| This dissertation reexamines the compositional development of Paul Hindemith during the years 1919-1922. It proceeds from the conviction that this turbulent period cannot be addressed adequately without due regard for the cultural, political, social, and personal traumas that accompanied the First World War. Fundamentally, the study situates Hindemith's postwar development in strong dialogue with numerous challenges that were being issued to guiding assumptions of prewar German modernism. During and immediately after the war, heated debates over German music and culture were taking place. These concerned the status of music as a domain of expansive subjectivity, expressive intensity, and far-reaching technical innovation. Also at issue was the implication of the late nineteenth-century musical legacy in the cultural chauvinism that had precipitated the war.; With reference to numerous works dating from the immediate postwar years, such as Hindemith's Drei Hymnen von Walt Whitman, his scandalous one-act opera Das Nusch-Nuschi, and his Sonata for Solo Viola, Op. 25, No. 1, the dissertation traces the emergence in his music of an outlook that arguably responded to these broader challenges. These and other early postwar compositions variously manifest what we might, following the composer Heinz Tiessen, call a "hard-edged simplicity" in their balancing of technical experimentation with clear aural accessibility, their attenuation of heightened expressiveness, and their increased physicality. They also show Hindemith's ready engagement with musical voices that had articulated themselves against the German mainstream, those of Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Bela Bartok. In contrast to existing scholarship, which has tended to address this period by invoking categories internal to German modernism (such as Expressionism), I propose that "Germanness" as well as modernism had become problematic after the war and suggest that these works be read as attempts by Hindemith to distance himself from a tainted cultural legacy. |
