Sonata for flute and piano (Hindemith)

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Portrait of Paul Hindemith by Rudolf Heinisch , 1931

The German composer Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) wrote his sonata for flute and piano in Berlin at the end of 1936 , and it premiered the following year in Washington .

Origin, premiere and reception

Paul Hindemith has faced increasing hostility and repression since the National Socialists came to power in 1933. Although he was elected to the leadership council of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1934, in the same year Joseph Goebbels discredited him as an “atonal noisemaker”, which prompted Hindemith to take a leave of absence from his chair at the Berlin Conservatory . In 1935 he traveled to Turkey at the invitation of the government to work out proposals for building up Turkish musical life. In the same year he completed the opera Mathis der Maler . In 1936 he made a second trip to Turkey and in December he composed his sonata for flute and piano .

The planned premiere of the freshly composed work in Berlin with the soloists Gustav Scheck and Walter Gieseking fell victim to a performance ban imposed on Hindemith by the regime. It then took place in the course of Hindemith's first trip to America in the presence of the composer as a contribution to the 8th Chamber Music Festival by Elizabeth Coolidge on April 10, 1937 in the Library of Congress in Washington. Soloists were Georges Barrère , principal flutist of the New York Symphony Orchestra , and the Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá .

Hindemith was very impressed by the performance of both soloists and also noted in his recordings a warm reception by the audience (Scheck's statement that the world premiere had been performed by Barrère and Hindemith themselves in Chicago should not be correct).

The Flute Sonata was published in 1937 by the Mainz publishing house Schott . It stands at the beginning of a series of ten sonatas each for one wind instrument with piano, which ended in 1955, and which ended up covering almost all common wind instruments of the symphony orchestra (from 1918 to 1922 several sonatas for a string instrument and piano had already preceded it).

characterization

The playing time of the sonata for flute and piano by Paul Hindemith is around 15 minutes. Your sentence headings are:

  1. Moved cheerful
  2. Very slowly
  3. Very lively - march

The harmony of the flute sonata is, like other chamber music works by Hindemith of this time, characterized by a preference for second passages in the bass and a chord formation that breaks away from the conventional structure of thirds . They are replaced by the melodies of stacked fourths , mixed with fifths , thirds and seconds. In doing so, he follows his own music-theoretical principles, which are set out in the " Instruction in music composition " (the first part was published in 1937). Major triads appear almost only at the end of larger sections of the shape and thus develop a special effect. Fourths and seconds are also preferred in melody .

The first set is the Sonatensatz form based on (bar 1 to 43: exposure , clock 44-101: performing , from clock 102: altered recapitulation with only two clocks long Coda ).

The second, song-like, deeply serious sentence follows the formal structure A - B - C - A - B.

The lively third movement is a rondo with sonata-like features and has the characteristics of a tarantella . An attached ironic march extends the sonata to a quasi-four-movement. According to the Hindemith student John Coleman, he satirized rehearsals of a National Socialist marching band that Hindemith had heard at the time of the composition.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information on http://www.hindemith.info
  2. ↑ Introduction to the work of Robert Cummings (Engl.)
  3. ↑ Amanda Cook, Program Notes (Eng.)
  4. ^ Nancy Toff: Monarch of the Flute. The Life of George Barrère . Oxford University Press, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-19-517016-0 , p. 287
  5. ↑ Gustav Scheck: The flute and its music . B. Schott's Sons, Mainz 1975, ISBN 3795727650 , p. 228
  6. ↑ Kyle Džapo: Notes for flautists, A Guide to the repertoire . Oxford University Press, New York 2005, ISBN 9780199857074 , Chapter 21

literature

  • Gustav Scheck : The flute and its music . B. Schott's Sons, Mainz 1975, ISBN 3795727650 , pp. 227-231.
  • Ursula Pešek, Željko Pešek: Flute music from three centuries . Bärenreiter, Kassel 1990, ISBN 3-7618-0985-9 , pp. 197-199.