Notes for: July 29, 2014
Paul Hindemith was the “renaissance man” of 20th century music. Active in both Germany and the United States, he was a professional violinist and violist; a competent pianist, clarinetist and bassoonist; a respected conductor, and, of course, a leading composer. He wrote several books and scholarly articles, including a highly influential theoretical textbook, the Craft of Musical Composition. And he taught composition at a number of leading universities, including an 11-year stint at Yale.
Hindemith’s teaching career began in 1927 when he was appointed a professor of composition at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. In 1934, the Nazis launched a campaign against him for his membership in an “international group” of atonal composers, his association with Jews, and his parody of a Bavarian military march heard at Nazi rallies. In 1938 he left Germany, writing a friend, “There are only two things worth aiming for: good music and a clear conscience, and both of these things are now being taken care of.” After a two-year stay in Switzerland, he came to the United States for the position at Yale.
Over a composing career of 50 years, Hindemith experimented with most of the musical styles that characterized the first half of the 20th century. At one time or another, he favored dissonant counterpoint; atonality and the 12-tone system developed by Arnold Schoenberg; a return to the Classsical forms, and his own brand of gebrauschsmusik or “utility music” – that is, music written for performance by school groups and community music organizations.
In the early 1920s, Hindemith ventured into the new field of musical expressionism. This was a term borrowed from painting, used to identify a group of artists working in Vienna in the early 20th century. In their vivid and disturbing paintings, these “expressionists” aimed to express their innermost feelings, thoughts, and secret fears, in fantastic visions of the subconscious mind.
At first musical expressionism was an exaggeration of late Romanticism in which composers poured into their music the most intense emotional expressiveness. With time, they began to join forces with expressionists in the theater, literature and the fine arts, dwelling on the morbid, the neurotic and the gruesome. To express this restructuring of reality, a new style of music emerged characterized by extremely dissonant harmonies, frenzied melodies with wild, jagged leaps; violent explosive contrasts, and instruments playing harshly and at the extremes of their ranges.
In 1922, Hindemith made his boldest venture into musical expressionism – The Demon, a Ballet-Pantomime scored for a unique soloists’ ensemble of flute, clarinet, horn, trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and piano. Composed for the dancer Nini Willenz, The Demon was first performed in Darmstadt in December 1923. Other performances followed in Europe and the United States, but the work is better known today for its spirited and colorful music.
The work of expressionistic author and critic Max Krell, The Demon is a tale of brutal subjugation through violence and sexual dominance. It consists of 14 brief dances, the first and last of which are musically identical. In the first dance, the Demon displays his fearsome strength. In the last, he dances in solitary triumph gloating over his destruction of two sisters. In the intervening dances, he has seduced one of the sisters and imprisoned her in chains. The other he has forced to dance not as a human being but as a beaten animal.
For so tortured a tale Hindemith composed some of his most inventive music. Wisely, he did not try to depict the story’s violence or sadism in musically graphic terms. He focused instead on setting the mood of each dance and, through varied rhythmic patterns and deft instrumentation, creating contrasts of mood among them.
Thus, the score derives much of its propulsion from the use of ostinato – the insistent repetition of motives and chords. Hindemith treats the ensemble as a group of solo instruments, experimenting with novel combinations of sound and making technical demands on its players. And although the harmonic language is tonal, he compulsively seasons the score with dissonance as instrumental lines clash with one another.
In the opening Dance of the Demon, the driving, repetitive patterns of the music, with the instruments mostly playing together, contrasts with the more lyrical and soloistic Dance with Colored Ribbons. In the latter dance, the Demon’s approach is heralded by the clarinet, which often represents the ballet’s title character.
In the Dance of Frightened Swallows we hear in the music the sisters’ attempts to escape, but in the following Poison Dance they are overcome, as if drugged, with the music again marked by ostinato patterns. The Demon’s choice of one sister as his victim is announced by the solo flute.
In the menacing Dance of Sorrows, unison strings and pounding piano show the Demon’s power over the sisters. In the ensuing Passacaglia on the Dance of Demons, the theme appears in the low strings with the clarinet above, with the piano, horn and trumpet joining in.
Scene Two opens with an anguished Dance of Grief and Longing. In the following three dances, the full ensemble sings a mock-majestic hymn of homage to the Demon. In the Child’s Dance, the mocking instrument is the clarinet contrasted with a lyrical string interlude. The Cloak Dance is characterized by a sensuous theme for the strings, joined once again by the flute and clarinet with rippling figures on the piano. In the Orchid Dance, rich slow strings suggest the intense scent of the flower itself.
As the whole ensemble and the mood of menace returns, there is a trumpet call and we have reached Red Frenzy with strings in driving unison, the winds in raucous counterpoint and the piano providing ominous reiterated chords. The trumpet, in brazen triumph, takes the lead in the Dance of Brutality, while in the Dance of the Beaten Animal, plaintive strings and heavy piano chords convey the dancer’s humiliation. The ballet closes with a reprise of the opening dance, the Demon triumphant.