More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

Listen to this:

Now listen to this:

Does anything strike you about the two?  They are actually the same.  The two pieces were written by the German composer Paul Hindemith in 1942 and they represent a deliberate choice which reflects a certain way of thinking about musical composition.  But to understand how we got here, it would be good to go back a couple hundred years.

It was impossible for any musician working within the German legacy (a legacy which still informs the classical training of today very deeply) to escape the incredible gravity of Johann Sebastian Bach.  You hear his name all the time in musical studies, don’t you?  You’re never that far away from hearing Bach’s name if you are involved with music in any way.  I find his admirers far-flung across diverse musical styles and modes of expression.  It seems that musicians simply cannot help but to admire Bach’s musicianship.  Why is this?  The answer is deep and complex, but I’m going to try to sum it up for you.

Like any young musician, as a child I had known of Bach.  I had even listened to much of his music.  I knew his name was regarded with an almost sacred reverence by my musical mentors, but I couldn’t have exactly told you why.  Once I started college and began to mature a little more, the attitudes I had encountered, and continued to, regarding the musical contributions of the great Bach began to come a bit more clearly into focus.  I started to have the experience I understood my mentors to have in listening to Bach.  It’s hard to explain, probably impossible, but the more you study, listen, and appreciate, the deeper you are drawn into his mystical world.  Events are…charged, and with a kind of energy that seems to draw its momentum from the fabric of the universe.  The decisions that placed the abundant notes in those pieces seem at once inevitable and astounding, as if there’s only one route to perfection and a human actually found it.  The music is constantly alive with a potency you would expect from that combination.  So much of Bach’s music feels this way, and shortly after his death other musicians began to sense this superhuman aura that was somehow largely neglected during his lifetime (see this post for a story about that).

In studying his life and personality one is struck with the sense that, while on one level Bach was a very practical and successful professional, on another, parallel, level he truly sensed he was writing for the source of all universal ideals, and that he knew it.  I think it’s the only way to explain his sensibility that guided his life, which exudes the quality of never needing to justify himself.  However the people he encountered reacted to him and his artistry, he always seemed so supremely convicted of his proper path, but never boastful.  And what results from this sensibility is a body of aural work that is always flawless in principle, never needlessly flamboyant, and frequently clever to an astonishing degree.  Bach is almost supreme in his powers of summation, like a god (but a recreative one, not a creator) who is able to see inside the entire flawed universe, warts and all, and reorder it to resonate with utter divine harmony.  He absorbed everything around him, spake it fresh, and then proceeded to catalog every possible chemical reaction in the universe through his encyclopedic contrapuntal works which are still peerless in their completion and craftsmanship.  Does that seem lofty?  Many musicians find themselves contending with Bach’s legacy, and that’s my best attempt at summing it up in 2015.  Try me again in a decade and it will probably be a bit clearer.

All subsequent musicians within the German legacy, and many outside of it, had no choice but to recon with the force of Bach’s will, and they did it in various ways.  But in Paul Hindemith I see a German musician who exhibited a sensibility with many points of confluence to Bach’s.  His language was rather different, owing to the stylistic development of two intervening centuries and the curious, perhaps prophetic place, he and some of his like-minded contemporaries found themselves during a most turbulent and menacing time in history.  But so much of what I described in Bach’s legacy seems to fit Hindemith as well, although we are still too close to his lifetime to judge his legacy.  Additionally, Hindemith’s output is…plagued…by the departure from pure tonal grammar which makes so much modern music difficult to evaluate as objectively as Common Practice music often is.

Hindemith, like Bach, seemed to be aware of all the musical currents around him, was able to quickly digest them, and then created theories to unify them.  He saw inside music in a way that was acutely insightful, and in his prolific works he reordered the musical universe as he saw fit, and unapologetically.  I sense it was difficult to keep up with him, so fluent was he in his analytical and creative technique.  But you feel that his composition choices were always guided by some deep conviction, much like Bach’s, in that you always sense a deep integrity underwriting everything and determining the best possible order for all of it, even if it doesn’t always make sense on the surface (which is probably a result of the style as much as anything).  Do his theories hold water?  Are his orderings of the chromatic scale and intervals really based on anything real and true beyond his own opinion?  It’s hard to say, but his strong principles and unwavering integrity will always convince me that it is worth another look, even if I may not quite see it yet.  

Hindemith ordered the tones of the chromatic scale and and all the intervals in his own way as he felt their gravity

And, also like Bach, he never felt the need to justify his sensibility.  Richard Strauss said to him: “Why do you write like that?  You have talent!” to which the young Hindemith replied “You write your music, maestro, and I’ll write mine!”  To Hindemith there were no sacred cows, and he exhibited a brusque confidence in the face of stuffy decorum.  But if he admired something it was undoubtedly genuine admiration.  His music is often filled with the digested fragments of other styles, from Debussy to ragtime, but always refracted through the his musically-cubist prism.  He took it all in, and perhaps, like Bach, whether he liked it is not the right question, but rather whether he found it worthy of his study.

I’m sure the music of Bach played prominently into shaping Hindemith’s aesthetics and philosophy.  He probably would have acknowledged this.  And sometimes his music does so explicitly.  Very famous is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which arranges crafty preludes and fugues in every single key.  Less well-known is Hindemith’s equivalent work, composed two centuries later, according to a similar scheme, Ludus Tonalis, which translates roughly to “Play of Tones”.  Written for solo keyboard, like Bach’s monumental collection, Ludus Tonalis arranges fugues and interludes according to Hindemith’s version of the chromatic scale.  It’s not a precise analogue to the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it shouldn’t be, because it is Hindemith’s piece, and not Bach’s.  The fugues and interludes traverse a vast array of different styles and characters, an affective and introspective journey over the course of an hour.

And then there’s the prelude and postlude which respectively draw us in and release us from the world of Ludus Tonalis.  As a pair, the prelude and postlude are also a nod to J.S. Bach; a different work, but just as encyclopedic, A Musical Offering, which develops every possible canonic and fugal expression of an angular theme given to Bach as a challenge by Frederick the Great.  In this great contrapuntal game, Bach delights in looking at the theme from all angles, backwards, upside down, inside out, and creates clever music for every arrangement.  See this post for more about that.  Hindemith follows suit, and the prelude and postlude of the Ludus Tonalis are precise retrograde inversions of one another.  What this means is that the postlude is the prelude note for note, but backwards and upside down.  And it makes music spoken by Hindemith’s uncompromising voice in both directions.
With this bold and clever stroke Hindemith secures his inheritance of Bach’s breathtaking intellectual musicianship.  Hindemith is not Bach; they lived in very different times and cultures and so were inevitably shaped by different forces, but their sensibilities clearly resonate with similar aims and outlooks.

—

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Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST! Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 3 – BONUS DOUBLE POST!  Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel and Nobilissima Visione by Paul Hindemith

Depending on where you look in the history Western music, “passacaglia”, or its frequently-encountered French version “passacaille”, may refer to an assortment of different but related musical phenomena.  In attempting to define the term, I long ago concluded that it is only really possible to list characteristic tendencies, and even then there are always exceptions.  But here are some things that tend to be true about passacaglias:

1. Like its close cousin, the chaconne, it is usually in triple meter, and usually a fast triple meter which feels almost like one beat per bar with a compound division.  If anything is nearly always true of movements labeled as passacaglias, it is this.  Oh, except for this one:

 

2. Passacaglias tend to be in minor keys, with a heavy character, often described as “ponderous”.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Even if passacaglias are not strictly tonal, especially in twentieth century examples, this is more or less true.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Well, maybe that’s subject to interpretation?  It certainly has a breadth and solemnity, even if it’s not exactly ponderous.

3. Passacaglias tend to be built by stringing together phrases, often called variations, of regular length, all built around some kind of repeating melodic figure.  Oh, except for this one:

 

Granted, you could say it’s more the chord progression that unifies the phrases of Handel’s example there, but usually when the unifying theme of the passacaglia variations is described it refers to a melody that is literally stated somewhere in the ensemble during each one, and it’s generally considered a mark of craftsmanship by critics to successfully pull that off.

It’s the third point that I most often find identified as the distinctive hallmark of the passacaglia, and it is that device which tends to help the best-known and most widely-respected examples of the genre stand out from the pack.

The earliest examples of this technique tend to see the recurring melodic phrase in the lowest voice, also known as the bass.  Sometimes this specific technique is known as a ground or ground bass.  One of the most famous examples of this can be found toward the end of Englishman Henry Purcell’s short opera Dido and Aeneas, written on an episode of Virgil’s Aeneid.  Shortly before Queen Dido expires out of heartsickness, she sings a plaintive lament about her death, a lyrical outpouring of drooping melody which is set above a recurring passacaglia-like bass ground:

 

The ground bass was a favorite technique of Purcell’s; his music is just peppered with repeating basslines of all styles and characters, and he was quite ingenious in composing nuanced and fascinating musical lines for the upper parts which leveraged the ground bass’ propulsive character while at the same time avoiding a slavish conformity to the phrase lengths happening below.

There is another famous passacaglia from the Baroque period which features this highly disciplined technique, although it twists the ground bass convention by moving the recurring phrase around within the texture; the repeating line is often in the bass, but frequently moves to the upper and middle voices also.  It is Bach’s great Passacaglia in c minor for organ:

 

Admired widely by fans of Bach’s music across all subsequent generations, I think it is probably Bach’s idea to moving the passacaglia ground around throughout the ensemble that enshrined the passacaglia within Western compositional technique as the rigorous, disciplined, and powerful exercise that it has come to be when written by subsequent composers.

Passacaglias largely fell out of favor during the Classical and Romantic eras, more or less replaced by the theme and variations technique, a comparable practice which better fit the virtuosic character of the musical sensibility that drove European art music during these periods, but as brainy composers began to delight more self-consciously in the intellectual rigor of past music, the passacaglia started to make a comeback.  Granted, you don’t hear them all the time, but many notable composers during the twentieth century have written at least one of them as part of a significant work, and when they appear they somehow manage to emanate antiquity and modern freshness in equal measure.

One example of which I am quite fond is the passacaglia from Paul Hindemith’s 1938 ballet about Saint Francis of Assisi, Nobilissima Visione.  In this movement, the finale of the ballet, Hindemith portrays the great holy man’s state of spiritual ecstasy, his sense of unity with God and all of creation, as the phrases of the passacaglia, written around the ever-present, stoic, 6-bar theme, build to a magnificently orchestrated climax.  In this work Hindemith really created an orchestral work which transcends the passacaglia discipline:

 

 

And so did Maurice Ravel, writing just before the onset of the First World War, for considerably different forces.  Ravel’s passacaglia is found in his Piano Trio, written for the standard instrumentation of violin, cello and piano, but shimmering with his unique and compelling approach to orchestration.  The third movement is built around a solemn, long-breathed 8-bar phrase, present somewhere in the texture during each variation, although Ravel does take liberties with it at certain points.  In customary passacaglia form we hear the triple meter subject (it is so slow that the meter seems ambiguous from just listening) in the lowest register of the piano.  It is then transferred from instrument to instrument in the succeeding variations, creating a pensive and reflective character throughout, cast in Ravel’s crystal clear and sensuously French orchestration and harmonies.  We even hear echoes of much more sentimental French voices like Chausson in some of the more thickly scored sections.  Like Hindemith’s monumental passacaglia from Nobilissima Vision, Ravel crafts a fluid musical movement which rises and recedes, cast in compelling and varied instrumental colors with each new iteration:

While the passacaglia seemed to suffer an identity crisis from its inception centuries ago, it proved immediately useful as an ideal vehicle for composers to cast a solemn, introspective spell over their listeners.  As musicians’ agreement of its textbook characteristics coalesced in more recent years, it has, and continues to, provide a challenging exercise in formal control and development of continuous variation, with the finest examples transcending the contrivances of their construction.

—

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Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

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Really Clever Music, Day 4 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…Really Clever Music!  All lovers of music respond to its mysterious ability to move them, often describing its effect as soul-deep.  Unlike any other art, music most directly communicates emotions and passions extremely convincingly, and that is why it is so loved.  But music works on another level as well, an intellectual one.  Due to its highly mathematical and systematic nature it can be created to satisfy and delight from an entirely different angle.  This angle is often missed in listening because it is usually much easier to see and comprehend this aspect through analysis and score study.  Every piece this week is written by a very clever composer who was able to craft a beautiful piece of music while, at the same time, manipulating the musical medium in a surprising way that may be discovered upon analysis, almost like an easter egg.

Really Clever Music, Day 4 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

Listen to this:

 

Now listen to this:

 

Does anything strike you about the two?  They are actually the same.  The two pieces were written by the German composer Paul Hindemith in 1942 and they represent a deliberate choice which reflects a certain way of thinking about musical composition.  But to understand how we got here, it would be good to go back a couple hundred years.

It was impossible for any musician working within the German legacy (a legacy which still informs the classical training of today very deeply) to escape the incredible gravity of Johann Sebastian Bach.  You hear his name all the time in musical studies, don’t you?  You’re never that far away from hearing Bach’s name if you are involved with music in any way.  I find his admirers far-flung across diverse musical styles and modes of expression.  It seems that musicians simply cannot help but to admire Bach’s musicianship.  Why is this?  The answer is deep and complex, but I’m going to try to sum it up for you.

Like any young musician, as a child I had known of Bach.  I had even listened to much of his music.  I knew his name was regarded with an almost sacred reverence by my musical mentors, but I couldn’t have exactly told you why.  Once I started college and began to mature a little more, the attitudes I had encountered, and continued to, regarding the musical contributions of the great Bach began to come a bit more clearly into focus.  I started to have the experience I understood my mentors to have in listening to Bach.  It’s hard to explain, probably impossible, but the more you study, listen, and appreciate, the deeper you are drawn into his mystical world.  Events are…charged, and with a kind of energy that seems to draw its momentum from the fabric of the universe.  The decisions that placed the abundant notes in those pieces seem at once inevitable and astounding, as if there’s only one route to perfection and a human actually found it.  The music is constantly alive with a potency you would expect from that combination.  So much of Bach’s music feels this way, and shortly after his death other musicians began to sense this superhuman aura that was somehow largely neglected during his lifetime (see this post for a story about that).

In studying his life and personality one is struck with the sense that, while on one level Bach was a very practical and successful professional, on another, parallel, level he truly sensed he was writing for the source of all universal ideals, and that he knew it.  I think it’s the only way to explain his sensibility that guided his life, which exudes the quality of never needing to justify himself.  However the people he encountered reacted to him and his artistry, he always seemed so supremely convicted of his proper path, but never boastful.  And what results from this sensibility is a body of aural work that is always flawless in principle, never needlessly flamboyant, and frequently clever to an astonishing degree.  Bach is almost supreme in his powers of summation, like a god (but a recreative one, not a creator) who is able to see inside the entire flawed universe, warts and all, and reorder it to resonate with utter divine harmony.  He absorbed everything around him, spake it fresh, and then proceeded to catalog every possible chemical reaction in the universe through his encyclopedic contrapuntal works which are still peerless in their completion and craftsmanship.  Does that seem lofty?  Many musicians find themselves contending with Bach’s legacy, and that’s my best attempt at summing it up in 2015.  Try me again in a decade and it will probably be a bit clearer.

All subsequent musicians within the German legacy, and many outside of it, had no choice but to recon with the force of Bach’s will, and they did it in various ways.  But in Paul Hindemith I see a German musician who exhibited a sensibility with many points of confluence to Bach’s.  His language was rather different, owing to the stylistic development of two intervening centuries and the curious, perhaps prophetic place, he and some of his like-minded contemporaries found themselves during a most turbulent and menacing time in history.  But so much of what I described in Bach’s legacy seems to fit Hindemith as well, although we are still too close to his lifetime to judge his legacy.  Additionally, Hindemith’s output is…plagued…by the departure from pure tonal grammar which makes so much modern music difficult to evaluate as objectively as Common Practice music often is.

Hindemith, like Bach, seemed to be aware of all the musical currents around him, was able to quickly digest them, and then created theories to unify them.  He saw inside music in a way that was acutely insightful, and in his prolific works he reordered the musical universe as he saw fit, and unapologetically.  I sense it was difficult to keep up with him, so fluent was he in his analytical and creative technique.  But you feel that his composition choices were always guided by some deep conviction, much like Bach’s, in that you always sense a deep integrity underwriting everything and determining the best possible order for all of it, even if it doesn’t always make sense on the surface (which is probably a result of the style as much as anything).  Do his theories hold water?  Are his orderings of the chromatic scale and intervals really based on anything real and true beyond his own opinion?  It’s hard to say, but his strong principles and unwavering integrity will always convince me that it is worth another look, even if I may not quite see it yet.  

