Old Pros, New Works

German-born Composer Paul Hindemith, 61, and French-born Composer Darius Milhaud, 65, both of whom have lived and taught in the U.S. for long stretches, are furiously prolific writers of serious music. Between them, so far, they have published more than 500 works. Last week, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, the two tireless pros conducted their latest compositions.

Musical Chronicle. Hindemith's was the more ambitious work--a five-act opera entitled The Harmony of the World, premiered in Munich at the city's Opera Festival. It was his first opera since Mathis der Maler (1938). The libretto, put together by Composer Hindemith himself, dealt with a familiar theme: the sensitive thinker who lives and dies a lonely, misunderstood man in an unquiet age. The hero: Astronomer Johann Kepler (1571-1630). The age: the eve and early stages of the 30 Years' War. The rambling musical chronicle, covering two decades and skipping about among five cities, opened with predictions of doom surrounding the great comet of 1607. It moved on to alternating glimpses of military conquest and its dark human underside, e.g., Germany's famed General Wallenstein (hero of the 30 Years' War) at the start of his tumultuous career, Scientist Kepler's superstitious mother shown digging for her dead husband's skull to make a charmed goblet. In contrasting scenes, Hindemith poised Kepler's visions of universal harmony against the madness of a society slipping into war. Kepler dies disillusioned, but in a final and preposterous apotheosis Hindemith has the opera's principle characters reappear in space as figures representing the planets, accompanied by others carrying the signs of the zodiac and representing the Milky Way.

Librettist Hindemith's book might be confused and at times even silly, but Composer Hindemith's contribution was another matter. From the start, when flutes and oboes whistled high and remote as a reminder of the opera's celestial theme, the score was richly varied, full of impressively moving themes stitched together with great formal skill. As for the audience, more than anything else they seemed to feel awe for the flailing, Buddha-faced little man on the podium, ablaze with musical ideas.

Fugal Serenade. Milhaud's new work, given at the Aspen (Colo.) Music Festival and entitled Aspen Serenade, was written as "a little contribution which I am happy to make" to the festival's "magnificent virtuosi." Milhaud, often confined to a wheelchair with arthritis, leaned on two walking sticks as he made his way to a chair on the orange-colored podium. He conducted seated, his leonine head nodding to the music's arresting rhythms. The five movements proved to be characteristically light in spirit, thick in instrumentation, and aglow with bright tonal colors.

Because Milhaud was anxious to give each of nine instrumentalists a challenging score, the work is perhaps the most difficult to play and to follow of any Milhaud has written. In the last movement, Milhaud has a fugue for strings and a fugue for woodwinds going at the same time, with a trumpet chorale keeping them company. The sense of the music was of nine virtuosi playing together in a tight fabric in which each one flirts with supremacy but never truly dominates. The style is reminiscent of his five symphonies for small orchestra (1917-22), but it is vastly more complex, for like Hindemith, Milhaud is still searching. "It is always important," says Composer Milhaud, "to return to a certain period with 40 years of research and maturity."

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