In Conversation with Christoph Eschenbach
Maestro Eschenbach, how far back do your first encounters with Hindemith‘s music go?
At the age of fourteen I conducted a recording of Hindemith’s musical play for children Wir bauen eine Stadt for DGG. And as a young man, I even experienced Hindemith as a conductor in person: in 1960 he conducted the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg on the occasion of his 65th birthday; the programme included his Symphony “Die Harmonie der Welt” and Jeu des Cartes by Stravinsky. I still remember the small, somewhat stocky figure on the podium … of course one cannot rank him as one of the truly great conductors of his time, but he was one whom the orchestral musicians respected and who achieved thoroughly solid work. This can be heard very well on his extant recordings.
You have remained faithful to the music of Paul Hindemith for many decades …
… and that was not so simple during my student years, in the 1960s. In those days Hindemith was sent into a kind of spiritual exile – once again, after the Nazi period the second time – by the influential music philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno. He had his special ideas concerning music and his own taste, which he wanted to impose on his students. He succeeded in this to a large extent until – an irony of fate – his fall was brought about by his own students. Hindemith was not welcome in the intellectual atmosphere of that time. We as students suffered from this and it was really not easy to swim counter to this mainstream.
Which pieces by Hindemith occupied you at that time?
At that time, I first became acquainted with piano music of Hindemith: I studied the three piano sonatas and performed some of them publicly. Later, when I was artistic director of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, I was thrilled to play three of the sonatas for brass instruments: the Trumpet Sonata, the Tuba Sonata and the Trombone Sonata – magnificent, crazy pieces! In this way, Hindemith always remained familiar to me during the course of my life as a musician, today of course mainly through conducting. Unfortunately, I have only a little time for chamber music these days, so some of my wishes concerning Hindemith must remain dreams …
What are those wishes?
One of my greatest wishes would be to learn and rehearse Marienleben with a soprano. This song cycle to poems of Rainer Maria Rilke is another masterpiece of Hindemith, music with an incredible depth. But I don’t know if I will succeed in that, for my time is very limited through my numerous orchestral obligations. Both the early version of 1923 and the revised version of 1948 are highly demanding works for both soprano and pianist, and one must work on them for a long time.
What do you experience when you would like to place works of Hindemith on your concert programmes?
The stigma surrounding Hindemith placed in the world by Adorno is unfortunately still effective. Both in Europe and in the United States, I continue to find that organisers shy away from placing Hindemith on their programme, primarily because they’re afraid that the audience will stay away. I am fighting to change that: each time the orchestral musicians as well as the audience react to this music with enthusiasm. For this reason, I can only encourage all organisers to be more courageous as regards programming Hindemith. He is, after all, the greatest German composer of the twentieth century.
What do you appreciate in his music?
The word “academic” is often mentioned in connection with Hindemith – a misleading prejudice that causes many people to have reservations towards Hindemith’s music. The truth is that it is simply extremely well made, and especially the slow movements contain an incredible emotional force. Just think of the slow movement of the Symphony in E-flat or the “Burial” in the Symphony “Mathis der Maler”. In these movements one also clearly senses Hindemith’s relationship to Bruckner, whom he greatly admired and whose symphonies he often conducted.
Hindemith’s works have been part of your repertoire as a conductor for many years – what were your strongest impressions?
I conducted an excellent production of the opera Mathis der Maler in Paris in 2010, with Matthias Goerne in the title role. There is a wonderful piece that is very dear to my heart: When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d: A Requiem “For those we love” which Hindemith composed in the USA in 1946. I performed it three years ago with the National Symphony Orchestra – unbelievably, it was the Washington premiere! Although this choral work, called the “Lilac Requiem”, is a genuinely US-American piece in many respects: its text is based on the poetic cycle by the same name by the great national poet Walt Whitman, in which he mourns the murder of Abraham Lincoln. For his part, Hindemith wrote it to commemorate the death of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and originally wanted to entitle it “An American Requiem”.
What plans do you have for the future?
I will perform the “Lilac Requiem” in early 2018 with the NDR Symphony Orchestra in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, with a CD recording being produced simultaneously. This recording will be the next in an entire series of CDs with works by Hindemith that I have released over the past years. One of these, the recording with Midori as soloist in Hindemith‘s Violin Concerto (1939) as well as the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by C. M. von Weber (1943) and the Konzertmusik für Streichorchester und Blechbläser, Op. 50 (1930), even won a Grammy.
I would also like to do the opera Cardillac and I still hope to have the opportunity to do this. And I am arranging for the recording of the seven concertante Kammermusiken – these, too, are works with great power of attraction.
Thank you, Maestro Eschenbach!
Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt