Die Harmonie der Welt (review)

Any artist of conscience working in Germany during the rise of National Socialism would have had to ponder the question of his or her responsibility in a society that was going mad. Paul Hindemith was nothing if not conscientious, and he had already been attuned to the social responsibility of the composer; in his conception of Gebrauchsmusik, developed in the mid-1920s, he envisioned the composer as an integral part of a community, creating music in response to the community's needs. It's not surprising, then, that he would have turned to the theme of the artist in society for two of the most significant works of his mature period, the operas Mathis der Maler (1934-35) and Die Harmonie der Welt (1956-57).

Mathis and Die Harmonie der Welt, along with Cardillac (1926), are generally considered Hindemith's most important operas (although recent revivals and a recording of the zany Neues vom Tage, his long-neglected 1929 Zeitoper, have boosted its reputation in the eyes of many critics). Cardillac, Mathis, and Harmonie der Welt are also often grouped together as a kind of career-spanning trilogy, since each tackles the artist-in-society theme. Too much has been made, however, of the connection between Cardillac and the two later operas. Cardillac, with a libretto by Ferdinand Lion, after a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, tells of a pathological seventeenth-century Parisian goldsmith who murders his clients in order to reclaim the beloved jewels they have purchased from him. That's certainly one way for an artist to relate to society, but it's a far cry from the earnest humanitarian struggles of Mathis, or of Johannes Kepler, the protagonist of Die Harmonie der Welt. Cardillac, drenched in musical and dramatic irony, is easily the most entertaining of the three operas—but it's hard to imagine that Hindemith, even at his most ironic, would have envisioned its entirely unsympathetic protagonist as an exemplar of artistic responsibility. The composer wrote the librettos for the two later operas himself, and the conflicts and aspirations of the protagonists are obvious reflections of his most deeply felt artistic and philosophical concerns. Mathis der Maler, based on the life of Matthias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece, describes the artist's decision to abandon his art so that he can make a concrete difference in the struggle for justice, only to discover that it is by fulfilling his calling as an artist that he is most useful. If Mathis served as a kind of apologia for the composer's decision to continue making art even in times of great social crisis, Die Harmonie der Welt proposed a much grander scheme, in which the creative genius strives, through his theories, to make an ultimate difference in bringing order to a disordered world.

Hindemith had become familiar with the work of astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) while writing his Unterweisung im Tonsatz during the early 1930s. The composer's interest in defining the laws of tonal relationships resonated with Kepler's theories of the harmony of the spheres, articulated in his Harmonices Mundi of 1619. In a 1939 letter to his publisher at Schott, Hindemith announced his plan to write an opera based on Kepler's life. From the beginning Hindemith felt that Die Harmonie der Welt would be his magnum opus, the musical and philosophical capstone of his career, and it was the weight of that sensibility, as much as the political turmoil of...