Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith founded the Amar Quartet in 1921 and spent the decade touring Europe as both violist and composer, becoming a leading voice of Neue Sachlichkeit — the unsentimental, neo-Baroque clarity that defined German modernism between the wars. His Kammermusik series and song cycle Das Marienleben (1923) put the viola and viola d'amore at center stage in a Bach-inflected language that used all twelve chromatic tones within a tonal frame. By the mid-1930s the Nazi regime had turned hostile; he responded with Mathis der Maler, an opera about a painter caught between art and politics, then ex…