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PAUL HINDEMITH 'Could you also use fox trots, bostons, rags and other kitsch? When I can't think of any decent music anymore, I always write stuff like that. I manage them very well and I think you could do more business with a piece like this than with my best chamber music. (After all, good kitsch is terribly rare)«, the self-confident Paul Hindemith asked his publishing house Schott in Mainz in 1920, which immediately answered the question in the affirmative. An example of "things like that" is the Piano Suite »1922« op. 26, which programmatically bears the year of its composition in the title. Except for the serious one night piece in the middle it consists of stylized fashion dances and is therefore to be understood as a parody of the baroque suite. The final Ragtime Hindemith prefaced it with a cheeky "Instructions for Use". The suite was first performed by Carl Friedberg in Berlin in October 1922. Soon after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, Hindemith was confronted with rumors that his music was officially banned; As a result, unsettled concert organizers removed his works from their programs and no longer invited him as a soloist. The premiere of his Symphony »Mathis the Painter« in March 1934 triggered a months-long journalistic exchange of blows between reactionary Nazi culture guards, who denounced his music as "culturally Bolshevik", and more moderate-minded Hindemith supporters. In December 1934, the propaganda minister Goebbels put his foot down: »Certainly we cannot afford to do without a real German artist in view of the unspeakable poverty of truly productive artists all over the world. But then it should be a real artist, not an atonal foley artist.« Hindemith's leave of absence from his professorship at the Berlin Musikhochschule for an initially indefinite period of time further clouded his future prospects in Germany. In this situation, he received the offer from the Turkish government to draw up plans for a Western European-style music education in Ankara. Until 1937 he undertook a total of four trips to Turkey lasting several weeks. There he began work on the first piano sonata in April 1936. It was completed after returning to Berlin, from where his wife Gertrud wrote to the publisher Willy Strecker: »I'm curious what you think about it, it's going to be a really big piece! And a lovely but wistful and strangely suggestive text.' She was playing on the poem Main by Friedrich Hölderlin, which, according to Hindemith himself, "provoked the inspiration for the composition of this sonata". In the poem, the river running through Frankfurt is used as a scenic metaphor for the object of Hölderlin's unfulfilled love, the Frankfurt banker's wife Susette Gontard (whom he immortalized as "Diotima" in his poems). It contains two stanzas in which Hindemith may have seen parallels to his own situation: To you perhaps, you islands! device one day Serve him instead of fatherland as long as he lives, At the beginning of July 1936, Hindemith wrote to Mainz: “Dear Willy, here you get the intended sonata and so that you don’t think that senility is already on the way, I’ve also included a smaller brother: I’ve just made another hinnedruff, like this A practice. It is the lighter counterpart to the weighty first one.« The pianist Walter Gieseking, who was being discussed as a soloist for the world premiere, was immediately given an insight into the manuscripts by Willy Strecker: »Yesterday I was with Gieseking, who played both sonatas for me. He had played through the first sonata several times and did an excellent job. He had only read the second sonata once or twice, but he played it brilliantly.« Because Gieseking had objections to the second movement of the first sonata, a slow movement of variations, Hindemith exchanged it for a new one, with which the pianist was now very satisfied. Probably encouraged by his positive reaction, Hindemith began composing the third sonata at the end of July, which was completed on August 20th. The short opening sentence First Piano Sonata, in which two themes are merely exposed and concluded with a coda, serves less as a representative beginning of the work than as a prelude to the weighty second movement, a funeral march with the dotted rhythm usual in the genre over slowly striding crotchets. In the third movement, pent-up energy breaks free. The fourth movement, a recapitulation of the motives from the first movement in a different order, has the same function as an introduction to the complexly structured finale. The Second Piano Sonata is to be assigned to the field of amateur music in view of its smaller size, the more easily grasped themes and lower pianistic requirements. In fact, this connection is also clear from a musical and thematic point of view: the beginning of the first movement is from the theme of the opening chorus of Hindemith's amateur cantata Ms. Musica op. 45 no. 1 (1928). The dance-like second movement is conceived as a scherzo with a syncopated trio middle section. A cheerful rondo follows, opening with a slow introduction and coda and ending thoughtfully with the concluding repetition of this coda. The Third Piano Sonata begins with a lyrical Siciliano that takes on more dramatic traits in its middle section. The frame sections of the scherzo-like second movement are pulsed through with a spirited thematic head; urgent quavers determine the middle section. A funeral march, a fugato and an arioso are the contrasting elements of the third movement. In the final movement, a large-scale, successively thickening double fugue, the fugato theme from the third movement is taken up again and artfully integrated. As the host of the Olympic Games in the summer of 1936, Berlin was temporarily cosmopolitan and liberal. If Hindemith had therefore hoped for an improvement in his own prospects, he was soon disappointed. A ban on the performance of all his works issued in October 1936 prevented the official premiere of the First Sonata by Walter Gieseking also the premiere of the planned by this Second Sonata. Third Sonata presented Hindemith's pupil Franz Reizenstein, who had emigrated to England, for the first time in London at a concert in front of an invited audience; the public premiere was played by the Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá in April 1937 in New York. Regardless of the performance ban, all three works appeared in print at the beginning of 1937. Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt program:
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