Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber ranks among the most popular orchestral pieces by Paul Hindemith. The dry, academic, and perhaps even pretentious title belongs to an entertaining piece with unfailing good cheer.

As popular as it is, critics and scholars appear not to consider it a great work. For example, the biography of Hindemith in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians does not mention the piece. Nor does it appear in Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise.

Hindemith himself seems to be regarded among a multitude of composers who wrote some wonderful music but did not achieve greatness.

Paul Hindemith’s life

Paul Hindemith was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1895, the eldest child in a working-class family. His father was an amateur zither player who encouraged his children’s musical gifts.  Paul started violin lessons in 1904 and soon became a private student of two successive violin teachers at Frankfurt’s Hoch’sche Konservatorium.

When he was 19, he became leader of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He also played second violin in his teacher’s string quartet. Later, he switched to viola and became a virtuoso.

HIndemith began formal study of composition in 1912. Called to military service in World War I, he managed to stay active in music. He played bass drum in his regiment’s band and founded a string quartet of soldiers that gave private concerts. When the war ended, he quickly became known as the leading German composer of his generation.

In his early years, he seemed like an avant-gardist who loved dissonance. He explored numerous contemporary styles, including Impressionism and American jazz, in an attempt to move beyond a provincial view of German tradition. He wrote mostly chamber music, including sonatas for almost every conceivable instrument. But he also wrote a few provocative operas.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, Hindemith made no secret of his disdain. The Nazis, on the other hand, looked down on those early operas, Hindemith’s dissonant harmonies, and avowed internationalism. The government condemned his music as degenerate and forbid its public performance. Hindemith fled and eventually became an American citizen.

In 1953, however, he moved back to Switzerland and lived there for the next ten years until his death.

Hindemith’s late style and two of its masterpieces

His opera Mathis der Mahler marks a stylistic turning point. He had fallen afoul of Hitler’s government. At first, though, he thought the Nazi regime would not last long. In 1932, Willy Strecker of Hindemith’s publisher B. Schott suggested that the 16th-centuryGerman painter Mattias Grünewald would make a good subject for an opera.

Grünewald had renounced painting in order to participate in political action in the time of the Peasant Revolt of 1524-1525. This renunciation was short-lived, however. He discovered that it was a futile decision and that he had to be true to who he really was, an artist. Hindemith later noted that the artist’s experience had shattered him to the soul.

For three years, he worked on nothing but the opera. By 1934, he had extracted a symphony from his work on the opera, which he intended as a preview. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the symphony’s very successful premiere on March 12, 1934. Hindemith’s political standing, however, deteriorated to the point that in 1938, he had to leave Germany. He moved first to Switzerland and, in 1940, to the US.

In 1937, however, Hindemith visited Florence, Italy to lecture on his harmonic theories. There, he saw Giotto’s frescos depicting the life of St. Francis of Assisi in the church of Santa Croce. At about the same time, he met the choreographer Léonide Massine. Hindemith told Massine that he wanted to write a ballet on the life of St. Francis. He started working on Nobilissima Visione in 1938 after the world premiere of Mathis der Mahler in Zurich, Switzerland. He conducted the premiere that year in London. Then he packed up his home in Berlin.

The success of that ballet led Hindemith and Massine to collaborate on something else. Massine suggested music of Carl Maria von Weber as possible source material. Hindemith started work, but neither artist felt comfortable with the collaboration. Massine thought Hindemith’s ideas departed too much from Weber’s music. Hindemith objected to Massine’s choice of Salvador Dali to design sets and costumes.

The genesis of Symphonic Metamorphosis

Having just moved to the US, however, Hindemith needed to compose something that would appeal to the taste of American concert audiences. He based it on his sketches for Massine.

Carl Maria von Weber lived from 1786-1826. During his lifetime, two separate musical audiences started to emerge, those for “classical” music and popular music. Weber was probably the last composer who appealed to both. He redefined German opera and provided a link between Mozart’s German operas and the works of Richard Wagner. As influential as he was, modern orchestral concerts seldom feature his works

Hindemith chose not to use any of Weber’s best-known music, however. The first, third, and fourth movements come from a book of Weber’s piano duets that Hindemith owned and played at home with his wife. He selected op. 60, no. 4; op.  10a, no. 2; and op. 60, no. 7. He made few changes to the themes themselves, but he wrapped them in wholly new harmonies and contrapuntal structures.

The second movement comes from Weber’s incidental music to Friedrich Schiller’s play Turandot. If that title sounds familiar, Schiller derived it from the same Italian play that inspired Puccini’s Turandot.

