Notes on the Program

By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair

Ragtime (Well-Tempered), for Large Orchestra

Symphony, Mathis der Maler
Paul Hindemith

P aul Hindemith sowed plenty of wild oats

during his apprentice years as a com-
poser. In 1921, the year of Ragtime (Well-
his teaching position at the Hochschule für
Musik in Berlin.
By 1938 Hindemith’s situation had grown
Tempered), he included a fire siren and a so dire that he left for Switzerland, and in
canister of sand in the instrumentation for 1940 he proceeded to the United States. That
his Kammermusik No. 1, and provoked scan- autumn he joined the faculty of Yale Univer-
dal by parodying both the words and music sity, where he remained until 1953 as profes-
of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in his lurid sor of music theory and director of the Yale
comic opera Das Nusch-Nuschi. By 1929 he Collegium Musicum (the early-music ensem-
had managed to spotlight an apparently ble). He became an American citizen in 1946,
nude soprano at center-stage in his opera
Neues vom Tage. During that decade he was
also immersed in many other musical activ- In Short
ities: playing viola in the Amar String Quar-
Born: November 16, 1895, in Hanau, near
tet, which championed new music along
Frankfurt, Germany
with the classics; serving on the program
committee of the Donaueschingen Festival, Died: December 28, 1963, in Frankfurt
a hotbed of the latest sounds; embarking on Works composed and premiered: Ragtime
a lifelong fascination with early music (mas- (Well-Tempered), composed 1921, incorporating
tering the Baroque-era viola d’amore); even a theme from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue
creating some of the first repertoire in the in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier,
incipient field of electronic music. Book One (ca. 1720–22); premiered March 21,
1987, in Berlin, by the Radio-Symphonie-
However, the years following 1932 proved
Orchester Berlin, Gerd Albrecht, conductor.
difficult for Hindemith. He did not immedi-
Symphony, Mathis der Maler, composed
ately comprehend the threat posed by the
1933–34; premiered March 12, 1934, in
rise of the National Socialist Party in Germa- Berlin, by the Berlin Philharmonic, Wilhelm
ny. Apparently assuming it would be a short- Furtwängler, conductor
lived development, he went on expressing
New York Philharmonic premieres and
his personal anti-Nazi views and performing
most recent performances: these perfor-
with Jewish colleagues, failing to recognize mances mark the first of Ragtime (Well-
that his own wife’s part-Jewish background Tempered), as well as its New York Premiere;
might quash his career. In November 1934 Symphony, Mathis der Maler, premiered
the Kulturgemeinde, an independent orga- October 4, 1934, Otto Klemperer, conductor;
nization that served as artistic guardian for most recently played, October 22, 2002, in
the Nazis, effected a boycott on all perfor- Hong Kong, Lorin Maazel, conductor
mances of his music (claiming it reeked of Estimated durations: Ragtime (Well-
“cultural Bolshevism”), and in January 1935 Tempered), ca. 4 minutes; Symphony, Mathis
he was placed on a leave of absence from de Maler, ca. 25 minutes
NOVEMBER 2019 | 25
and the next year he returned for a visit to a or the sixth finger. Play this piece fero-
much-changed Europe. He remained a Euro- ciously, but always very strict in rhythm,
pean at heart, and in 1951 he accepted an offer like a machine. Consider the piano here as
to teach at the University of Zurich, splitting an interesting kind of percussion instru-
his time between that school and Yale until ment and treat it accordingly.
1953, when he settled in Switzerland for good.
But those tribulations lay ahead in the Those instructions might similarly serve
early 1920s, when Hindemith was eagerly another ragtime he had produced a year
experimenting with the wealth of musical earlier, the Ragtime (Well-Tempered) played
styles available to open-minded composers, in this concert. It was an off-the-cuff piece
including the jazz that was causing such a that Hindemith wrote in versions for piano
stir in America. His Suite 1922, which re- four-hands and for full orchestra. He made
mains in the active piano repertoire, is a no pretense about its importance. “Can you
keyboard suite analogous to those of the late also use Fox-trots, Boston, Rags, and other
Baroque, but with modern dances replac- kitsch?” he had asked his publisher in 1920.
ing the courantes, gigues, and other courtly “If I cannot think of any decent music, I al-
dances of the earlier era. It concludes with ways write such things.” This is a naughty
a movement titled Ragtime, to which he af- musical prank in which jazzy modernism of
fixed these “directions for use”: a sarcastic sort serves as the framework in
which the subject of the C-minor Fugue from
Forget everything you have learned in J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One
your piano lessons. Don’t worry whether is buffeted about — the musically sacred in
you should play D-sharp with the fourth surroundings most profane.

Hindemith on Bach

Hindemith held Johann Sebastian Bach in the highest

regard and often performed his music, but he protested
against treating the Leipzig master like a fly in amber. In
1952 he published a little book about Bach, based on a
speech he had delivered at a 1950 commemoration of the
composer in Hamburg. He complained that biographers
had so deified Bach that “he became the banal figure
which meets our eyes every day: a man in a full-skirted
coat, with a wig he never lays by.” But thanks to recent
research, he argued, “the mythical being is beginning
slowly to change back into a human being.”
In 1921 Hindemith had imagined that his own Ragtime
(Well-Tempered) suggested how Bach might embrace
the 20th century:

Do you think that Bach is turning in his grave? On the

contrary: if Bach had been alive today he might very
well have invented the shimmy or at least incorporated it
in respectable music. And perhaps, in doing so, he might
have used a theme from the Well-Tempered Clavier by a
Hindemith in 1923 composer who had Bach’s standing in his eyes.

