Welt —have fallen into total obscurity.
The reason for Hindemith’s sudden loss of reputation was a mystery to me; I had always considered his craftsmanship if not his inspiration to be first-rate. When I saw that the Harmony of the World symphony, almost never played, would be performed in our anonymous city, I told Cascadilla that I wanted to write a story for that week on how fame was gained and lost in the world of music. He thought that subject might be racy enough to interest the tone-deaf citizens of leafy and peaceful Maple Street, where no one is famous, if I made sure the story contained “the human element.”
I read up on Hindemith, played his piano music, and listened to the recordings. I slowly found the music to be technically astute but emotionallyarid, as if some problem of purely local interest kept the composer’s gaze safely below the horizon. Technocratic and oddly timid, his work reminded me of a model train chugging through a tiny town inhabited only by models of people. In fact, Hindemith did have a lifelong obsession with train sets: in Berlin, his collection took up three rooms, and the composer wrote elaborate timetables so that the toys wouldn’t collide.
But if Hindemith had a technocrat’s intelligence, he also believed in the necessity of universal participation in musical activities. Listening was not enough. Even nonmusical citizens could learn to sing and play, and he wrote music expressly for this purpose. He seemed to have known that passive, drugged listening was a side effect of totalitarian environments and that elitist composers such as Schoenberg were engaged in antisocial Faustian projects that would bewilder and ultimately infuriate most audiences, leaving them isolated and thus eager to be drugged by a musical superman.
As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day, therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, using a text by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of De Harmonice Mundi . This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called Harmony of the World . Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.
It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.
For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity:I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different-colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.
She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. They don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”
I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top
The reason for Hindemith’s sudden loss of reputation was a mystery to me; I had always considered his craftsmanship if not his inspiration to be first-rate. When I saw that the Harmony of the World symphony, almost never played, would be performed in our anonymous city, I told Cascadilla that I wanted to write a story for that week on how fame was gained and lost in the world of music. He thought that subject might be racy enough to interest the tone-deaf citizens of leafy and peaceful Maple Street, where no one is famous, if I made sure the story contained “the human element.”
I read up on Hindemith, played his piano music, and listened to the recordings. I slowly found the music to be technically astute but emotionallyarid, as if some problem of purely local interest kept the composer’s gaze safely below the horizon. Technocratic and oddly timid, his work reminded me of a model train chugging through a tiny town inhabited only by models of people. In fact, Hindemith did have a lifelong obsession with train sets: in Berlin, his collection took up three rooms, and the composer wrote elaborate timetables so that the toys wouldn’t collide.
But if Hindemith had a technocrat’s intelligence, he also believed in the necessity of universal participation in musical activities. Listening was not enough. Even nonmusical citizens could learn to sing and play, and he wrote music expressly for this purpose. He seemed to have known that passive, drugged listening was a side effect of totalitarian environments and that elitist composers such as Schoenberg were engaged in antisocial Faustian projects that would bewilder and ultimately infuriate most audiences, leaving them isolated and thus eager to be drugged by a musical superman.
As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day, therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, using a text by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of De Harmonice Mundi . This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called Harmony of the World . Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.
It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.
For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity:I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different-colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.
She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. They don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”
I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top
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