I greeted your decision about Ludus Tonalis with a dry and laughing eye. Hindemith, though, insisted on a fully engraved production, and unleashed upon Voigt the following invective: Voigt’s first plan, upon receiving Ludus Tonalis, involved releasing it in a manuscript-facsimile format, rather than running the financial risk of issuing an engraved one. (One tin-eared commentator has insisted on rendering the title as ‘Tonal Primary School’.) What Hindemith clearly sought to communicate by his choice of nomenclature is the sportive character which the music possesses, even – or especially – at its most dense and abstruse. Perhaps some such translation as ‘The Play of Tones’, or ‘The Game of Tones’, or ‘The Play of Tonalities’ comes closest to conveying Hindemith’s intent. Ludus Tonalis, as he implied, is not readily turned into English at all. Indeed, Hindemith could not have chosen a better name for his creation. I cannot find anything better in German or English to describe as clearly what it is and at the same time hinting at the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue (the form, that is … ) Our Latin experts here at Yale think the title is very apt. I am thinking of calling it ‘Ludus Tonalis’ because of its didactic (not to say sophisticated) quality. The twelve fugues all came first then came six of the interludes then came the Praeludium and Postludium last of all came the other interludes. He cannot have been altogether discouraging, since Hindemith boldly completed the entire manuscript of Ludus Tonalis in a six-week burst of inspiration between September and October 1942. Ernest Voigt, manager at Hindemith’s American publisher AMP, did not at first know quite what to make of the composer’s scheme concerning a polyphonic marathon for solo piano. He took justifiable pride in it and when discussing it, he displayed a touchiness that belied his public image of ruthlessly unsentimental artisan. Nevertheless, from the start, Ludus Tonalis meant something special to Hindemith. Improbably, amid all this, he found time to labour at The Craft of Musical Composition, his theoretical magnum opus, which he had begun in 1937 and which eventually ran to three volumes. The major compositions included the ballet score The Four Temperaments, the Symphony in E flat, the Cello Concerto and the Third Organ Sonata (all 1940) a cor anglais sonata and a trombone sonata (both 1941) the Sonata for Two Pianos (1942) the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber (1943) and another ballet score, Hérodiade (1944). In fact his American sojourn’s first four years saw the production of several major compositions – aside from Ludus Tonalis – and more than two dozen minor ones. He crossed the Atlantic first Gertrude followed him near the end of 1940.Īt Yale, Hindemith drove his students pitilessly hard, but no harder than he drove himself. Shortly before war came, he and Gertrude moved to the Swiss village of Bluche, where he received a formal invitation to come back to America on a lasting basis. There he helped to establish Turkey’s first Western-style conservatoire. Hardly astonishing, then, that during Hitler’s reign Hindemith took numerous opportunities to work and tour abroad, one such opportunity having involved a role as musical consultant for Atatürk’s government in Ankara. The exhibition had as its ominous slogan: ‘He who eats with Jews, dies of it’. Two years afterwards, he found himself calumniated at a Düsseldorf exhibition for allegedly purveying Entartete Musik (‘degenerate music’). In 1936 the National Socialists formally prohibited all further performances of every piece that Hindemith had written. Though a Gentile himself, Hindemith feared for the safety of his part-Jewish wife Gertrude at the regime’s hands. (For the same celebrations Koussevitzky also commissioned works from Stravinsky, Copland, Prokofiev, Ravel, Roussel, and Respighi.) Later in the decade Hindemith visited America twice, eager to spend as little time as possible in Germany after 1933. Serge Koussevitzky had commissioned from him in 1930 the Concert Music for Brass and Strings, as part of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s half-century celebrations. Well before Hindemith came to reside in the USA, he had maintained friendly connections with individual Americans. Stove provides the background to the music and the recording for the first CD issue of this extremely rare Philips recording.Īmong the many creative fruits of Paul Hindemith’s American life – spent predominantly at Yale, where he taught from 1940 to 1953 – Ludus Tonalis (1942) ranks with the most significant. The fourth spouse of Ingmar Bergman, pianist Käbi Laretei worked with Hindemith on his “Ludus Tonalis”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |