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CD Review

Summary for the Busy Executive: Music from the deep heart's core.

One often hears said of Hindemith – usually from people who know perhaps all of two or three of his works – "always competent, rarely inspired." I can think of few musical pronouncements more likely to get me to set my jaw and grind my molars. Since I find Hindemith's language enjoyable in itself, I begin to wonder whether such people have ears at all and what this condemnation, usually blithely delivered, says about their taste in general. Eventually, however, I calm down, tell myself that nobody likes everything and "there, there," and chalk it up to yet another victory for Schoenberg's disciples, who managed to write Hindemith out of most serious discussions of modern music as well as most programming. I happen to love Schoenberg's and Webern's music, but their pronouncements on this or that of their contemporaries strike me as, to say the least, idiosyncratic. In fact, I find that many if not most composers tend to view their colleagues through the extremely narrow filter of their own creative concerns. It would probably be strange if they did not. Nevertheless, even though the hegemony of the Schoenberg-Webern axis has weakened long since and composers sentenced to oblivion have begun to make their way back to performances and general consciousness, Hindemith remains a figure relatively little known among classical-music listeners. Major works in his enormous catalogue go unplayed and unrecorded.

Someone once said of Ezra Pound that he wrote as if Shakespeare and Milton had never lived. The French and the Chinese comprised his major influence. Hindemith writes as if Beethoven and almost the entire 19^th century never happened. The composer he reminds me of most strongly (I say this without blushing) is Bach. Both produced a huge body of work at all levels – virtuoso, professional, amateur – with a wide range of mood, in just about every genre, and with something significant for almost every instrument. In both, I find the balance of formidable craft and astonishing poetry, achieved by pretty much the same means. For both, counterpoint is never an end in itself: it is the outcome of a musical impulse to dance and a poetic impulse to dramatize. That is, as in Bach, the drama in the music comes through the contrapuntal opposition of near-simultaneous musical ideas. I don't think there's much question – among music scholars, at any rate – that Hindemith probably came to his own spin on Bach through the music of Reger, another Bach-mad composer. The difference between the two lies in the harmonic language, with Reger still a part of the late 19^th century, and, in the musical texture, with Reger indulging in the late-Romantic habit of more and more filigree – four lines considered twice as swell as two. As a result, Hindemith's neo-classicism is one of the few that doesn't derive from Stravinsky. In fact, it's entirely his own. Predicting the future's pretty much a sucker's game and I won't be around anyway, so I won't predict whether Hindemith will be played fifty years from now. Nevertheless, his delivery of repertoire for so many different instruments and at so many levels of player skill I believe bodes well for him. Students of brass still have to learn Hindemith's sonatas for their instruments. If international operatic life were healthier, at least five Hindemith operas could be presented, including "school operas." Violists have at least two concertos and any number of sonatas (including at least one for solo viola) in a sparse repertory. Amateur, school, and professional choirs can find Hindemith pieces that suit them.

Glenn Gould, of course, stands under the heading of virtuoso. Hindemith was one of those surprising Gould enthusiasms – like the piano music of Richard Strauss, Korngold, and Bizet or the singing of Petula Clark and Barbra Streisand – that would bubble to the surface from time to time with the loud pop of a party cracker or swamp gas, and damn prevailing opinion. As one might expect, he had definite ideas on what constituted good piano writing (among other things, how many contrapuntal lines a composer could suggest for the keyboard without actually writing them out), and gave Hindemith generally high marks. With those criteria, he loved the piano sonatas and Hindemith's piano accompaniments and disliked the piano pieces from about Ludus Tonalis on. He also credited Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony as the work which got him to like modern music.

I myself play the relatively easy second sonata – badly, of course, but I get through it – and the sheet music constituted my introduction to the work. I later owned a German LP, with all three sonatas performed by a pianist named Billeter. Although I can nit-pick some of the tempo choices (with both Billeter and Gould), I admit Gould does better.

