PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

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

Overture to Neues vom Tage

Hindemith composed his comic opera in 1928 and 1929. The premiere was given in Berlin, at the Kroll Theater, on June 8, 1929. The overture calls for an orchestra consisting of flute and two piccolos, oboe and english horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet and clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, one horn, two trumpets, two trombones and tuba, percussion, and strings. Performance time is approximately eight minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first performances of Hindemith's Overture to News of the Day were given on subscription concerts at Orchestra Hall on March 20 and 21, 1931, with Frederick Stock conducting.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Hindemith was destined to be branded as a decadent composer, largely because Hitler had once walked out of a performance of Hindemith's opera Neues vom Tage (News of the day), scandalized by the sight of a singing from her bathtub. (For the record, she was merely extolling the joys of modern plumbing.) "It is obvious that [it] shocked the Führer greatly," Hindemith wrote to his publisher late in 1934. "I shall write him a letter . . . in which I shall ask him to convince himself to the contrary." But in the meantime, Joseph Goebbels spoke out publicly, if inaccurately, about the horror of modern composers "allowing naked women to appear on the stage in obscene scenes in a bathtub, making a mockery of the female sex." Hindemith wasn't mentioned by name, but the message was clear. He made a powerful statement on the value of art in his opera , about the sixteenth-century German painter Mathias Grünewald, who was himself torn between his commitment to art and a life of political activism, but the work was attacked and eventually banned. After Hindemith figured prominently in the exhibition of Entartete Musik (Degenerate music) in 1938, he had little choice but to leave his native Germany for good. (He came to the United States and began teaching at Yale in 1940; he became an American citizen in 1946.)

Although Neues vom Tage, which premiered in Berlin in June of 1929, is the work that first put Hindemith in jeopardy, its musical style is far from radical. The opera is a satire on modern times, focusing on the uneasy relationship between the privacy of married life and a sensationalistic press that is hungry for the news of the day. In the overture, Hindemith quickly sets the scene for the high-jinks that will later follow— including a "divorce duet," a parody of German cabaret, and, of course, the notorious bathtub aria. The overture is dazzlingly scored, often jazzy, and full of wit and high spirits—it typifies a world unaware of the shadow that would soon fall over German music.

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

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