PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Paul Hindemith Born November 16, 1895, Hanau, Germany. Died December 28, 1963, Frankfurt, Germany.

Trauermusik for Viola and Strings

Hindemith was one of the few great composers who might have made a big career as a performer. At nineteen, he was named concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera; after the war, he switched to viola and was known (along with William Primrose) as one of the important violists of the 1920s and 1930s. He gave the first performance of William Walton's Viola Concerto in 1929. Like his fellow composer- performers Bartók, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky―to name only a few active on the concert circuit at the time―Hindemith wrote music for himself to play. This was not only practical and savvy from a public relations standpoint, but it bolstered his own self-image as the age-old composer and performer rolled into one―the total musician.

In all, Hindemith wrote more than a dozen viola pieces for himself to play. On November 14, 1935, he gave the first performance of Der Schwanendreher, scored for viola and orchestra and named for an old German folk song about the kitchen lackey assigned to turn the swan on the roasting spit―a work that would take Hindemith around the world. (He played it for his Chicago Symphony debut on March 3, 1938.) In January 1936, he went to London for a performance there on the twenty-second. But Hindemith arrived on the nineteenth to find a nation saddened by the news that its king was dying. The next day, at a few minutes before midnight, King George V of England was dead.

Hindemith immediately recognized the inappropriateness of his jolly swan music. It was suggested that he substitute something more suitable that he could play with the orchestra, but nothing could be found. And so Hindemith agreed to write a piece himself―with little more than a day and a half before the performance. As the composer recalled, "I was assigned a studio, some copyists were stoked up, and then, from 11 to 5, I did some heavy mourning." In the same letter―signed "P.H., Manufacturer of custom-made products"―Hindemith relates how the music was rehearsed the next day and played publicly that night, right on schedule, "with great devotion and feeling."

The Trauermusik has four short movements; in performance, it unfolds like an unbroken span of varying moods. Hindemith ends with a sober setting of the Bach chorale he knew as "Für deinen Thron tret ich hiermit" (Thus I stand before your throne)―"very suitable for kings," he commented―which, to his surprise, most English schoolchildren learned as "All People that on Earth Do Dwell" (it is also known as Old One Hundredth).

Throughout the Trauermusik, there are echoes of the recently completed Mathis der Maler and of the Schwanendreher it was designed to replace. Hindemith was not apologetic: "at that speed I couldn't set out on a voyage of discovery"; he knew that few composers could have done as well under the circumstances, and he rightly suspected that the music would outlive the occasion.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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