Weber found a Chinese melody in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique. Rousseau, in turn, had gotten it from book about China by Jean-Baptiste du Halde. Halde had never been to China, by the way. Rousseau warned that Halde had likely altered it to fit Western tastes. Nevertheless, Weber’s use of it marks the first time anything close to an authentic Asian melody had been heard in European orchestral music.

Hindemith altered this tune more than any of the others. His version uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale butkeeps the insistent repetition from Weber’s overture. Nearly every instrument in the orchestra plays it, including an extended timpani solo. Sometime past the middle of the movement, he transformed the tune into a ragtime-flavored fugue, first introduced by the trombones.

The premiere of Symphonic Metamorphosis

The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Artur Rodzinski, played the world premiere of Symphonic Metamorphosison January 20, 1944. The full program comprised Concerto in D major for Orchestra and Organ by Handel, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Brahms, Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of C.M. von Weber by Hindemith, and excerpts from “Die Meistersinger” by Wagner.

The program for the evening included the following description of Symphonic Metamorphosis:

This work, completed in in August 1943, is constructed in four movements and it approximates the symphonic form. The movements are: I. Allegro; II. Turandot-Scherzo; III. Andantino, and IV. March.

The themes employed by Hindemith in the first, third and fourth movements of his Metamorphosis, stem from music Weber wrote for piano four hands. That of the second movement, however, derives from the incidental music to Schilller’s play, Turandot. None of these fragments, in Hindemith’s opinion, represents Weber at his best. Consequently he has made alterations to suit his requirements.

The score calls for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contra-bassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, a lard percussion section—consisting of chimes, triangles, tom-tom, woodblock, cymbal, gong and kettledrums—and strings. . . . R.C.B.

The program note continues with a description of Hindemith. It starts with the surprising statement that there is nothing academic about him—surprising since he had taught in academic settings most of his life! Basically, the note stresses that his music is accessible without his being “the composer for the multitude.”

The comment about Hindemith’s opinions about the music he selected comes in the context of Leopold Stokowski’s controversial transcriptions of Bach’s music. Stokowski could do nothing to improve on Bach. Hindemith stressed that he did not transcribe Weber’s music but used it as the basis of his own composition. In other words, he had improved on Weber.

Early recordings of Symphonic Metamorphosis

Four recordings appeared within Hindemith’s lifetime:

• Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell (released1949)
• Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Raphael Kubelik (1954)
• Berlin Philharmonic, Paul Hindemith (1956)
• Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Joseph Keilberth (1957)

And, of course, many other recordings appeared after Hindemith’s death in 1963. These include a recording made in 1947 by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic but not released until 1964.

Critical views of Hindemith and Symphonic Metamorphosis

In the years following World War I, Americans did not receive German arts with much enthusiasm. After moving to the US, however, Hindemith worked to embrace an American identity. Subsequent reviews of his works emphasized his German background but never failed to highlight his decision to flee from the Nazis. For whatever reasons, Hindemith’s music then became popular with American concert audiences.

Hindemith was a prolific composer with, as Philip Hale wrote in 1931, “the fertility of a rabbit.”

He had long taught counterpoint and other aspects of music theory in institutions of higher education and wrote a book titled, in English, The Craft of Musical Composition. As a result, many critics considered him more an academic than a composer. Although he was undoubtedly a master of technique, they found much of his music dry and lacking in inspiration and expressiveness.

As to Symphonic Metamorphosis, critics of various early performances praised Hindemith’s skill as an orchestrator and mastery in counterpoint. They noted the generally light-hearted, even jocular mood. Some even seemed to be surprised that he had not produced another dour, monotonous, and overly dissonant piece.

J. Dorsey Callahan called it “the least Hindemithish” of his compositions, noting that it used conventional melodies. Although most reviewers enjoyed the piece, Irving Fine considered it a disappointment compared to Hindemith’s best music.

Reviews of Symphonic Metamorphosis that mention other of Hindemith’s works compare it unfavorably to Nobilissima Visione, one of his true masterpieces. Some of the reviews of Szell’s 1949 recording of both works have little description of Symphonic Metamorphosis.

Where Nobilissima Visione is profound, Symphonic Metamorphosis is merely clever and entertaining. But why should everything have to be serious?

Sources:

Facsimile of the New York Philharmonic program of January 20, 1944
Hindemith, Paul / Jan Kemp, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980)
Liner notes to Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber, Mathis der Mahler [Symphony], Nobilissima Visione (Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Yoel Levi, conductor. Telarc CD-80195, 1989) / Richard E. Rodda
The reception of Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic metamorphosis of themes by C. M. von Weber / Allison Elizabeth King (Master of Music, Texas Christian University, May 2020)