Hindemith wrote, somewhat disingenuously, that he intended the sonatas for amateurs. That fits the second sonata best. You have to be a professionally-adroit amateur to get through sonatas one and three, particularly in the movements marked "lebhaft" (lively). The first sonata, subtitled "Der Main" (the River Main, pronounced "mine"), leads one to expect something programmatic. The work fails to call up any images for me, and I assume that the title refers to where the piece was written (Frankfurt, a major teaching post for Hindemith), rather than to any extra-musical inspiration. Whatever the relevance of the subtitle, the sonata runs about as far from the standard-rep view of what a keyboard sonata should be as one can get – no obvious finger-flash, no apostrophizing, nothing inflated or theatrically heightened. Even the movements marked "lively" find time to meditate. There's a balance, a stillness at the center of this music that puts me in mind of Elizabethan fantasias. The second movement seems to find its inspiration in the funeral march of Beethoven's "Eroica," but that's just a starting point. Hindemith's sonata and Beethoven's symphony differ too greatly in the way they make their rhetorical points. For all its considerable motific development, Beethoven produces in essence a dramatic march in song form. Hindemith's relation to song structure and phrasing is far more distant and abstract. The drama consists not in opposition of dynamics (often felt by listeners as "light" vs. "dark"), but, again, in the way the basic ideas work themselves out in contrapuntal opposition.

The second sonata ranks as one of my favorite Hindemiths and exemplifies what I've come to call "sensuous form." The opening movement not only sings gorgeously, but is almost a textbook example of sonata. In fact, when I think of sonata-allegro form per se, this piece almost always comes to mind. Still, this isn't the Sturm und Drang of Beethoven and his heirs. Hindemith's effect comes mainly from the formal play of his ideas. He doesn't surprise you, as much as fulfill your every expectation perfectly. You find yourself in a world of near-Platonic perfection. Listening to this sonata, I can understand how mathematicians can speak lovingly of "beautiful proofs." I hasten to add, however, that this is music, not a treatise. It aims to move you, but in a pre-nineteenth-century way. The finale is a kind of musical joke. It begins with a solemn theme, richly harmonized. It then leads to a cheeky rondo, which one recognizes – though not instantly – as a variation of the solemn theme. Hindemith eventually brings the two ideas together, and the light dawns. Solemnity returns for a noble close. Having played this work, I can say something of the layout for the hands. Hindemith is almost always considerate, although I encountered a fiendish run in the second-movement scherzo and chords in the finale that turned my hair a little grayer. Hindemith mainly gives your hands a set of patterns of movement and varies position and combination to yield beautiful music – a kind of jeu des mains. I found it incredibly satisfying to play.

Sonata #3 opens with a pastoral rhythm, full at the outset of balance and calm, but quick runs rip through the first movement like a chainsaw. The second movement careens like a whirligig. The third movement contains, among other things, a fugue, but one that owes more to the Romantics than to Bach. Indeed, almost the entire sonata seems a Beethoven heir. This time Hindemith does make use of Romantic drama, with violent oppositions of dynamic, tempo, and register, and consequently the sonata stands as a rarity in the composer's output. But within this oddness stands the odd finale, a monumental fugue. It's Hindemith plying his usual trade, but in the context of the other movements, the movement causes an aural double-take.

Gould plays the dickens out of these things. He understands not only how Hindemith constructs the music, but also how the composer achieves his emotional effects. There's technique and poetry both, as well as individuality of interpretation – just like Gould's Bach. To me, individuality this time around doesn't cross the line to eccentricity. Gould not only gives you contrapuntal clarity, he brings out any line or lines he wishes to and can change the texture instantly. His rhythm is sharp, without labor. What really sells this recording to me, however, is Gould's take on Hindemith's lyricism. For Gould, Hindemith's music primarily sings, and to bring this out, Gould constructs a gorgeous line (and of course occasionally hums along). It's definitely a minority viewpoint, but I believe a valid one. Most Hindemith interpreters play stiffly, drily, and without emotion, as if Hindemith really were some pedant interested in proving a theorem, rather than a poet with an astonishing mastery of craft. But these interpreters miss the core of the music. After all, a noticeable sense of balance is achieved only when you recognize the fragility of the balance. Hindemith's music may keep powerful emotions in check, but it is full of such emotions. Gould brings them out.

I mentioned Gould's humming, but it intrudes less here than in other discs. The sound is fine. This CD will probably become a favorite.

Copyright © 1999, Steve Schwartz

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