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 extracted its music into a symphony that premiered in 1934. He and his wife left for Switzerland, then the United States, where he wrote the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943) and a Whitman requiem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946). He spent his final years conducting and recording his own catalog, a composer who had codified his harmonic thinking in a three-volume treatise and lived long enough to cement it on tape.