Symphonic Metamorphosis

One of the sad legacies for post-Nazi Germany was the emigration of its leading intellectuals and artists to foreign lands: Einstein, Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann, to name only a few. Paul Hindemith was once regarded as Germany’s—and perhaps Europe’s—finest composer/performer. Following early success as an instrumentalist, his fortunes as a composer waxed while those of the Weimar Republic waned; rampant poverty, violence, and political instability during the 1920s spawned Hindemith’s particular brand of acerbic, dissonant music. His modernism came under suspicion when the Nazis took power, and his works were eventually banned. In 1937 Hindemith went into exile rather than endure increasingly virulent attacks from the Third Reich’s official critics.

After a brief stay in Switzerland, Hindemith became professor of music theory at Yale (1941-53). His compositional style grew more tonal and accessible, and the works-in-exile were coveted by American orchestras. In 1943 he revised sketches for an abandoned ballet based on the music of C. M. von Weber (Hindemith mainly drew from Weber’s Op. 60 piano duets). The title “Symphonic Metamorphoses” is doubly resonant: updating Weber’s musical themes to the context of the mid 20th century, but also Hindemith’s reworking of his own material. The premiere occurred in New York City on January 20, 1944.

The first movement opens with a Brucknerian fanfare, while touches of folk song and dissonant woodwind trills evoke Mahler. Sectional repetition and tonal progressions help anchor the listener in familiar sonic territory. A quieter middle section, dominated by the winds, reinforces the movement’s east-of-Vienna appeal. Akin to Ravel’s Bolero, the second movement gradually passes a memorable oriental tune (pulled from Weber’s Turandot overture) to each family of instruments. We may also note Hindemith’s penchant for polyphony: a simultaneous juxtaposition of independent melodies. The center section of the movement, with material derived from the main theme, is given over to the brass and timpani. For some listeners the lyricism of the third movement will mark the composition’s spiritual core. The tonality and conventional phrase structure reinforces Hindemith’s popular, even cinematic, ambitions in this movement, but that is not to say that it fails as concert music of the highest caliber. The final movement, like the first, opens with a strident brass fanfare. Weber’s original funeral march is presented at double tempo, and the energy is infectious. The final cadences reveal what many movie composers learned from Hindemith (think of John Williams, perhaps). More “modernist” than Wagner, yet less experimental by far than Hindemith’s own earlier pieces, the sound of this movement—militaristic, exalted, tonal—epitomizes the composer’s aesthetic evolution from avant-garde to genial popularity.

(c) Jason Stell