Music: The Compleat Musician

The stubby little man stood firmly on the stage, drawing music with shaking, clenched fists from the choirs ranged on either side of a horseshoe balcony. Later, he picked up a three-string vielle (old-style fiddle) and joined two other instrumentalists and a singer in an expert per” formance of four songs by Guillaume de Machaut (circa 1300-77). Then he sat down and. listened to the world premiere of his own new work—Motets for Tenor and Piano. Thus in a single evening last week, during the Berlin Festival, Paul Hindemith, 64, got a rare chance to wear all his musical caps—as composer, conductor, musicologist and instrumentalist.

Hindemith had selected all the music for the concert, which was held in Berlin’s Musik-Hochschule concert hall, nicknamed “Hindemith’s Bahnhof” because of its modern railroad-station architecture. Included, in addition to Machaut and Hindemith’s own work, were five intricate and austere pieces of church music by Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612) arranged for choir, some with instrumental accompaniment. Hindemith, a first-rate conductor, gave them all performances that Die Welt’s critic found “almost overpoweringly impressive.” Hindemith’s own work, musical settings to four long passages from the books of Matthew and Luke in Latin, evoked several strikingly different moods: the first and fourth motets were highly dramatic and rhythmically complicated; the second had the lyric simplicity of folk song, while the third was reminiscent of an Arab mourning song. They displayed, concluded Die Welt, an entirely “new creative impulse.”

As for Hindemith’s performance on the vielle, it was as masterly as might be expected from a man who can play every instrument in the orchestra and who was once considered one of the world’s leading viola virtuosos (as a soloist and a member of the Amar-Hindemith Quartet).

Although Hindemith rarely gets a chance these days to play the role of Compleat Musician, he manages to keep briskly occupied. Since leaving the U.S., where he taught at Yale, he has lived with his wife in Switzerland (“We live in the mountains; where, is a military secret”). He teaches at the University of Zurich, retires from the world for five months each year to compose. Among the works proposed: an orchestral piece for the opening of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. Next summer he will conduct the Santa Fe Opera in three performances of his opera News of the Day.

Some critics believe that most of Hin demith’s later work fails to measure up to the vigorous and imaginative music of the 1920s, in which he so brilliantly enlarged the neo-classical movement. But Hindemith rarely listens to the critics. In all the 20th century, he insists, there are only two men who deserve the name Composer: Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok. And perhaps, his admirers believe, Paul Hindemith.