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In the wake of the Nazi upsurge, Hindemith oblivion for centuries when his work was
composed a series of vocal works setting mel- rediscovered in the 1920s. Since then, his
ancholy, even despairing, texts. Examples Isenheim Altarpiece, painted for a monas-
of such “inner emigration” can been found tery in Alsace but now residing in the Musée
in the careers of a number of similarly disaf- d’Unterlinden in Colmar, has become one of
fected German artists at that time, and many the most famous images in all of art.
works were not proffered for performance Hindemith was deeply touched by
until years later. His opera Mathis der Maler Grünewald’s situation, sensing its relevance
towers among them. Its title character — to the Germany of his own time. From July
Mathis the Painter — is the German artist 1933 through July 1935 he crafted the libretto
known as Matthias (or Mathis) Grünewald and music for his opera, which evolved into a
(ca. 1470–1528). Like Hindemith, Grünewald three-hour work comprising a prologue and
lived in troubled times: his sympathy with seven ensuing scenes. It was in the midst of
uprisings by German peasants cost him this project that Hindemith’s standing sud-
the support of his patron, the Cardinal- denly crashed, leading to the blacklisting of
Archbishop of Mainz. He had rested in his music and the impossibility of producing

Sources and Inspirations

In a program essay for the premiere of his opera Mathis der Maler, Hindemith wrote:

No one expects works from musicians and playwrights that satisfy the scholarly require-
ments of an art historian; but they are surely permitted what painters of historical figures
and events have always been allowed: to show what history has taught them and the signif-
icance they have found in its events. If I have
tried to present on the stage what I have read
of the few remaining pieces of information re-
garding the life of Mathis Gothart Neithardt
[a.k.a Grünewald] and the connection to
his works which this information suggested
to me, it is because I cannot think of a more
lively, more problematic, human, artistically
touching and, in the best sense, more dramat-
ic figure …. Mathis placed himself at the dis-
posal of the powerful machinery of the state
and the church and was apparently able to
withstand the pressures of these institutions
…. The abysses of doubt and despair through
which he passed must have been deep …. [He
was] a man who went to his grave having
finally found a balance in his soul between
bliss and abomination.

Detail from the Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert) scene of

Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, which inspired the first
movement of Hindemith’s symphony

NOVEMBER 2019 | 27
the opera in Frankfurt, as had been planned. scene, serves as an interlude in the op-
It would first be seen in Switzerland, at the era’s final tableau. The music builds from
Zurich Stadttheater, in 1948. the flute’s tender melody at the opening
In 1933, the conductor Wilhelm Furt- through a procession of increasing power
wängler asked Hindemith to write a piece he to a solemn but grand climax (again with a
could premiere with the Berlin Philharmon- firm brass presence); and then it recedes to
ic. The composer responded with the idea of quiet contemplation.
creating a four-movement Mathis der Maler The Versuchung des heiligen Antonius
orchestral suite, employing symphonic pass- (Temptation of St. Anthony) music occurs as
ages that he had already sketched, or intended to a sequence of hallucinations in Scene Six of
write for his opera. In the end, he decided to the opera, during which the painter imag-
limit the movements to three, each depicting ines himself to be the hermit St. Anthony,
a different section of the Isenheim Altarpiece. confronted by a series of characters from
The Symphony, Mathis der Maler was one of Mathis’s past. “Ubi eras bone Jhesu / ubi
the composer’s last successes before the tide eras, quare non affuisti / ut sanares vulnera
turned against him, but it was a resounding meas?” Hindemith has inscribed at the head
one, and he himself led the Berlin Philhar- of this finale, words transcribed from the al-
monic in a recording for the German Tele- tarpiece itself: “Where were you, good Jesus,
funken label shortly after the 1934 premiere. where were you? Why have you not come to
The first movement, Engelkonzert (An- heal my wounds?” St. Anthony’s triumphant
gelic Concert), is inspired by a scene of the fate is mirrored in a concluding chorale pre-
altarpiece in which the Virgin and Child are lude on the chant “Lauda Sion Salvatorem”
being serenaded by a host of angels playing (“Praise the Savior, O Zion”).
fanciful instruments. It begins with a sol-
emn introduction during which much use Instrumentation: Ragtime (Well-Tempered)
is made of an ancient German folk song, Es calls for two piccolos and flute, two oboes,
sungen drei Engel ein’ süssen Gesang. Mahler two clarinets and E-flat clarinet, two
had drawn on the same folk song in the cho- bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three
ral fifth movement of his Third Symphony, trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum,
taking its text from the famous 19th-century bass drum, cymbals, xylophone, and
German poetic collection Des Knaben Wun- strings. Symphony, Mathis der Maler em-
derhorn. Here one encounters Hindemith’s ploys two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two
love of brass timbres, as in the chorale-like oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four
intonations that follow the fugal develop- horns, two trumpets, three trombones,
ment in this opening movement. tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum,
The second movement, based on Grüne- cymbals, small cymbals, triangle, orchestra
wald’s Grablegung (Entombment) altarpiece bells, and strings.

28 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC