Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, in 1895 and became one of the central figures of German music between the wars. He was a practical musician first: a professional violist who founded the Amar Quartet in 1921 and toured Europe with it. As a composer he made his name in the 1920s with lean, energetic, contrapuntal music that was linked to the New Objectivity movement and looked back to Bach, including the series of chamber concertos he called Kammermusik. He taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. After the Nazi regime turned against him, he left Germany, moving to Switzerland in 1938 and to the United States in 1940, where he taught at Yale University. His best-known works include the opera and symphony Mathis der Maler, the viola concerto Der Schwanendreher and the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. He set out his thinking about harmony in the treatise The Craft of Musical Composition. He died in Frankfurt in 1963.