Notes from a Master

He began his career as a talented prankster. In his famous opera Neues vom Tage (News of the Day), he reversed all the conventional numbers; a hate duet replaced a love duet and a divorce ensemble took the place of a wedding march. He also wrote a one-act opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi, designed it for performance by Burmese marionettes, and worked in a parody of Tristan that outraged loyal Wagnerians. Since those high old days of the 1920s, Paul Hindemith has turned more serious, and his enormous output (including such masterpieces as the opera Mathis der Maler, the symphonies Symphonische Taenze and Die Harmonic der Welt) has established him as Germany's greatest living composer. But, at 67, he has not lost his ironic touch. He was still exercising it last week as he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Der Mainzer Umzug (The Mainz Procession), a new work that may rank with his very best.

Quirky Themes. Commissioned by the city of Mainz to celebrate its 2,000th anniversary, Hindemith's new cantata is scored for three vocal soloists, a chorus and orchestra, and is based on the Fastnacht, or pre-Lenten festival, for which Mainz is famous. The text, partly by Hindemith and partly by Playwright Carl Zuckmayer, has the soprano and tenor soloists singing only in Mainzer dialect while the baritone sings in high German. Soprano and tenor are supposed to be watching an imaginary Fastnacht procession passing before them as they face the audience, and in the roles of low comics exchange opinions with the baritone about the history of Mainz. The exchange gives Hindemith the chance to let fly satirical shafts at some favorite targets. Thus, when Gutenberg and the printing press are mentioned, soloists and chorus sing:

If they had known what journalism is,

Belles lettres, sport reporting, art and music criticism,

Book fairs, reported sensations, scandal stories,

The latest murders, piquant accident chronicles, slanderous pamphlets,

Things a pen hardly dares to write,

They would have let it lie.

The varied dialects made the singers hard to understand, but Hindemith's music is a model of clarity. Its expansive, flowing melodies were developed by the chorus, with the soloists assigned more angular parts. Less lofty in style than much of what Hindemith has written recently, it is tautly constructed, as responsive to the text's moods as litmus paper to acid. It is, as Hindemith himself said, a "light, gay piece"--but the gaiety is that of a master.

Facility & Wonder. When Hindemith conducted last week's concert he was playing an increasingly familiar role. The podium so appeals to him that he now conducts about 40 concerts a year. But he turns out music as profusely as ever: Darius Milhaud is one of the few living composers whose output rivals his. On one occasion, when the commission for a new work arrived perilously close to the scheduled performance date, Hindemith composed the instrumental parts directly on duplicating stencils, then conducted the score from memory. When King George V of England died, Hindemith composed his Trauermusik for the British Broadcasting Corporation in one day, conducted its premiere the day after. But for all his facility, his works remain a wonder of technique--as original in their structure and complex in their texture as any music now being written.

Hindemith still lives in Switzerland, where he settled after leaving his Yale teaching post in 1953. And he remains a composer's composer. "He simply produces music," a sometime musician named Albert Einstein once said wonderingly of him, "as a tree bears fruit."

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