Paul Hindemith: Sonate für Bratsche und Klavier op. 11 Nr. 4,
based on the text of the edition: Paul Hindemith. Sämtliche Werke edited by Peter Cahn and Luitgard Schader. Schott: Mainz 2016 (ED 1976)
The musical text of this individual issue of Hindemith‘s best known and most popular viola sonata takes the philological insights of the historical-critical Complete Edition into consideration.
Paul Hindemith. Complete Works
Vol. I, 12: Ballets I
edited by Luitgard Schader, commissioned by the Fondation Hindemith,
Mainz: Schott Music, 2016
The latest volume of the Hindemith Complete Edition contains two dance pieces from completely different creative periods. The vitality of the 1922 dance piece Der Dämon (The Demon), Op. 28, a work for flute, clarinet, horn, trumpet, piano and string quintet, is exemplary of the “infernal high spirits” which the music critic Paul Bekker had already attributed to the Kammermusik Nr. 1, Op. 24 No. 1 premiered during the same year. The ballet Nobilissima Visione was composed in 1938 in collaboration with the choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine. The publication of the original version for small orchestra in this volume makes possible a comparison with the expanded 1939 version for large orchestra published in Volume I,13 of the Hindemith Complete Edition.
Giselher Schubert: Paul Hindemith
Mainz: Schott, 2016
The compact monograph on the life and work of Paul Hindemith published in 1981 by Rowalt-Verlag is now available in a new edition examined and updated by the author.
Ina Knoth: Hindemiths Kompositionsprozess Die Harmonie der Welt:
Ambivalenz als Rhetorik der Ernüchterung
Mainz: Schott 2016
Die Harmonie der Welt is considered to be Hindemith’s opus summum. This is the title of his opera premiered in 1957; its protagonist is modelled on the astronomer, theologian and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). It is also the title of a three-movement Symphony composed in 1951, in which the musical material of the opera is anticipated. In her study – also a dissertation submitted to Oldenburg University in 2014 – the musicologist Ina Knoth completely processes the sources for the first time, thus reconstructing eleven different versions of the opera. Die Harmonie der Welt is thus not understood as “work(s)”, but as a single, exceedingly variable and open “compositional process” with which Hindemith intensively occupied himself from the late 1930s onward, musically as well as in terms of philosophy and literature.
The new production by Dietrich Hilsdorf at the Linz Provincial Theatre (premiere on 8 April 2017) will provide an opportunity to become acquainted with the opera Die Harmonie der Welt, which was last heard on an operatic stage in 1969.