in the power that its music unlocks: it is a vibrant and aspirational work. The first movement is strong, vigorous, lofty, like the church architecture it describes; the third’s warm chords and soft tenderness echoes the Lied’s implicit prayer for an immortal art, not one subject to human frailty. Even if it later proves inevitable that Hindemith’s hopes for music fail, that does not mean that it is not worth trying; indeed, to be properly heroic is not to give up after all hope has been lost. Der Harmonie’s final tableau remarks: “But what their humble spirit perceived, dreaming, feeling, believing, praying, and their readiness to serve it, raised them far above the ways of Man.” Thus the second movement is deliberately technically difficult, so cannot always be perfect in performance, but that the harpist continually attempts to make it so elevates both musician and music. The human artistic condition lies in the attempt to create perfection, a heroic failure perhaps but one that elevates us none the less. It is a tenet that underpins the music of Britten and the libretti of Chester Kallman and W H Auden; it disturbs Yeats but stimulates his most profound lyricism. As Auden wrote, "Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance."
1 The Craft of Musical Composition.
2 Hindemith to Strecker, 1939.
3 Bernhard Rust, spokesman for Goebbels’ Reichskulturkammer (1934).
4 Strecker, letter to his brother Ludwig, 4th August 1933.
5 Geoffrey Skelton: Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music (London, 1975).
6 Hindemith, letter to Strecker, 15th July 1946.
