Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith (1859-1963) was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, and conductor. Born in Hanau, Germany on the 16th November 1895, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered the Hoch'sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main where he studied conducting, composition and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles, supporting himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy outfits. He led the Frankfurt Opera orchestra from 1915 to 1923 and played in the Rebner string quartet in 1921 in which he played second violin, and later the viola. In 1929 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe. In 1922, some of his pieces were heard in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. From 1927 he taught composition at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and in the 1930s he made several visits to Ankara where he led the task of reorganising Turkish music education. Towards the end of the 1930s, he made several tours of America as a viola and viola d'amore soloist. Despite protests from the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, his music was condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis, and in 1940 he emigrated to the U.S.A. At the same time that he was codifying his musical language, his teaching began to be affected by his theories. At this time he taught primarily at Yale University where he had such notable pupils as Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Harold Shapero, and Ruth Schonthal. During this time he also held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard, from which the book A Composer's World was extracted. He became an American citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe in 1953, living in Zürich and teaching at the University there. Towards the end of his life he began to conduct more. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962. Hindemith died in Frankfurt am Main on the 28th December 1963 from acute pancreatitis.