7 - The Hindemith Legacy

Summary

All the young composers are writing like Hindemith.

—Copland, 1947

The present generation judges him harshly – is, in fact, downright unfriendly. Hindemith is no longer cited among the top men of our time; it is undeniable that a severe downgrading is in process.

—Copland, 1967

Music history has not been kind to Hindemith. Heralded by some in his own lifetime as the future of German contemporary music, and later chosen as one of the New Grove Dictionary's ‘Modern Masters’, he has begun to drift to the margins of music history. This is regrettable given both the quality of his music and the significant number of performances he continues to receive – particularly of his chamber works. He was never innovative enough for the avant-garde, and yet for others he still falls into the category of a ‘contemporary’ composer. History, it seems, does not know quite how to remember him.

Relevantly, many twentieth-century composers and theorists were reliant on their students to introduce and champion their work to a wider community. Schenker and Schoenberg are notable examples, whose theoretical work was posthumously disseminated and built up by faithful students Ernst Oster, Felix Salzer and Oswald Jonas, and Leonard Stein and Gerald Strang respectively.

Their enthusiasm and dedication precipitated the international understanding of Schenker's and Schoenberg's work in the second half of the twentieth century. Hindemith was not as fortunate as either. For a time, America brought him notable success, which reached its peak in the late 1940s. The editor of Time magazine wrote in 1948 that ‘few living composers have ever had so much of their music played in one week. Everyone seemed to burst out playing the knotty dissonant music of Paul Hindemith’. Moreover, Hindemith received fourteen commissions during his time in the USA, more than any other composer during the same period. However a dramatic devaluation of Hindemith's music and theory occurred during the 1950s, provoking Copland to reverse his implicit criticism of Hindemith's music influence in the 1940s to a defence of his worth. This chapter explores this general shift in attitude and its consequences for the wider reception of Hindemith's music and theory.