Paul Hindemith

Violist of the Amar Quartet and concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera orchestra while still very young, Paul Hindemith knew instruments from the inside, and it tells in every bar he wrote — he eventually produced a sonata for very nearly all of them. Born in Hanau in 1895 and trained at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, he was by the 1920s a leading voice of the German avant-garde, moving from the provocations of his early one-act operas towards Gebrauchsmusik: music made for particular players, schools and occasions rather than for posterity. The Kammermusik series, the song cycle Das Marienleben and the opera Cardillac show the contrapuntal mind at work; Mathis der Maler, built around Grünewald and his altarpiece, asks what an artist owes the world in a time of catastrophe. Conflict with the Nazi regime cost him his position in Germany. He went first to Switzerland and then to the United States, where he taught at Yale for more than a decade and set out his theory in The Craft of Musical Composition. He returned to Europe after the war and died in Frankfurt in 1963. Before the Amar Quartet, founded in 1921, he played in Adolph Rebner's quartet, and from 1927 he taught composition at the Berlin Academy of Music; the years 1935 to 1937 took him to Ankara, where he laid out a system of music education for Turkey and taught at the conservatory. Ludus tonalis, written in America in 1942, answered Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier two hundred years on, and the late opera Die Harmonie der Welt turns on the astronomer Kepler. His last premiere was a Mass for unaccompanied choir, given in Vienna on 12 November 1963.