Paul Hindemith
    Three Piano Sonatas

* Piano Sonata No. 1 "Der Main"
* Piano Sonata No. 2
* Piano Sonata No. 3

Glenn Gould (piano)
Total Time: 65:32
Sony SMK 52670

Summary for the Busy Executive: Music from the deep heart's core.

One often hears said of Hindemith - usually from people who know perhaps
all of two or three of his works - "always competent, rarely inspired."
I can think of few musical pronouncements more likely to get me to set my
jaw and grind my molars.  Since I find Hindemith's language enjoyable in
itself, I begin to wonder whether such people have ears at all and what
this condemnation, usually blithely delivered, says about their taste in
general.  Eventually, however, I calm down, tell myself that nobody likes
everything and "there, there," and chalk it up to yet another victory for
Schoenberg's disciples, who managed to write Hindemith out of most serious
discussions of modern music as well as most programming.  I happen to love
Schoenberg's and Webern's music, but their pronouncements on this or that
of their contemporaries strike me as, to say the least, idiosyncratic.  In
fact, I find that many if not most composers tend to view their colleagues
through the extremely narrow filter of their own creative concerns.  It
would probably be strange if they did not.  Nevertheless, even though
the hegemony of the Schoenberg-Webern axis has weakened long since and
composers sentenced to oblivion have begun to make their way back to
performances and general consciousness, Hindemith remains a figure
relatively little known among classical-music listeners.  Major works
in his enormous catalogue go unplayed and unrecorded.

Someone once said of Ezra Pound that he wrote as if Shakespeare and Milton
had never lived.  The French and the Chinese comprised his major influence.
Hindemith writes as if Beethoven and almost the entire 19th century never
happened.  The composer he reminds me of most strongly (I say this without
blushing) is Bach.  Both produced a huge body of work at all levels -
virtuoso, professional, amateur - with a wide range of mood, in just about
every genre, and with something significant for almost every instrument.
In both, I find the balance of formidable craft and astonishing poetry,
achieved by pretty much the same means.  For both, counterpoint is never
an end in itself:  it is the outcome of a musical impulse to dance and a
poetic impulse to dramatize.  That is, as in Bach, the drama in the music
comes through the contrapuntal opposition of near-simultaneous musical
ideas.  I don't think there's much question - among music scholars, at
any rate - that Hindemith probably came to his own spin on Bach through
the music of Reger, another Bach-mad composer.  The difference between
the two lies in the harmonic language, with Reger still a part of the late
19th century, and, in the musical texture, with Reger indulging in the
late-Romantic habit of more and more filigree - four lines considered twice
as swell as two.  As a result, Hindemith's neo-classicism is one of the
few that doesn't derive from Stravinsky.  In fact, it's entirely his own.
Predicting the future's pretty much a sucker's game and I won't be around
anyway, so I won't predict whether Hindemith will be played fifty years
from now.  Nevertheless, his delivery of repertoire for so many different
instruments and at so many levels of player skill I believe bodes well for
him.  Students of brass still have to learn Hindemith's sonatas for their
instruments.  If international operatic life were healthier, at least five
Hindemith operas could be presented, including "school operas." Violists
have at least two concertos and any number of sonatas (including at least
one for solo viola) in a sparse repertory.  Amateur, school, and
professional choirs can find Hindemith pieces that suit them.

Glenn Gould, of course, stands under the heading of virtuoso.  Hindemith
was one of those surprising Gould enthusiasms - like the piano music of
Richard Strauss, Korngold, and Bizet or the singing of Petula Clark and
Barbra Streisand - that would bubble to the surface from time to time with
the loud pop of a party cracker or swamp gas, and damn prevailing opinion.
As one might expect, he had definite ideas on what constituted good piano
writing (among other things, how many contrapuntal lines a composer could
suggest for the keyboard without actually writing them out), and gave
Hindemith generally high marks.  With those criteria, he loved the piano
sonatas and Hindemith's piano accompaniments and disliked the piano pieces
from about Ludus Tonalis on.  He also credited Hindemith's Mathis der Maler
Symphony as the work which got him to like modern music.

I myself play the relatively easy second sonata - badly, of course, but
I get through it - and the sheet music constituted my introduction to
the work.  I later owned a German LP, with all three sonatas performed
by a pianist named Billeter.  Although I can nit-pick some of the tempo
choices (with both Billeter and Gould), I admit Gould does better.

