Hindemith-Jahrbuch / Annales Hindemith XLIV/2015
This year‘s Hindemith-Jahrbuch opens with a review of the festivities on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt in November 2014. In her festival lecture, Professor Dr. Susanne Popp, Director of the Max Reger Institute, provides an overview of the diverse and manifold tasks of composers‘ institutes and their perception by the wider public. Alongside collecting materials and making them accessible, she considers the mediation of the cultural assets looked after by the institutes to be the task most relevant for the future - a task frequently neglected in the past.
In his contribution, Wilhelm Sinkovicz vehemently contradicts the verdicts/prejudices of Theodor Adorno concerning Hindemith‘s music, which coarsely pidgeon-hole the composer as a dry neoclassicist or a backward-looking formalist. By contrast, he refers to compositions of Hindemith which do indeed convey „expressive„ messages or contain factors of „mood“ or „atmosphere“.
Ulrike Kienzle examines an early work of Hindemith within the framework of her studies concerning the history of the Frankfurt Mozart Foundation. As a student at Dr. Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt, Hindemith applied for a stipend from this Frankfurt institution in 1914 with a string quartet movement (the first movement of the String Quartet No. 1 in C major, Op. 2). The jury, however, preferred another candidate. This first movement shows how the young Hindemith endeavoured to break with traditional generic forms in order to offer individual solutions.
Nina Goslar, film editor for the television channel ARTE, was significantly involved in the synchronisation of music and film in the first mountaineering film In Sturm und Eis / Im Kampf mit dem Berg by Arnold Fanck in 2012/2013. Hindemith was present when the editor cut the film material in August 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, and spontaneously offered to write the music to the film. The film material that has been handed down, however, does not „align“ with the score. The film and music can be „adapted“, however, with the help of the indications of minutes in Hindemith‘s autograph manuscript. Ms. Goslar depicts her experiences with this Sisyphos task with great clarity.
For the 2000th anniversary of the City of Mainz in June 1962, Paul Hindemith and Carl Zuckmayer collaborated on a libretto, in the Rhenish dialect, that allowed stations in the history of Mainz to pass in review. The libretto is by turns serious and humorous, in the manner of a Mardi Gras parade. Katharina Heinius reports on the origins, structure and reception of this very rarely performed work.
Immediately after the Nazis seized power, it became obvious that the new ruling powers also wanted to rigorously establish their ideas in cultural politics. Artists who had already been defamed by the National Socialist press during the late 1920s, such as Kurt Weill, Bert Brecht and Paul Hindemith, chose different strategies in order to remain artistically active. With the help of contemporary reminiscences, Ulrich Fischer depicts individual situations, showing with what complexity the plethora of contradictory motives for action took shape for each individual.
Heinz-Jürgen Winkler