Hindemith ordered the tones of the chromatic scale and and all the intervals in his own way as he felt their gravity

And, also like Bach, he never felt the need to justify his sensibility.  Richard Strauss said to him: “Why do you write like that?  You have talent!” to which the young Hindemith replied “You write your music, maestro, and I’ll write mine!”  To Hindemith there were no sacred cows, and he exhibited a brusque confidence in the face of stuffy decorum.  But if he admired something it was undoubtedly genuine admiration.  His music is often filled with the digested fragments of other styles, from Debussy to ragtime, but always refracted through the his musically-cubist prism.  He took it all in, and perhaps, like Bach, whether he liked it is not the right question, but rather whether he found it worthy of his study.

I’m sure the music of Bach played prominently into shaping Hindemith’s aesthetics and philosophy.  He probably would have acknowledged this.  And sometimes his music does so explicitly.  Very famous is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which arranges crafty preludes and fugues in every single key.  Less well-known is Hindemith’s equivalent work, composed two centuries later, according to a similar scheme, Ludus Tonalis, which translates roughly to “Play of Tones”.  Written for solo keyboard, like Bach’s monumental collection, Ludus Tonalis arranges fugues and interludes according to Hindemith’s version of the chromatic scale.  It’s not a precise analogue to the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it shouldn’t be, because it is Hindemith’s piece, and not Bach’s.  The fugues and interludes traverse a vast array of different styles and characters, an affective and introspective journey over the course of an hour.

And then there’s the prelude and postlude which respectively draw us in and release us from the world of Ludus Tonalis.  As a pair, the prelude and postlude are also a nod to J.S. Bach; a different work, but just as encyclopedic, A Musical Offering, which develops every possible canonic and fugal expression of an angular theme given to Bach as a challenge by Frederick the Great.  In this great contrapuntal game, Bach delights in looking at the theme from all angles, backwards, upside down, inside out, and creates clever music for every arrangement.  See this post for more about that.  Hindemith follows suit, and the prelude and postlude of the Ludus Tonalis are precise retrograde inversions of one another.  What this means is that the postlude is the prelude note for note, but backwards and upside down.  And it makes music spoken by Hindemith’s uncompromising voice in both directions.
With this bold and clever stroke Hindemith secures his inheritance of Bach’s breathtaking intellectual musicianship.  Hindemith is not Bach; they lived in very different times and cultures and so were inevitably shaped by different forces, but their sensibilities clearly resonate with similar aims and outlooks.

—

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“New” Music, Day 5 – Overture from The News of the Day by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…“New” Music!  Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new.  But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing!  The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point.  Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness.  This week we explore some such examples.

“New” Music, Day 5 – Overture from The News of the Day by Paul Hindemith

I heard an amazing story about Paul Hindemith once.  It was a story that summed up and seemed to confirm all of the rumors and legends about his peerless musical facility.  It was a story about this piece:

Isn’t that a plaintive and uncomfortable little number?  It kind of gets under your skin and makes you feel as though something isn’t quite right.  Hindemith seems to know exactly what the milky alto of the english horn is capable of, and the piano moves the whimsical little portrait along, almost below the threshold of perception.  The story I hear about this piece came from Samuel Adler, a most accomplished composer and teacher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  He is still with us, fortunately, and continues to revise his very popular textbook about orchestration:

The story goes like this: It must have been 1941, which would have been shortly after Hindemith emigrated to the United States.  Hindemith was teaching a composition seminar, or something like that, probably at Harvard University, since that is where Adler studied with him.  The room was small, square, and perimetered by chalkboards with staves printed on them (a pretty common fixture in music school classrooms).  From what Adler says, Hindemith was kind of sparky, easily set off into grand reprimands or demonstrations, but always in good fun.  Apparently something set him off and he sprang up, notating his entire sonata for english horn and piano on the staves that ran around the walls of the room.  Adler, who was sort of his secretary, took it down, and it was sent to Hindemith’s publisher later that week.  I place that story in 1941 because that’s the date of the english horn sonata’s publication, but it seems like it ought to be a little later on given Adler’s timeline.  Inconsistencies aside, I believe it.