Hindemith wrote, somewhat disingenuously, that he intended the sonatas
for amateurs.  That fits the second sonata best.  You have to be a
professionally-adroit amateur to get through sonatas one and three,
particularly in the movements marked "lebhaft" (lively).  The first
sonata, subtitled "Der Main" (the River Main, pronounced "mine"), leads
one to expect something programmatic.  The work fails to call up any
images for me, and I assume that the title refers to where the piece was
written (Frankfurt, a major teaching post for Hindemith), rather than to
any extra-musical inspiration.  Whatever the relevance of the subtitle,
the sonata runs about as far from the standard-rep view of what a
keyboard sonata should be as one can get - no obvious finger-flash, no
apostrophizing, nothing inflated or theatrically heightened.  Even the
movements marked "lively" find time to meditate.  There's a balance, a
stillness at the center of this music that puts me in mind of Elizabethan
fantasias.  The second movement seems to find its inspiration in the
funeral march of Beethoven's "Eroica," but that's just a starting point.
Hindemith's sonata and Beethoven's symphony differ too greatly in the
way they make their rhetorical points.  For all its considerable motific
development, Beethoven produces in essence a dramatic march in song form.
Hindemith's relation to song structure and phrasing is far more distant and
abstract.  The drama consists not in opposition of dynamics (often felt by
listeners as "light" vs.  "dark"), but, again, in the way the basic ideas
work themselves out in contrapuntal opposition.

The second sonata ranks as one of my favorite Hindemiths and exemplifies
what I've come to call "sensuous form." The opening movement not only sings
gorgeously, but is almost a textbook example of sonata.  In fact, when I
think of sonata-allegro form per se, this piece almost always comes to
mind.  Still, this isn't the Sturm und Drang of Beethoven and his heirs.
Hindemith's effect comes mainly from the formal play of his ideas.  He
doesn't surprise you, as much as fulfill your every expectation perfectly.
You find yourself in a world of near-Platonic perfection.  Listening to
this sonata, I can understand how mathematicians can speak lovingly of
"beautiful proofs." I hasten to add, however, that this is music, not a
treatise.  It aims to move you, but in a pre-nineteenth-century way.  The
finale is a kind of musical joke.  It begins with a solemn theme, richly
harmonized.  It then leads to a cheeky rondo, which one recognizes - though
not instantly - as a variation of the solemn theme.  Hindemith eventually
brings the two ideas together, and the light dawns.  Solemnity returns for
a noble close.  Having played this work, I can say something of the layout
for the hands.  Hindemith is almost always considerate, although I
encountered a fiendish run in the second-movement scherzo and chords in the
finale that turned my hair a little grayer.  Hindemith mainly gives your
hands a set of patterns of movement and varies position and combination to
yield beautiful music - a kind of jeu des mains.  I found it incredibly
satisfying to play.

Sonata No. 3 opens with a pastoral rhythm, full at the outset of balance
and calm, but quick runs rip through the first movement like a chainsaw.
The second movement careens like a whirligig.  The third movement contains,
among other things, a fugue, but one that owes more to the Romantics than
to Bach.  Indeed, almost the entire sonata seems a Beethoven heir.  This
time Hindemith does make use of Romantic drama, with violent oppositions
of dynamic, tempo, and register, and consequently the sonata stands as a
rarity in the composer's output.  But within this oddness stands the odd
finale, a monumental fugue.  It's Hindemith plying his usual trade, but
in the context of the other movements, the movement causes an aural
double-take.

Gould plays the dickens out of these things.  He understands not only
how Hindemith constructs the music, but also how the composer achieves
his emotional effects.  There's technique and poetry both, as well
as individuality of interpretation - just like Gould's Bach.  To me,
individuality this time around doesn't cross the line to eccentricity.
Gould not only gives you contrapuntal clarity, he brings out any line or
lines he wishes to and can change the texture instantly.  His rhythm is
sharp, without labor.  What really sells this recording to me, however,
is Gould's take on Hindemith's lyricism.  For Gould, Hindemith's music
primarily sings, and to bring this out, Gould constructs a gorgeous line
(and of course occasionally hums along).  It's definitely a minority
viewpoint, but I believe a valid one.  Most Hindemith interpreters play
stiffly, drily, and without emotion, as if Hindemith really were some
pedant interested in proving a theorem, rather than a poet with an
astonishing mastery of craft.  But these interpreters miss the core of
the music.  After all, a noticeable sense of balance is achieved only when
you recognize the fragility of the balance.  Hindemith's music may keep
powerful emotions in check, but it is full of such emotions.  Gould brings
them out.

I mentioned Gould's humming, but it intrudes less here than in other discs.
The sound is fine. This CD will probably become a favorite.

Steve Schwartz