Preface

Summary

Like many readers, I came to know Paul Hindemith through one of his instrumental sonatas. In the gap between sixth form and university, I would visit trumpet professor Iaan Wilson at the Royal Academy of Music in London, who introduced me to Hindemith's Sonata for Trumpet and Piano. Our lessons occurred during a vital part of my technical and musical development, although – again, similarly to many readers – I look back on my endeavour with mixed feelings. I remember it being hard work – I had to improve my physical level to play the first movement convincingly – and, when it came to putting the trumpet part with the piano, it took me many attempts before I was able to execute a coherent and accurate rendition. However, it was not unrealistic. After practice I soon came to enjoy the work and appreciate the technical platform it offered. This highlights, I believe, the position that these duo sonatas often take. They are encountered regularly along the road to securing instrumental technique and are particularly common in examination, audition and competition environments. This does not necessarily make them popular – but undoubtedly, they are familiar to many. I was also to encounter his Elementary Training for Musicians whilst an undergraduate student at King's College London, guided by the now prominent British composer Joseph Phibbs. The case of Hindemith's music and writing is therefore of sentimental value, both due to the time in my life I first encountered it and the formative role it played in my development as a musician.

But this is to form a narrow image of Hindemith's musical legacy. Though works such as the instrumental sonatas have found a natural place in the repertoire – indeed, for many instruments they remain as some of the key works for recitals, examinations, auditions and competitions – they offer only one side of Hindemith's creative personality. This is also the man who wrote the ingenious Ludus Tonalis; the song cycle Das Marienleben; the jazztinged Suite 1922; and the radical, scandalous one-act opera Sancta Susanna. He was also an essential pioneer of the early music movement in North America through the establishment of the Yale Collegium Musicum; one of the most highly regarded proponents of the viola in the early twentieth century; and, for a time, seen as the future of German modernism.