Chicago Cuts a Cake

The concert promoter in Chicago put it this way: "When I found out it was Hindemith's 50th birthday I said, 'Let's bring the guy here and cut up the cake out here.' I knew it wouldn't mean any cake at the box office but for heaven's sake he's one of the world's foremost musicians, and unless someone takes an interest in what he's doing the public will never know his work. What are we going to do, wait until his 150th anniversary to do a program? The guy won't be around."

Promoter Harry Zelzer had his way and last week the guy was around, for all Chicago to see. Paul Hindemith, Nazi Germany's No. 1 musical outlaw, led 30 musicians through four of his more recent works. A crinkly-eyed, cherubic little (5 ft. 4 in.) man with mouse-colored hair haloing a pink pate, he looked more like a Benedictine friar than a musical anarchist. The anarchy was too much for some of the audience, who walked out at half time. But other martyrs who had come to give dissonance its due found the new Hindemith shockingly pleasant to listen to.

The first number, Herodiade, sounded almost as though Hindemith meant to atone for his atonalist sins. Explained he: "I am heading toward more simple treatment of harmonies and melodies." Of The Four Temperaments, Hindemith said: "I wrote it for Balanchine, but he never danced it. I don't know why." Die junge Magd, third of Hindemith's four, is a song cycle about a young maiden's life. Says the composer: "I suppose she dies in the end. Nobody knows." The fourth, Nobilis-sima Visione, was known as St. Francis when Massine danced it. "I never go to see the performances," Hindemith added. "I saw Nobilissima once because I had to conduct it." In less melodic days, Atonalist Hindemith wrote an opera (Hin und Zurueck) to be performed both forwards and back wards. The Nazis called him a "Kulturbol-schewist noisemaker" and banned his works from Germany. Says Hindemith: "I never was controversial. But people were." Today, at 50, Hindemith is a solid citizen of New Haven, Conn. ("It's close to New York if you need New York. I don't need New York") and teaches composition and theory 16 hours a week at Yale.

The rest of the time he works at composing. "Real composers get ideas from heaven but they never came to me that way," he said. When someone suggested he be come a conductor, he laughed: "All my life I've tried to be an honest musician and now you want me to be a racketeer.

Why, anybody can conduct. Well, almost anybody."

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