Symphony: Mathis der Maler

Program notes

About the Work

The Berlin Philharmonic gave the first performance of this symphony, under Wilhelm Furtwängler, on 12 March 1934. Furtwängler had conducted the premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Philharmonisches Konzert for the orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary in 1932 and asked the composer for another piece. Hindemith was then at work on an opera, and he answered the request by shaping three orchestral movements from it into a symphony.

The opera, Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter), is about Matthias Grünewald, the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, a large folding altar made in the 1510s and now in Colmar in Alsace. Hindemith wrote the libretto himself. It is set during the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 and asks what an artist owes to society in a time of upheaval: Mathis gives up painting to join the peasants’ revolt, is repelled by its violence, and returns to his art. Hindemith took up the subject in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, and the parallel with his own position is hard to miss.

Each movement of the symphony is named after a panel of the altarpiece. In his note for the premiere Hindemith wrote that he was trying, by musical means, to approach the same state of feeling that the paintings produce in the viewer.

The premiere was a success, but the consequences were serious. The regime had already turned against Hindemith’s music. When Furtwängler defended him in a newspaper article later in 1934, the result was a public attack on the composer by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, that December. Hindemith finished the opera in 1935, but it could not be staged in Germany and was first performed in Zurich in 1938. He moved to Switzerland the same year, and in 1940 to the United States.

What to Listen For

I. Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert). The first movement, which also serves as the overture to the opera, takes its name from the panel in which angels play music for the Virgin and Child. It opens with soft, luminous chords in G major. After a few bars the trombones quietly intone an old German song, “Es sungen drei Engel” (Three angels were singing), and the tune is taken up and built into a broad, hymn-like introduction. The main part of the movement is quick and bright, set going by the flute and the violins and worked out in busy counterpoint.

II. Grablegung (Entombment). A short, slow lament, after the panel at the base of the altarpiece that shows the body of Christ being laid in the tomb. In the opera this music belongs to the final act. The lines are spare, with muted strings and solo woodwinds, and the movement rises to one grave climax before sinking back.

III. Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of Saint Anthony). The finale is by far the longest movement and the most violent. The panel shows the saint attacked by grotesque demons. Hindemith begins with a slow, free introduction for the strings alone, like a recitative, and then sets off a fast movement of great force, with snarling brass and hammering percussion. Shortly before the end the storm clears. The woodwinds introduce the medieval chant “Lauda Sion Salvatorem” over rushing strings, and the brass answer with a blazing chorale of alleluias that closes the symphony.