Hindemith, at the age of eleven, played the viola in the theater and in the moving-picture house; when he was thirteen, he was a viola virtuoso, and he now plays in public his own concertos for that instrument. When he was twenty, he was first concert master of the Frankfort opera house. His teachers in composition were Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfort. He is the viola player in the Amar Quartet (Licco Amar, Walter Casper, Paul Hindemith, and Maurits Frank—in 1926 his brother Rudolf was the violoncellist).
Apropos of a performance of one of his works, in Berlin, the late Adolf Weissmann wrote in a letter to the Christian Science Monitor: “Promising indeed among the young German composers is Paul Hindemith. More than promising he is not yet. For the viola player Paul Hindemith, travelling with the Amar Quartet through half Europe, has seldom time enough to work carefully. The greater part of his compositions were created in the railway car. Is it, therefore, to be wondered at that their principal virtue lies in their rhythm? The rhythm of the rolling car is, apparently, blended with the rhythm springing from within. It is always threatening to outrun all the other values of what he writes. For that these values exist cannot be denied.”
A foreign correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, having heard one of his compositions, wrote: “It was all rather an exhilarating nightmare, as if Hindemith had been attempting to prove the theorem of Pythagoras in terms of parallelograms, which is amusing, but utterly absurd.”
It has been said by A. Machabey that Hindemith has been influenced in turn by Wagner, Brahms—“an influence still felt”; Richard Strauss; Max Reger, who attracted him by his ingenuity and freedom from elementary technic; Stravinsky, who made himself felt after the war; and finally by the theatrical surroundings in which he lives. “He is opposed to post-romanticism. Not being able to escape from romanticism in his youth, today he seems to be completely stripped of it. Freed from the despotism of a text, from the preëstablished plan of programme music, from obedience to the caprices and emphasis of sentiment, music in itself suffices.... The reaction against romanticism is doubled by a democratic spirit which was general in Germany after the war.” Therefore he has had many supporters, who welcomed, “besides this new spirit, an unexpected technic, unusual polyphony and instrumentation, in which one found a profound synthesis of primordial rhythms, tonalities enriched and extended by Schönberg and Hauer, economical and rational groupings of jazz.” Then his compositions are so varied: chamber music for the ultra-fastidious; melodies for amateurs; dramatic works for opera-goers; orchestral pieces for frequenters of concerts; he has written for débutantes and children; for the cinema, marionettes, mechanical pianos, brass bands. Work has followed work with an amazing rapidity.
ARTHUR
HONNEGER
(Born at Havre, France, on March 10, 1892)
“PACIFIC 231,” ORCHESTRAL MOVEMENT
Some say that Honegger had no business to summon a locomotive engine for inspiration. No doubt this music of Honegger’s is “clever,” but cleverness in music quickly palls. Louis Antoine Jullien years ago in this country excited wild enthusiasm by his Firemen’s Quadrille, in which a conflagration, the bells, the rush of the firemen, the squirting and the shout of the foreman, “Wash her, Thirteen!” were graphically portrayed.
But there is majestic poetry in great machines, even in railway engines. One of Turner’s most striking pictures is the one depicting a hare running madly across a viaduct with a pursuing locomotive in rain and mist. What was the most poetic thing of the Philadelphia exposition of 1876? The superb Corliss engine, epic in strength and grandeur. Walt Whitman, Kipling, and others have found inspiration in a locomotive; why reproach a composer for attempting to express “the visual impression and the physical sensation” of it? One may like or dislike Pacific 231, but it is something more than a musical joke; it was not merely devised for sensational effect.
