Music: Hindemith’s Big Week

Few living composers had ever had so much of their music played in one week. Everyone seemed to burst out playing the knotty, dissonant music of Paul Hindemith.

Violinist Robert Brink had just put his fiddle away after playing Hindemith’s Sonata in E at Manhattan’s Town Hall, when the Guilet Quartet moved in to play a Hindemith quartet. Next night, in Carnegie Hall, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra marched through his Symphony in E Flat; three blocks away, Ballet Society danced The Four Temperaments—music by Hindemith. Next night, in Carnegie Hall, George Szell put his Cleveland Orchestra through Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber. The critics, who usually find Hindemith dry as toast, found his Metamorphosis gay and charming. In Boston, the same night, the Boston Symphony was playing his Symphonia Serena.

Two days later, Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave Symphonia Serena its New York premiere. At week’s end, Composer Hindemith, a short and shy man who now heads the music department at Yale, capped it all by conducting his own Hérodiade at a New Friends of Music performance at Manhattan’s Town Hall.

For a man whom the Nazis banned as a Kulturbolschewist noisemaker (and whom most U.S. critics have called much the same thing in politer language), life was suddenly—at 52—much sunnier.