Hindemith: Mathis der Maler Symphony
Hindemith: Mathis der Maler Symphony
60.00
714 words
note by Chris Myers
includes image files
Excerpt:
It’s difficult to overstate Paul Hindemith’s low opinion of the National Socialist Party. Like many Germans, he found it difficult to take them seriously, and it came as a great shock to him when they came to power in 1933. In seeking to decide how he could best use his prominent position to protest the beliefs and ideals he saw being inflicted on his native land, he turned to a concept his publisher had suggested only a year earlier: an opera based on the German Peasants’ War.
[...]
The message was not lost on those in power. The unstaged work was banned on a direct order from Hermann Göring, and the controversy, which played out in the Berlin newspapers, led to Joseph Goebbels personally and publicly denouncing Hindemith at length in a December 1934 speech before the Reich Chamber of Culture.