Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, Germany, (near Frankfurt) in November 1895. He was the eldest child of a painter (Rudolph Hindemith) and of a farmer’s daughter (Marie Sophie née Warnicke).

Musical talent was likely in the blood – Paul took up the violin early, his sister Toni the piano and his brother Rudolf the cello.

Paul lived a very busy and varied musical life, as concert violinist (he also played the viola), and as conductor, teacher, composer, and theorist.

One of his best known compositions is his one-act opera, Sancta Susanna, set to a libretto by August Stramm, first performed in Frankfurt in March 1922. This opera depicted the barely-sublimated lusts of the nuns at a convent. In 1930, the prominent English musicologist Marion Scott wrote that though Sancta Susanna’s content is “horrific,” its “musical brilliance is equally certain.”

Hindemith left Germany for Turkey in 1935, and left Turkey for the United States in 1940, becoming an American citizen in 1946. By a quirk of fate, he was back in Germany, in Frankfurt, at the time of his death, in December 1963, of an inflammation of the pancreas.