Overture to the "Flying Dutchman", as played by a bad spa band at 7 am at the fountain from the sheet

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Paul Hindemith (1923)

The overture to the “Flying Dutchman”, as played by a bad spa orchestra at 7 am at the fountain , in an arrangement for string quartet , is a musical parody by Paul Hindemith from around 1925 . The performance of the work is 7 ½ to 8 minutes and is about three minutes shorter than the original, Richard Wagner's overture to the opera Der Fliegende Holländer .

background

Hindemith, who as a young composer had a lot of humor and self-irony, composed, in addition to serious works, numerous occasional works and parodic pieces, of which often only the title and the line-up are known, including a music for 6 instruments and a reverser , a Berceuse Der Sturm in a water glass , a Gouda - Emmental march or a song in the style of Richard Strauss , in which he replaced the large orchestra with a string quartet and had the soprano sing a text from a beekeeper newspaper .

Hindemith originally planned to publish his parodic pieces and entertainment music as well, and therefore wrote to his publisher Schott in 1920 : “Can you also use foxtrots , bostons , rags and other kitsch? When I can't think of decent music, I always write things like that. ”However, the publisher showed no interest, so many of these works are lost. The rediscovered musical parodies includes the Minimax string quartet from 1923 and the 1925 overture to the “Flying Dutchman” .

music

A spa concert (around 1912)

Giselher Schubert , head of the Frankfurt Hindemith Institute , emphasizes in the foreword to the score that Hindemith does not caricature Wagner's composition, but rather the members of a music band who play a work that is new to them and has not yet been rehearsed. Hindemith, who had played a violinist at spa concerts in his youth , has since known the situation "how listless, overtired musicians grimly and routinely torment their way through a score".

In his arrangement, Hindemith reduces the overture written for a romantic opera orchestra to a string quartet, so that a credible interpretation is necessary in order to deal with the “built-in rebellions” of the piece when imitating bad orchestral musicians.

In the work Hindemith uncovered various tricks with which the musicians "cheat their way through the musical chaos they cause". Thus, the members of the Quartet must be aware gamble by false intone or incorrect use . In bars 261–262, for example, Hindemith prescribes a first violin glissando "up to any note high up". At the end, when the whole thing threatens to end in chaos, the musicians break out of the piece and play a waltz that suits them better from bar 271, before they find their way back to Wagner "confidently" and end the overture with a cacophonic- dissonant chord that "makes you shudder".

Hindemith's arrangement is meticulously composed, extremely difficult and demands the utmost precision from the members of the string quartet, "even if the result sounds pathetic".

Edition of the work

  • Paul Hindemith: Overture to the “Flying Dutchman”, as it is played by a bad spa orchestra at 7 am at the fountain from the leaf for string quartet , ED 8106, Schott, Mainz 1991, score with a foreword by Giselher Schubert .

Recordings

  • Buchberger Quartet, Wergo WER 6197-2 (1991, recorded 1989–1990)
  • Kocian Quartet, Praga digitals PR 250 093 94 (1995)
  • Quatuor de L'Opera de Paris, UT3 (2006)
  • Leipzig String Quartet , MDG 307 1362-2 (2006)

literature

  • Maria Goeth: Music and Humor: Strategies, Universals, Limits (= studies and materials for musicology. Volume 93). Olms, Hildesheim 2016, ISBN 978-3-487-15426-8 , pp. 231–233 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Knut Holtsträter: Mauricio Kagel's musical work. The composer as narrator, media arranger and collector (= series of publications by the Liszt School of Music. Volume 5). Böhlau, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20245-3 , pp. 34–37 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Giselher Schubert: Paul Hindemith with self-testimonies and picture documents , Rowohlt's monographs, Reinbek 1981, ISBN 3-499-50299-2
  • Giselher Schubert: Nonsense and sense. Chamber music of the early Hindemith , in: Supplement to CD Wergo 6197-2, 1991, pp. 1–6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Unknown Hindemith , Homepage of the Hindemith Foundation , accessed on September 16, 2019
  2. ↑ a b Giselher Schubert : Nonsense and Sense , in: Supplement to CD Wergo 1991, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Quotation Hindemith, in: Giselher Schubert: Paul Hindemith with self-testimonies and image documents , Rowohlts Monographien, edition 1990, p. 30.
  4. ^ Giselher Schubert: Paul Hindemith with self-testimonies and picture documents , Rowohlts Monographien, edition 1990, p. 31.
  5. ^ A b c Giselher Schubert: Foreword to the score, Schott ED 8106, Mainz 1991. The same text: Nonsense and Sense , in: Supplement to CD Wergo 1991, p. 4.
  6. ↑ Knut Holtsträter: Mauricio Kagel's musical work. The composer as narrator, media arranger and collector , Weimar 2010, p. 34.
  7. ↑ Giselher Schubert: Nonsense and Sense , in: Supplement to CD Wergo 1991, p. 4.
  8. ↑ Information according to the score, Schott ED 8106, p. 14.
  9. ↑ Knut Holtsträter: Mauricio Kagel's musical work. The composer as narrator, media arranger and collector , Weimar 2010, p. 34.
  10. ↑ According to the publisher, difficulty level 5 [1]
  11. ↑ Work of the Week - Paul Hindemith: Overture to the "Flying Dutchman" ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )