"Noble Music"

0 what must it have cost the angels

not suddenly to burst into song, as one

bursts into tears,

since indeed they knew: on this night

the mother is being

born to the boy, the One, who shall

soon appear.*

When Composer Paul Hindemith came on such lines as these from the 15 poems of German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke's The Life of the Virgin Mary (Das Marienleben), he determined to set them to song. But the first performance of Marienleben, 25 years ago, was not, even Hindemith admitted, "a sensational success." Jagged with octave jumps, hard-to-land-on intervals of sevenths and ninths, and grinding dissonances, his high-tensioned 70-minute song cycle was even more difficult to sing than to listen to.

Wrote Hindemith later: "I had given the best that was in me [but] this best . . . was not good enough . . ." He had, however, glimpsed "the ideal of a noble music, as nearly perfect as possible, that I should some day be able to realize . . ." Since then, pudgy Composer Hindemith has stolen minutes and hours from other composition (and more lately from his duties as a professor at Yale) to perfect Marienleben. He rewrote some songs as many as five times, reworked individual passages as much as 20, strengthening and humanizing the vocal line.

Last summer, Hindemith thought he had finally approached his ideal. Manhattan's New Friends of Music asked famed Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel to give the new Marienleben its first performance. Jennie, as good as they come in skill and agility of voice, took a run over the score and gulped. Even after revision, the score was the most difficult Jennie had ever seen. But, she says, she couldn't shake off the beauty of Rilke's poems and the challenge of Hindemith's powerful music. With Pianist Erich Itor Kahn, she worked on it, finally, after months of study and some 40 rehearsals, mastered its immense difficulties.

Last week, an audience in Manhattan's Town Hall got to hear the music that had become "a real labor of love" for both Mezzo Tourel and Composer Hindemith. Incandescent with devotional power and warmth, much, if not all, of Das Marienleben made far easier listening this time. Most listeners found it "noble music" indeed. Japed Jennie, tired, but flushed and excited by the music and the ovation: "Let's go back on and do it again."

* M. D. Herter Norton translation, copyrighted 1938 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

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