If anyone could have done that, it was Hindemith, a massively intelligent musician from the twentieth century whose uncomfortable nature, in terms of both personality and music, caused him to be branded as entartete by the Third Reich, and so he came to America where he was able to contribute significantly to music and music education.

Do you get a sense of Hindemith’s overall gestalt from that music and its amazing story?  Brilliant and calculating, uncompromising and uncomfortable, but with a warmth and good humor toward those whom he found worthy, and a general stoicism that cares not a lick what others opine.  These are all of the qualities I imagine to be true about Hindemith based on the stories I have read and the music I have heard.  I treasure his music, even if it is not for everyone.  It is often where I turn to gain perspective in a world that does not make sense.  Hindemith seemed to intuitively know that and poke fun at it, even if it doesn’t always seem that funny.  But sometimes it does!  Because he did have a sense of humor, and his music sometimes does too, even if it is not exactly what he is known for.

His 1929 comic opera The News of the Day is a mile-a-minute satire that seems to spring from the Dadaist sensibility that dominated German culture between the World Wars.  Dada was absurd and surreal, nearly to the point of nihilism.  A movement which showed the world upside down and dissolving.  The News of the Day, while not pure Dada, certainly reflects that perspective.  The main couple, Eduard and Laura, have had enough of married life and decide to divorce (the opening of the opera finds them throwing crockery at each other’s heads).  A scandalous affair at a hotel becomes a major story broken when the shameless paparazzi media picks them up (hence the title, “News of the Day”), turning them into celebrities, with publicity managers swooping in and engaging them to recreate their arguments on stage every night for a paying audience.  Through all of this, Laura and Eduard’s conflict settles down and they recommit to their marriage.

This plot would have felt most congruent with the societal strain experienced by so many Germans during the interwar period.  Old institutions were becoming visibly unstable and unreliable and I’m sure marriage was no exception, even if The News of the Day does end with the mending of Eduard and Laura’s.  It is still madcap, ridiculous, highly cynical, and focused on the topsy-turvy treatment of a hallowed institution.

Hindemith is in fine form setting this crazy libretto.  It is a thorough farce from beginning to end, with the music seeming to caricature real life.  Just listening to it gives the hearer the impression of topsy-turvydom, life out of balance, a warped and gleefully pessimistic perspective.  Hindemith stirs in elements of jazz and cabaret into his typically bracing and spiky style.  And at times it feels as though this score could be lifted from a Looney Toons short.  Here is the overture:

 

Zany stuff, isn’t it?  And not the type of affective pallette that I imagine most listeners usually associate with Paul Hindemith, but there you have it.  I particularly love that steadily building ostinato at the end that brings the overture to its climax.  It’s like a Rossini crescendo, but Dada-ized!

I find the writing throughout the opera to be fantastically fresh, inventive, and tightly written, thoroughly speaking the perspective that is begun in the overture.  You can listen to it here if you are interested:

 

 

The News of the Day has the dubious distinction for Hindemith of arousing the ire of the Third Reich’s cultural censorship.  Certainly his general manner of music-making did not fit well into the whitewashed Romantic image that the Nazis strove to uphold and advance in the art of the Reich, but Hindemith’s opera gave them the unwelcome opportunity to pick at his decadence specifically due to the inclusion of a particularly indecent scene.  During the hotel episode, Laura sings an aria in the bathtub, a sort of ode to modern plumbing.  There exist accounts of der Fuhrer himself storming out of a theater in the middle a production of that scene during a production staged in 1933, just as his quest for power was gaining significant momentum.  Thanks in large part to this incident Paul Hindemith’s relationship with the regime through the 1930s was uneasy at best.  In 1940 he finally emigrated to the United States, by way of Switzerland, and not a moment too soon for consideration of his wife who had Jewish ancestry, even if she herself was a practicing Catholic.

When most people think of Hindemith, I doubt whether comedy is the primary association that accompanies the picture, but as The News of the Day illustrates, he had those chops too.  Hindemith must have been, throughout his life, an inexhaustible supply of musical insight, technique, and creativity, able to apply his gifts appropriately to any situation.

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