Symphony Mathis der Maler

"Angelic Concert" opens quietly, low strings sounding an old German hymn tune, "Three angels sang," passed up through the trombones like a chorale in a large stone room. Then the tempo lifts and three folk-like melodies arrive one after another, eventually stacking on top of each other so that you hear them woven together at once. The hymn returns in full brass near the close, and the movement ends bright and ringing.

"Entombment" is the short slow movement, barely five minutes. Muted strings carry a slow, stepping funeral tread; a flute and then an oboe sing above it in long, plain lines. Everything stays soft. The final chord settles rather than resolves, and the effect is of a scene closing quietly.

"The Temptation of Saint Anthony" is the longest and most violent panel. It begins with unaccompanied strings in a jagged recitative, marked in the score with the saint's cry from the painting, and from there the orchestra lurches through fast, hammering episodes: shrieking woodwinds, blocks of brass, a fugue that builds pressure rather than releasing it. Listen for the moment the chaos drains away and a solemn hymn, "Praise be to God," rises in the brass. The final page adds a blazing Alleluia, with the whole orchestra hammering the same rhythm home.

Hindemith wrote his own libretto for the opera Mathis der Maler, about the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grünewald caught between his art and the Peasants' War. Needing a concert piece before the opera was finished, he assembled three orchestral movements from its music, each named after a panel of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the premiere with the Berlin Philharmonic in March 1934. It was an immediate success, and just as immediately a political problem: Nazi officials attacked Hindemith's music, Furtwängler defended him publicly and lost his posts for a time, and the opera itself could not be staged in Germany. Its first performance took place in Zurich in 1938. Hindemith left Germany and settled in the United States, teaching at Yale from 1940. The symphony became his most frequently played orchestral work and remains the piece most listeners meet him through.